Luckily most of the soft goods on the boat are in great shape! The cushions are bright white and awesome looking! However, there’s nothing at all covering the windows.  In the tropics that light gets super bright and you really want something to keep it out of the boat so it stays cooler and doesn’t blind you randomly! Currently we have every redneck’s favorite window treatment: aluminum foil.

The design I had planned on doing on Peregrine won’t work for this boat, so I decided to get a rigid material and use the window latches to hold it in place.  I found a plastic cardboard garage sale sign at home depot (could have gotten these for free during campaign season! dangit!) and cut it to fit the window.  I ended up having to make notches in it for it to really fit nice and snug and even added some suction cups to hold it to the window!

The suction cups turned out to be completely unnecessary so I eliminated them in the final version.

My next project was some storage in the large gaping hole underneath mom’s bed.  You could easily fit like 3 people in there and it’s super hard to get in there to get supplies because it’s so deep.  I grabbed a pair of those cargo nets made to organize crap in the trunk of your car and hung them up on each side of the opening to store lightweight stuff like blankets and chips.

With just the two of us Jason and I usually have a pretty healthy collection of shoes by the front door.  Now that there are 4 people onboard we really need a way to organize shoes and keep them up off the ground. There’s the perfect spot on the face of the freezer cabinet right by the front door that I’m going to use.  My plan is to utilize the last of the old sail that I’ve been cutting up for a while now to make a hanging shoe rack!

Finally made it to the store to get some hooks and got the shoe rack mounted on the boat!

I finally leveled up my coffee game and I got an espresso machine!

Unfortunately not all projects are as fun as a new espresso machine… When our boat got parked a while ago, it was left with the water tanks full and water in the lines.  Might not seem like a big deal, but that water went bad and now the faucets smell like rotten eggs.  Gross!  Ideally you just toss some bleach in the water tanks and flush it through, but bleach eats aluminum and we have aluminum water tanks… The solution was to go to Tractor Supply and get a cheap transfer pump and manually pump all the water out of the tanks (much faster than using the house water pump, which is also more expensive…).  Once the water is out, we put a hose on the inlet side of the house pump and sucked bleach water through each faucet until the water smelled like chlorine and not rotten eggs.  There’s no risk to the tank this way and we can use as much bleach as we need.  We left it while we went to lunch and came back and flushed the water out of the lines and filled the water tanks back up with fresh water.  Good as new!

Storage in the kitchen is actually pretty fantastic for a boat, but there are still improvements to be made.  I hung one of those magnetic knife strips so we can clear out some drawer space and have easier access to our knives! Since the backsplash is also stainless, the block all but disappears!

Back to that espresso machine… I expect it to get a lot of use, so I got some thin rubber non-skid pads and made a nice coffee mess on the counter in the saloon!

The guest bathroom that the parents are using is meant to be a “wet head” where you just shower and everything gets wet, including the toilet, walls etc. It’s a super annoying situation, so they’re going to shower in our bathroom with the nice separate shower!  However, the head itself is just super tiny and needed some enhancements to be really useful.

We’re still putting a lot of the boat away since we’re still actively using all of our tools and finding room for 4 people’s stuff is hard!  However I did get our bedroom set up!

It’s starting to feel more and more like home the more we put away and move in!