Our mission today was to drag the upper kitchen cabinets (both this time!) out of the boat to get another coat of paint on the one we did yesterday and to sand and start painting the other half. I had hoped that since we got an earlier start (aside from the nitpicky sanding time) that the paint would flow better… it didn’t. Other than the fairly shitty paint job, the cabinets are starting to look pretty nice with the second coat! The other set of cabinets is kind of hidden in the back and holds our bowls and plates. It’ll need a few more coats to look acceptable!
Since the paint has to dry, we couldn’t cut any more plywood. Jason was working on figuring out the dimensions and mounting locations of our new stove/oven combo. We will need to make a custom enclosure to get it all installed, but that’s his little project. 😉 He did start looking at the stove cover that came with the boat. It’s in terrible shape. The top cover was Formica that fell off already and the bottom has 3 strips of stainless trim… like they couldn’t find a sheet big enough? It will be redone eventually…
While Jason was over there I got tired of not being able to sit anywhere and cleaned the boat up.
There was no wind today and the boat got muggy and hot really quickly. We all bailed around lunchtime, got some delicious sandwiches, and headed back to the apartment to chill. I got the new panel that Jason made for the radio and some of the little controllers and painted the front white with some spray paint. It soaked in more than I thought it would, but I liked being able to see the grain a little bit.
That’s not the final form of the panel though.. I was trying to find something to do with it besides just covering it in black formica sheet like everyone else. I have this old chart that Jason and I found when we took our old sailboat up through Canada… it was like $1 and is the chart that shows our area in Puget Sound. I always thought it was neat and had it hanging up in my cubicle at work for a long time. I brought it with us to Florida even though it’s not relevant down here…. so I’m going to glue it to this panel so I can still enjoy it instead of shoving it in a locker somewhere!
The only progress I really made was trimming the paper slightly and gluing it to the board. I still need to find something to cover it with that’s water proof.
That didn’t really take a long time and I was still motivated to do things so I started cleaning the house. I had 2 boxes that I had packed before we left that were full of “boat things” and fishing gear. I found homes for all of this stuff in the closets in the apartment. I figure if all of our stuff will fit in the supplied storage of a 1 bedroom apartment (we don’t have any furniture… lol) then it’ll probably fit ok on the boat!
The pile is definitely getting smaller! Still a few large boxes of parts that need to get installed on the boat. Sometime this week I would like to go to the storage shed and get another load of stuff that we put in there when we first came down to clean out the boat after we bought it. We threw so much crap away but didn’t really know what to keep. It’s probably time to start going through all of it. Half of our storage shed is cushions anyway, and I’d really like to wash those!
While I was wandering around the house, Jason was using our new convection microwave to bake bread. He wanted to see how well it worked and how much power it really used. The final total was 2 loaves of bread and high 70’s for amp-hours. Our batteries have a 600 amp-hour capacity so we’re good to go!
As a small added bonus, I was googling around for photos of other Island Packet 420’s to see what other people are doing on theirs and what the finish is supposed to look like on a boat that’s been taken care of. I found a few photos of our boat when it was for sale.
