Category: Interior

Those were the words I wish I would have heard before I opened the email quote from La Fabrica.

$9600 for the main salon cushions plus tax. Plus the mattresses.

Wow.

So after I picked my jaw up off the floor and started to really analyze it, it is scary to say but it isn’t all that far fetched. When we met with them last weekend we approached it from the sky is the limit approach with no regard to cost. The best foam, the best upholstery. If you went out and priced 2 custom sofa’s and a chair for your home, what would it come in at? I’ll bet pretty close if not more.

So, we are waiting for the rest of the quote for the mattresses and then we will start to decide how we are going to proceed. We have several options from backing off on quality to reducing the thickness to choosing a cheaper material to buying a sewing machine and doing it myself (yes I have done this before).

In any event, if we went with the full cost option I think we would still come in under our total expected cost for Akupara. I will need to take a close look on the weekend.

Or there is still the option of launching without the cushions in order to meet our new possible deadline but then the answer to the question are you sitting down would be a big no.

Is it a bad thing when the local marine chandlery gives you a brand new hat? I mean is it something they give to all of their customers or is it something that they only give to the customers who spend a lot of money? I was given a Wolff’s Marine hat yesterday, going to have to put some thought into that one…speaking of which, I updated the costs page recently.

We had a gentleman from http://www.lafabricamarine.com/ down to Akupara yesterday and we took all of the measurements for the vberth mattresses, the main salon cushions and the aft cabin mattresses and also the cockpit cushions since we they were already there. I had brought my laptop and we went through a bunch of pictures I have been saving of interiors we like and also of ones we do not like. It was an interesting process to go through with him. A lot of our decisions were based on the fact that their shop labour rate is $75 per hour. Materials are market price but as soon as you start getting really fancy, the labour costs rise beyond reason of course. So we will wait for the quote which should arrive mid week and make our decisions from there. They have a 3-6 week lead time which will allow us to finish the brightwork inside the main salon so that they can come in and do all of their patterning.

The admiral and one of the crew did a lot of painting inside cupboards and masking of doors as well as giving the foreward head a good cleaning in preparation of starting to put it all back together. I have a bit of glass work to do in order to fill 2 plumbing holes in the platform where the head sits, but I wanted to leave them in case I was able to reuse them. It does not look like it at this point. So they will be filled, faired, and painted.

I also ran into Rob from http://prodigymarine.ca/ and requested that he visit Akupara to provide me with 2 quotes. One to paint the decks and two for a mysterious crack on the bottom of the keel. In reading the previous owners blog, I knew that a repair would need to be made, I am not sure if they ran aground or what happened but the repair that they had paid for needs to be repaired again. I have seen some of Rob’s work and I am confident it will be completed properly this time.

Today I have to help a friend on his boat for a bit, and it is supposed to be a brilliant day, so I think I may just have the time to haul all of the sails out and take a really close look at them to see if they are useable or if they will make good sun shades this afternoon. I do know there is a brand new try sail and storm jib that appear to never have been used but beyond that I have never opened the bags. Should be interesting.

 

Typically I hate furniture shopping. It always seems like a chore that requires too much energy to complete. Colours and patterns and materials and quality and size and shape and will it fit through the door and will the neighbours like it and on and on.

But. I have to say I am a little excited for tomorrow. In effect we are going furniture shopping. Or to be more precise, furniture shopping is coming to us. We have arranged for a local company to come down to Akupara tomorrow to take measurements, create patterns, discuss colours, material, style etc for all of the new interior cushions and mattresses.

Yes I know we still have a lot of other projects to complete but as the cushions and mattresses are custom made and will take a while to manufacture and we may have a change of the overall plan, we decided to get a start on it. And if they are ready before we are, they can be brought home and stored until they are needed where they will be safe and sound.

We also plan on breaking this up into several steps in order to spread out the cost as much as possible.

So yes typically I hate furniture shopping but this time it is for Akupara and boat stuff is always fun!!

Well, I managed to hang all of the finished cupboard doors, the head doors and a couple I wasn’t even sure where they came from. I did however have to scavenge a few hinges from areas that we have not installed yet, like the chain locker doors. Several months ago the admiral and I were at home depot and thought we had found a replacement hinge for all of the old hinges. They looked almost exact, but once I installed one, it became obvious that they were just different enough to not work. I also learned that there are 2 types of hinges on the Whitby 42. They look identical but one is slightly larger than the other. I am guessing that the larger ones were for the doors but who knows, maybe Whitby couldn’t find the right hinges either!

