By day 5 we knew what we needed to do on the boat, and that was just keep going with the cleaning and throwing things out. It’s a time consuming process, but it needed to be done and the boat is starting to look like people care about her again! The main benefit is that when we finally get to Florida permanently and can start really tearing into the boat, she will be all cleaned out and ready to go.  We won’t have to dig through a ton of junk just to be able to work.

I really like the teak flooring in the bathrooms. Usually that’s left bare fiberglass, but the wood makes it feel more like a spa than a fiberglass tub, which is nice.

I also noticed that due to the water damage, the varnish on the floors is failing.  That won’t be fun to fix, but it should look spectacular.

Since we had been in the galley most of the morning fighting with the stove, we started looking at how we could fix up the galley.  We’re going to relocate the microwave, so that cabinet isn’t needed anymore and the countertops are just a sheet of formica laminate over plywood.  People replace boat countertops with Corian pretty regularly so we headed over to Lowe’s at lunch to see how much that might cost and what Corian even looked like.

Unfortunately, to replace the entire countertop, all of the upper cabinets need to be removed… and if we remove them, we might as well build better ones that use the space better.  You see where this is going… a snowball project!  If we have time we might look into it, otherwise I think the galley is going to be left alone and dealt with next year!

When we got back from lunch we started working on removing all of the extra structure off the back of the boat in the cockpit.  We removed the solar panels, solar wiring and controllers, solar panel mounts, bimini cover mounts, fishing rod holders, and a bunch of other random shit.  It was a pretty impressive pile of metal under the boat when we were done and really cleaned up the back of the boat a lot! I like simple!