Espacios Útiles

Six months ago I started working on Duolingo to get my Spanish back, motivated by my grandchildren who are doing the lessons as part of their homeschool curriculum. A good part of my childhood was spent in Viña del Mar, a small coastal town in Chile, but as the years back home in the US progressed, the fluency was lost. I was also interested in the challenge as a way to keep this aging brain engaged. So, since boat projects are getting intermixed with my daily Duolingo lessons, the title of this post is Espaciós Útiles, or Useful Spaces.

One of the things you find yourself tackling when you purchase a new-to-you boat is making the space yours. Different people live in different ways, and their space reflects that, but those ways may not fit the next owner down the line. For the most part, First Light has been taken care of and arranged by previous owners who paid a great bit of attention to detail and quality. For this I am eternally grateful, especially after the experience that was the purchase of Kintala. But we live a bit differently, so some of the spaces require modification.

One of the examples of this are the storage areas. You might have read the post from a couple trips ago where we modified two hanging lockers on the boat into a shelf-filled closet (because we absolutely never hang any clothes on the boat) and a pantry (because there was zero food storage space in the galley.) Now I needed a safe and sturdy place to store my Sailrite machine and sewing supplies. The Sailrite is many things, but light is not one of them. As a result, it must be secured so that it won't tumble into anything when underway. First Light has a very large storage cabinet under the lower helm seat, perfectly sized for this purpose, but it required a shelf addition to accomodate the supplies. A few strategically placed shelf supports and a plywood shelf did the trick nicely.

 

I still have plans to repaint the interior of the cabinet at some point, but for now the project got crossed off the list.

The next space was one in the spare pullman berth on the port side. At one point, someone had installed a washing machine in a cabinet space there but the washer had long since been removed. Someone else had installed some sliding basket drawer things, but I found them highly unusable because it wasted so much of the storage space. It also bothered me that there was no door for the cabinet. So I built a couple shelves and (after three iterations) custom built some doors for the cabinet. This process was a real challenge because I wanted the doors to open toward the berth rather than towards the door so that you could access the cabinet from the hallway. Because of the handle on the storage compartment under the berth and the frame for the mattress, the doors couldn't open completely with my first two designs. After a bit of moving this and cutting that, I ended up with something I'm happy with. I still have to put the stain and finish coat on them to match the rest of the woodwork, but that will have to wait for warmer, drier weather. I also am in the process of changing the way the cabinet door opens under the berth. It currently is installed with self-stick velcro, and the self-stick part of that equation isn't cooperating. I've installed a proper hinge but still need a new handle that will clear the bifold doors for my new cabinet. All of that will have to be handled on the next trip as we're about out of time on this one. 

The first iteration shelf installation

The original hanging baskets

 

 

 

The doors without the upper trim

 

The doors with the trim installed

I still have to come up with a latch solution for these doors. I think I will use a magnetic catch on the left side, but only another trip to Lowe's will decide that. For now I'm pretty happy with the progress, and we have a couple of cabinets with much more useful space.