So added to our list of things to find are a truckload of replacement hinges. If anyone knows where I can find the original hinges new, please, please let me know.

I think the admiral is rather happy as the only wood sanding left now is approximately 5 small pieces in the cockpit and a bunch of little fiddly pieces like trim and what not in the basement. We do need to go back and re-sand a few pieces that I may have gotten wet by accident but I really think with a little focus, we are less than 1 day away from putting this phase of the project to bed. Once the interior liner and sole has been sanded and painted, we will go back and re-sand (polish) all of the interior wood to fix any small imperfections or issues we have created but this will be a fairly quick project as it is more of a polish than a sanding. We will probably follow each other, one with 220 grit and one with 400 grit. Then we will add the final 2 layers of clear Cetol gloss. That should make the interior glisten even more than it does now.

You can see we still have a fair bit of staining to do in the main salon, but we needed to let the dust settle before we did that.

The frame for the main salon cabinet in the picture above still needs to come out one last time as I have yet to shape the backing pieces for the interior of the cabinets and I need to build out the shelves.

I can’t explain the feeling we have of actually being able to see the cockpit even if it is covered in several inches of sawdust and dirt!

The nice thing is that we have completed a Major part of this project and we know that we have an insulated, clean, fresh, dry interior with no lurking surprises behind panels. The bad part is that now we are entering a phase where things will start to cost big money as opposed to sandpaper and sweat.

Deck Painting, Electrical, Plumbing, Rigging, Engine, Heating, Refridgeration, Propane…

Okay maybe not the sky, but something definitely did not look right as we drove up to Akupara yesterday.

I knew this was coming but I just did not know when exactly it was going to happen.

We had a bit of snow last week one morning and obviously it was enough to gather in the low spots on the shrink wrap and as the temperature climbed a bit, it created a depression which continued to collect water when it rained this week. Thankfully the cover collapsed over the main companionway where it rested a little on deck, a little on the drawers that are queued for sanding and on the helm. I had to poke a small hole in the tarp and let it drain into the cockpit. I enlarged the hole to about 1/4 inch in size and after an hour or so, enough water was gone that I could stand up underneath the cover, and push the remainder outwards with my back. There was a layer of about an inch of ice on top of the water that was sent crashing overboard. Today I will have to go back and re-enforce the frame with some vertical 2×4’s and I will attempt to shrink the shrink-wrap a bit with a heat gun to tighten up the loose areas.

I think this is an omen. It is foreshadowing at least. We need to get back to hustling and we need to get the decks completely prepped for paint as I doubt if we would ever see another year out of the shrink wrap and I do not want to pay to have it done again.

Once the crisis was over and we fixed the falling sky issue, we began to work on the layout of the galley and pantry. Remember a while back I had started into the pantry and then I stopped. My reason for stopping was that I did not want to go and make a bunch of dividers and shelves only to find out that none of our containers would fit, so we brought all of the new containers down to Akupara and played organization for a while trying to find the best layout for all of the storage.

We have been thinking about the galley as well. The shelf behind the stove needs to come out yet, but for the same reason as not finishing the pantry, I wanted to be able to build everything to fit. We have always felt that the height of the shelf was a bit odd and after trying to fit containers etc in, it only reinforced our belief.

I think we need to slow down a bit on the galley and come to a final decision as to whether or not we will build in a microwave, dishwasher, coffee maker and where the wine fridge will go. Joke 😉 But in all honesty I think we need to spend a bit more time designing this. One of the major beefs about the layout currently is that anything you put on the shelf behind the stove is almost useless if the stove is on as you need to reach across directly on top of the stove.

Over the holidays I glued (contact cement) arborite to the panel for the area behind where the electrical panel was, which I have planned as the new spot for the watermaker, and to the new drop down electrical panel and electronics area at the nav station. We brought these pieces with us and I installed them temporarily to ensure they fit. One did and of course one did not so I will need to do some trimming, but overall we are pleased with the black look.

As you can see in the picture I still need to glue arborite to the tops of the chart locker, tool storage area.

I am still not sure what the official name for this spot is, but I am inclined to just start calling it the hallway.

