The Excellent Adventure

As I’ve mentioned before, the process of really settling into a boat and making it yours can be fairly long and involved. If you happen to have more money than we do, you can often buy a spiffy designer-touched creation, and no further care is required. But if you’re like us, and this is a bootstrapped venture, you pretty much end up with whatever the prior owner thought was cool.

It’s important to realize a few things about our boat. The man who owned her previously was not terribly interested in aesthetics. Pretty much everything in the boat was factory-standard 1991 chic. Frankly, the decor gave me hideous flashbacks, and we blew past the photos for this boat on YachtWorld twice. Not only for the decor, mind you, but also because the broker took the photos when the boat was hurricane-ready, and pretty much everything was just strewn about everywhichway. So the picture on the left, with the nasty looking mattress, ancient pillows, weird stained offwhite vinyl wallcoverings, ancient sticky tape for a long-gone photo, and god help us, pink suede and mirror trim (very French, sigh), is what the boys’ room (starboard forward berth) looked like when we took ownership.

Naturally, we prioritized demolishing it above pretty much all other boat refurb projects. And that’s not only because all of us seem to have an allergic reaction to pink suede. It’s also because moving onto this boat, despite the fact that Rowan and Kestrel were included in the decision as much as they were able considering their ages, was basically our call, so it’s also our obligation to make it as easy and fun for them as possible. We wanted their berth to be the sort of place where other kids, even land-based ones, walked in and went, “ooh! I want to live here!”. This picture shows what the berth looked like stripped to the fiberglass. The old velcro strips that held the panels on can be seen, and a bit of the underberth storage, where the holding tank was (eventually) installed (look for an upcoming post).

The first step was choosing a theme. I mean, little boys, right? Spaceships, jungles, dinosaurs, pirates, wildlife… there are a lot of options. Upon careful consideration and several tours of local fabric stores, Rowan decided on “Rainbows” as his preferred theme. We were pretty happy with this, as it was fairly neutral, easy to coordinate with, and would most likely age better than most of the other options.

Jason and Marc laid the (hideously vinyl covered) panels out flat, we estimated yardage required, and Rowan and Kestrel and I went to Stonemountain and Daughter fabrics to buy supplies. We settled on a quilting cotton in coordinating tie-dye colors, cloud print fabric for the front and back flat walls, and a middleweight fusible batting fabric. We also bought several cans of spray-on adhesive, boxes of industrial staples, and rolls of replacement industrial velcro.

Meanwhile, the guys scraped the old nastiness off by hand since the glue would have gummed up any sander (they tried). Anyone who has dealt with decades-old glued-on foam backed vinyl covering can tell you that this is a thankless and obnoxious job. The foam backing, over the years, becomes this weird toxic martian dust, that flies all over and coats everything. I strongly recommend breath masks and lots of ventilation for this stage.

Once the panels were free of the foam crud, Jason and Marc sprayed them with adhesive, stuck the batting to that and trimmed it, then ironed the fabric to the batting. It was then trimmed again, wrapped around to the backside of the board, and stapled in place. I didn’t participate, but this was apparently the most “fiddly” and annoying part of the process.

Of course panels aren’t the whole story. There are all kinds of details in a berth; side lighting, top lighting, the hole for the dorade vents, the hatch fittings and covers, the portlight hardware. It all had to be removed before the panels could come off, cleaned, in some cases modified, and most importantly, not lost while the rest of the mayhem was in process. Marc, being pretty artistic, decided to paint the hatch frame so that it matched the cloud fabric. It was at this stage of the process that stuff got moved back to the boat from the comparatively wider spaces in Vallejo.

Since there was no panel originally behind/around the portlights, one had to be constructed, so as to keep from gluing the fabric and batting directly to the fiberglass. The material used was maple laminate. These were made and measured and adjusted a few times before the fabric was attached.

The covered and velcro’d pieces were gradually replaced. Because the electrical panel is just outside the boys’ room and partially behind their storage cabinets, care had to be taken to make sure everything was at least tidy, if not necessarily proper or correct. We were NOT going to get involved with straightening out the electroni behind the panels and cabinets at the same time we were modifying and moving in. So Jason straightened, cleaned, and taped things into place. Obviously some of this will have to be revisited once the boat’s electrical system becomes our focus. But that’s what velcro’d panels are for.

