Category: And the real work starts…

It has been pointed out to me that I have been a bit negligent in updating the blog so I thought I had better write something.

So not sure where I left off but here goes…we have completed all of the interior wooden bits and pieces

We have sanded and stained the ladder as well as wrapped it in old tshirts to protect it. It is also glued and screwed with new screws of course.

We have started on work on the aft head.

 

We have found a place for the wine glasses, always important

We have found a use for the teak book rack that always seems to be in the way. It turns out it will hold 4 bottles of wine perfectly. I will need to make a bungee cord restrainer so the bottles do not come crashing out but now the wine will be within reach for dinner. Okay, some of the wine. Of course all of these little things need to be removed when we paint and then permanently installed. The wine rack (formerly book rack) will be through bolted. I don’t want my precious to come crashing down with the first little wave we hit.

We have finished all of the trim in the galley. Of course it will all come off for the new countertops but it is done. As well, the cutting board, fridge cover is sanded ready for food safe stain.

We have completed a multitude of little jobs and we have hired Prodigy Marine to fix the bad repair on the bottom of the keel. We have also requested a quote for painting the decks from them which we want to do while it is still warm in BC so that the paint cures properly. Of course this means sanding the decks in the heat as well but hey, we should have completed that back when it was cold out. We will sand the headliner very shortly so we can paint the ceiling inside. Once the headliner is painted, we can put up the last few pieces of trim and once the decks are painted, we can re-install all of the ports. I have also started purchasing wire for the big re-wire job and have installed all of the AC outlets.

So apologies for being behind on the blog, but lots of work has been happening and although it is small things, in the end they amount to big things.

 

Akupara originally did not have a starboard settee in the main salon and the previous owner added one. We have been going back and forth on this topic for almost 18 months. Do we reinstall it, or do we try to find 2 chairs that will work. Personally I think we need it. It is extra seating for 3 people, it is extra storage for odds and ends or survival suits or sails etc but because it was added afterwards, it totally removes access to the drawers and cupboards behind. Thankfully the PO did not cut and modify the cabinet behind so we still have a choice. I think for now we will leave it and use it. Until we find some nice chairs.  But then again, it is another good sea berth as well.

Decisions decisions decisions ?

 

If you said a pile of wood to be sanded you are correct!!!

Thats right. It’s all done. Okay I have 8 more pieces of trim to bring down today but they are all small.

Holy crap. 18 months just to clean the garbage out, remove all of the wood, sand all of the wood, reinstall all of the wood and gut the electrical! This is how long it takes when you have jobs, family, school and no garage at home. To say that we are thrilled to be complete this part would be an understatement. Don’t get me wrong, we still have some more work with wood like finishing the pantry and adding shelves in the closets etc but no sanding of old wood. Thank heavens.

By the way, the admiral has completed 90% of all of this sanding. I am sure that if you wanted to hire her to do your boat she would be interested for a low low rate of about $1000 per hour 😉

Today the plan is to complete the last 8 pieces, stain everything that we have left. Install as much of it as possible and maybe do a really good cleaning inside to start trying to get rid of all the dust.

Sometimes pictures speak louder than words. We have been making a little progress lately as you can see in the pictures below. We have one more bulkhead to sand (behind the ladder) and then we are down to a few remaining pieces of trim. Of course we still need to finish the galley, but there is no sanding of old wood there.

Next on the list, add several more coats of cetol, sand the cabin top, paint, and call the interior done.

And then move on to the hard stuff.

I have managed to dissemble and sand the main salon ladder as well as the icebox cutting board. The cutting board was coming completely unglued so I also re-glued the entire thing. It is partially sanded but I ran out of sandpaper 🙁

At Akupara I glued the corkboard down to the aft cabin dressing table and took a bunch of measurements for the vberth and aft cabin mattresses as well as for the new countertops. So progress is happening all be it very slow.

I will post a complete update this weekend and fill you in on the general goings on around here.

Sometimes you need to divide and conquer. Case in point. I went to Akupara, the Admiral did not. However, with the addition of the new sander, she was not completely off the hook as she may have thought. I spent a few hours sanding and staining the main salon sole and the admiral spent a couple of hours sanding itty bitty pieces at the house. All in all a good day.

It has been a long time, but I actually brought another piece home. The ladder needs some TLC so it will be worked on through the week and hopefully be ready for next weekend.

There is 1 more really big job to complete in the interior. Sanding all of the fiberglass liner enough to take new paint. That one is not going to be fun.

The admiral had sanded the “entertainment unit” several months ago but because of the cooler temperatures and the absence of ongoing work, we had not gotten around to applying the cetol. Yesterday we pulled the piece back out and gave it a light sanding just to touch up a few of the places that had been nicked and to open up the pours again.

Overall I think it went well and looks a hell of a lot better now.

I still need to add the teak backing in behind, but it is nice to have this much completed.

While the admiral was sanding this, I was rebuilding the shelves inside with all new plywood of course. Interesting that I cut the new pieces using the old ones as a template and they still did not fit properly. I seem to recall that when I first removed them, they had not fit all that well either.

It will be nice to some day be able to open up the bar and have it nicely stocked, pour ourselves a drink, go to the freezer and grab some ice, proceed into the cockpit and sit quietly watching the sun go down feeling the boat move gently underneath. Ahhhh, some day.

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…