So all in all we had a productive day, on top of all this, the Admiral managed to get a few more pieces sanded and ready to be stained.

Our basement is slowly emptying out to the point that I was able to create a temporary workbench out of some old plywood I had on top of sawhorses and really start organizing some of the remaining straggling pieces.

I also took a closer look at the booms yesterday and discovered that both the main and the mizzen are rigged with 2 reef points set up for 1 line reefing for each point. This is a nice feature that I do not recall seeing before. On our previous ketch’s, neither had a reefable mizzen.

We are approaching another milestone here soon. We are nearing the completion of the interior wood sanding. I say we, but in reality it has been the admiral performing all the sanding and I do the installation and staining. There are 2 more doors in our basement, 3 drawers, and a bunch of trim pieces. On Akupara there are about 5 drawers, 1 door, and a bunch of trim pieces as well, but the majority of all of the wood sanding is almost done. That was a gigantic job! When it is complete, we will need to move on to sanding of the liner in preparation for new paint and of course the multiple sandings of the deck.

It feels good to be back at it again!!

 

 

Well it has been a rather strange month again. We made it down to Akupara last weekend but did not get a lot accomplished other than to check on her and try to get our heads back in the game. We are so close to finishing all of the major interior wood that the last few pieces are getting to the point of being painful. Once they are completed we will need to make a decision as to what to attack next. We have many options of course but I think for the time being we will continue to complete the interior. We still have to sand the cabin ceiling to get rid of all of the old house paint, and there is still all of the electrical and plumbing. Of course we have not attacked the galley yet, but I think that will be the final interior job. Something about having construction dust in a new galley is just not appealing.

The Vancouver boat show is coming up in January and I would like to have the interior renovation complete so that we can move on to other things like what I mentioned above. Sometimes there can be some good deals at the boat show and other times it just seems to be the same old thing.

A few items from our shopping list are: new seacocks, 12v and 120v wire, electrical panel, 2 heads and associated plumbing, and perhaps a diesel heater. On Kismet, we installed a Planar Air Heater. They work on exactly the same principle as the other big name air heaters but cost 1/3 the cost. We absolutely loved it! We could go down to Kismet in the winter time after she had been left all week and in under an hour, the interior temperature would be close to 80. We have never had forced air heat aboard a boat before and let me tell you, once you have had it, you use it more than you can possibly imagine even in the summer. Typically I am the first one to wake in the mornings and I would get up, make my coffee and sit out in the cockpit to enjoy the sunrise. The admiral is the next up but if I timed it right. I would turn on the furnace about 15 minutes before she got out of bed and she loved it. Just enough to knock the damp early morning chill out of the boat. It extended our season and our comfort aboard in the off months was greatly increased. For 1/3 the cost of the big names I thought I would take a chance and I am very glad I did. I have heard of less issues with these units than the big names. Friends of ours also installed one, after fighting for years with an older big name brand and they love theirs as well. Even if you only got a year out of it and had to buy one 3 years in a row, you would still be farther ahead than the big names which from what I have heard, start acting up in under 3 years.

And the final icing on the cake. Here in Vancouver, the distributor actually delivers the entire unit and any extra parts that you may have purchased right to your front door!

If you have ever thought about having one, for about $1000 plus your installation time (I installed mine in 1 day), you can have the luxury of turning on the furnace as well. 🙂

check them out if you are in the Vancouver area. http://www.planarheaters.com/

 

Not a lot to say from last weekend except, sanding, staining, sanding, and more staining so I will keep this post short and just give you the pictures from last weekend.

There are some things in life that are satisfying and some that are not. Sanding is one of those things that I think falls into the satisfying category. You take an old weathered piece of wood and with minimum effort (most times) you end up with an almost new piece of wood. It is fantastic!

Of course that only holds true when you are only sanding one or two pieces. After the 457th piece is sanded and you still have another 457 pieces to sand, it starts to fall into the unsatisfying category. Actually just the pain in the ass category.

Believe it or not, we are actually coming close to being finished with the sanding of wood. I think there are 3 doors, about 10 drawers, and 1 major panel and 1 small panel left to sand not to mention all of the little pieces of trim. Our basement is almost free of Akupara’s interior!

We are trying to drive this to completion and I have to say that the admiral and the crew have been exceptional when it comes to being persistent with this. Hopefully, fingers crossed, that we will have all of the wood sanded and stained by the end of next weekend. So 4 more days of work.

