We Finally Have Heat!!

With winter approaching we needed to bring in a source of heat so that we could continue to work on the interior. My good friend John is an electrician and I somehow managed to convince him to help us on this project.

Here John is checking out information on the vacuflush system after he brought enough power into the boat to run a construction heater.

We were also able to bring my father on board to act as a site supervisor for a while. Now that we have plywood on the floor he was able to safely check it out. He turns 91 in a couple of weeks and lives a few hours away.

My father was a cabinet maker and had his own commercial cabinet business for many years and is the reason why we can do what we do. He has been following the blog and was happy to be able to see it in person.

Yesterday we were able to get quite a few things done.

I started making the curved door for the washroom vanity. Here is the first piece of bendable plywood in a jig. I will glue in a few more layers which keeps the door curved.

This will also be the same radius as the top for the vanity.

Donald was also able to make up the bulkhead that will be directly over the table in the seating area. We decided to build it down a bit in that area so that the lights could sit parallel to the table. The issue in boats…especially older ones…is that the ceiling is arched. The lights wouldn’t sit flat.

We temporarily put in a plywood panel so that we could check out the lights for intensity and spacing.

My brother also starting fitting a finished wall panel in that area too. It is amazing how one finished wall changes the overall look right away.

I was able to start installing screwing strips to the hull to give us something to fasten panels to over the next several weeks. Yesterday was a beautiful day so the adhesive was able to cure properly. We may have 2 more weeks with the temperature consistently above 5 degrees Celsius so this has to be finished soon.

These strips are in the v-berth and I was so able to get them fibreglassed in as well.

Our challenge over the next few weeks it to finalize the lighting. The boat layout isn’t symmetrical and so it isn’t obvious where we should put the lights…and what type of lights to use. We will be using a combination of 12 v and 24 v LED lights (both puck and strip) and the placement has to work both aesthetically and functionally. This is not our area of expertise. If there are any boat lighting experts out there that care to offer up suggestions we would be more than happy to listen.

Until next week….