This view, from inside the berth facing out, shows some detail about how fussy the work got when it moved from being the nice straight panels in the main part of the berth. There are a bunch of smaller, oddly-shaped pieces that involved a lot of fine-tuning, eyeballing, ripping out, and redoing.

The inside of the storage cabinet was also tricky; not only is the ducting for the air conditioning system back there, but the bases of the cabinets curve with the hull, and again, they’re pretty much made up of fiddly little bits that resist templating. Condensation is a concern, as is (like with everything else) access later. Again, there’s some pretty serious electrical wiring that reaches behind this cabinet from the wiring panel, heading for just about everything from the windlass to the port hull, so being able to get to that without ripping apart the work is pretty important.

Jason spent a lot of time with the detail work here, which is even cooler, because this is the inside of the cabinets! Observant readers looking at this picture will realize that what he ended up doing was yanking the cabinet off the wall, laying the fabric and padding liner down smoothly, and then replacing the cabinet in place later. Much easier in the long term. There are also some pieces of cloud material in the upper half of the inside of the cabinet area, which you can see if you follow any of these pictures back to our picasa album.

This shows some of the extreme detail on top of the cabinets. The curved piece on the arch of the bulkhead received extra padding, as the taller residents of the boat kept smacking their heads on it as they went through. The piece behind the air conditioning intake grill involved yanking the piece out, removing the metal grill, cleaning it up pretty thoroughly (we’re nearly positive the ducting and grating for the boat’s air conditioning system were never cleaned, ever), covering, and replacing.

And right about there was where we ran out of the cloud fabric, so the ceiling of the passageway is, to this day, white. We underestimated pretty thoroughly, because when we did the original yardage estimates, we focused on the room itself, and not on the bit of passage from the cabinets aft to the doors. We are still not quite sure what we’re going to do about that, and the cloud fabric has been discontinued. Naturally. Rowan suggested we go for something moons and stars, so we’ll see what we can find along that line.

This is a view aft from the room to the passageway. Notice the cords still dangling from the light we haven’t yet replaced, and the unfinished foo I was just discussing aft of the main room heading to the door. And ignore the mess at the bottom of the image; we’re still working at that stage. =)

Here’s the finished product. I hadn’t mentioned the bookshelf at the back; Marc created that from salvaged paneling from the old house, painted and then dappled to match the cloud fabric, and the top hatch cover as well. Because of how the boys play, they tend to want all their stuffed animals and books out where they can get to them easily, thus, the chaos there, but even after total demolish, everything’s got a place and it takes less than half an hour to get the entire room (including the small built-in bookshelf you can’t see) back into perfect shape.

This view is from lower down, so you get a better look at the ceiling and wall panels, and also a little more of the cabinetry. The drawer there under the bunk is where their socks, underwear, and pajamas go, easily accessable to them. The small cabinet to the left of that is where flashlights and light sabers go (the bookshelf I mentioned is above that, and you still can’t see it in this picture, which is kinda goofy, but it’s in several of the pictures above this.) The tall cabinet to the left is the storage cabinet with the snazzy new liner. And to the right of the image, you can see the ratty ends of the leftover nasty vinyl. You’ll also notice that the mattress is entirely different from the disreputable thing (long since disposed of) in the first photo. Since we were hitting the snarly edge of our spare (ha!) money, we opted not for the really cool custom “marine” mattresses we’d been drooling over, but for a memory foam mattress we found at Costco for ~$500, chopped to size with a machete. We’re also using normal bedding, which naturally bunches funny at the narrow end of the berth, but is perfectly adequate otherwise.

The installation has been complete since August. And despite the fact that we’ve had below-normal temperatures and above-record rainfall in California this winter, (read: inadequate boat heat and far too much condensation) the work has held up beautifully. Some wrinkles have appeared during the wettest of the wet, right around the hatch, but the rest of what you’d assume to be problem areas are looking as good as the day of install.

Got questions? Leave a comment below.

Tags: boat construction, Jason, Lagoon, Moving Aboard, Ownership, Remodel, Upgrades

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