Then the real sanding will begin. This sanding is not going to be fun. It will involve a lot of paint dust, and fiberglass dust and generally be very nasty as we sand all of the interior liner where it is visible in preparation for painting and of course I keep skirting the issue of sanding the decks, but I really do not think that will be as bad as the interior. At least we will not have to hold the sander above ourselves with everything falling in our faces.

So, we did manage to complete the sanding of the majority of the main salon, there is one small bulkhead left at the nav station, and eventually the table will need to be completed, and the admiral finished a few more cupboard doors and a drawer or two. I ran out of Cetol Natural Teak so we did not get a chance to stain any of it.

I mentioned before that at some point someone had painted the main bulkhead. I hate this look and a while back decided that I would strip it. This left me with an interesting issue. I was unable to get the paint out of the grain.  We spent many hours trying to discover a secret as to how to do this without ruining the teak. From brass wool to toothbrushes nothing worked. We resigned ourselves to having to add a new layer of veneer.

Yesterday I decided that since we were going to re veneer it there was no worry of damaging it so I have it one last attempt with the sander. 6 hours later I managed to remove 95% of the paint from the grain and we have now saved the original veneer. Although it is not perfect I am pleased that we could save it.

 

Once there was a nav station, now there is a big hole.

I have considered 3 avenues for the nav station and I will try to explain my reasoning for each. Option #1 was to remove, paint, fix and replace everything exactly as it was. Option #2 was to remove, paint, fix and rebuild the nav station to be starboard facing, so that when you were sitting there, you were facing to starboard as opposed to forward. Option #3 is pretty much like option #1 however with a major difference. Move all of the electrical panels, controls, monitors, and whatever else to the outboard side and fill in that 8″ of cupboard.

So option 1 seems like a very good idea. Simple easy and quick. However it does not make any improvements to the overall design. Option 2 also seems like a good idea. I would end up with a larger nav table, I could increase the storage area under the new desk for chart storage and I think it would flow a little better, but then I would lose my den. Ultimately I have decided to go with option 3. I will reuse as much of the existing layout and cabinetry however I will relocate all electrical to this area. It will be the nerve hub of the ship, the command central so to say. From here I can sit in the Captains private reserved area, play with my radios, turn switches and flip dials, all the while barking commands to the rest of the crew that are all salty like, “you there, you scallywag, run and fetch me another mug of grog.” And then the admiral will give me that look, and the crew will mutiny and I will turn back to my flipping of dials and turning of switches. But in my head, I will be commanding a great crew on a great old sailing ship as we battle our way round the cape. Or the end of the damn dock at the marina, but you get the point.

Okay, seriously, I do not like facing outwards as I do not feel that you would have the same sense of security of being able to jam yourself into a little cubby and I do not like the idea of an aft facing nav station as I think dealing with the motion of a boat offshore is difficult enough without having to anticipate and compensate for the motion in reverse. And I have always thought that the nav station should be the command central. This is where we will make log entries, this is where we will plot positions etc so it needs to be functional. Again on Kismet III we had a beautiful matching stainless clock and barometer mounted on the forward bulkhead. It looked great, very nautical and all that. From my nav station, I would have to get up, make my way to the forward side of the cabin, read the barometric pressure, make my way back to the nav station and record it. Of course typically I got distracted half way through this and had to make multiple trips. I am partially joking here, but how would this have worked offshore if there was a crewmate sleeping in the main salon, and you were dripping wet, the boat is at 40 degrees heel as you come down the face of some monstrous wave, and now you have to walk back and forth with a headlamp on…I think you get my point. The clock and the barometer should have been at the nav station. Not only to make it easier, but I think typically if something is easier, it is probably safer as well. My end goal is to have every piece of information that I need readily available in one spot.

So after cleaning, scraping, and painting, I have started replacing the cabinetry as it was prior. I hope by now that everyone realizes that all of the interior is removable and I am only dry fitting everything. Most of it will come out at least once more to run electrical wires etc.

I have always loved the idea of these black panels that you see on some of the more modern yachts that have an outline of the boat and little led’s that light up to indicate different things. If anyone knows where I can have one made, please send me a note. An example below:

I am not so much interested in this particular electrical panel, just the idea of the outline of the boat.