It’s time to address that aft cabin aboard Galapagos. We don’t have a date for moving aboard yet, but I am loathe to wait until the last minute to do any kind of remodeling of the interior. Now’s the time. The goal: create a sleeping area that is appropriate for a couple, without giving up too much in terms of standing and walking room, and without breaking the bank. Here’s our current setup.

The current situation.

When we bought Galapagos, it was with the realization that high on our list of comforts we wanted was a big berth in the aft cabin. We had been spoiled by some of the boats we’d looked at. Many of them had a queen sized bed in the master cabin, some even bigger. After our time on Moonrise, our Cal34, we knew we wanted three things: to be able to get out of bed without climbing over each other, a way to sleep comfortably together at anchor, and a comfortable mattress that was as good as the one we sleep on at home, not necessarily in that order.

Thus, I was pretty disappointed in the aft cabin in our boat. It wasn’t enough to turn me off to the boat, but I knew we’d have to do something about that cabin sooner, rather than later.  The disappointing thing is that the aft cabin, while very roomy by boat standards, has a split berth. Originally the boat had two single berths, one on each side. I guess this 1975 boat must have been designed before the days of cruising couples who actually wanted to sleep together.

Looking closely, you can see where this side was extended. The cabinetry was done to match.

Previous owners had extended one side into the boat definition of a double bed to try to solve that problem, but, well, no thanks.  Really that’s not enough room for either of us to be comfortable. We each need our space for actual sleeping.  And there is that whole thing about all the trips to the head we both make. They only seem to get more numerous as we get older. We both need our sleep. So we have ended up sleeping apart. We can handle that in the short term, but we would at least like to have an option that isn’t the v-berth. Ok, I’m a spoiled brat and am tired of having to crawl out of a berth in the night several times without kicking Mike in the head, or any more tender place. I’ll own that.

See this photo from the Hylas Yacht’s site? I want this. Ha hahaha! My wallet says no.

This week Mike removed the mattresses and we went down today armed with cardboard, tape, and tape measures, to create a new space. Here is a list of our goals for this space:

1. Be able to sleep side by side when we want to.
2. Maintain our current layout enough that we can continue to sleep apart when we’re just dog tired. That’s actually a bonus.
3. Be able to access the steering mechanism in the middle compartment, and also the stowage compartments on the starboard side by creating a mechanism to tilt the mattress pieces up individually. This requires that they be on a stiff underlayment made of plywood or some other, hopefully lighter weight yet sturdy, material. If that material were to allow air flow, that would be ideal.  Our measurements and trial runs have confirmed that we can use a mattress up to 8″ high and still have plenty of access room when it’s tilted up.
4. Do as little cabinetry work as possible because…lack of skills to make it look good.
5. Leave enough room for the head door, and to easily walk through from one side of the cabin to the other. We’d like to be able to stand and get dressed in there.
6. Continue to be able to access the drawers on each side.

I started by making a template of the existing layout, then began adding to that, keeping in mind that the finished product measurements will be larger where the mattress butts against the hull due to the curvature of that surface. This gives us a few more inches of room on each side and on a boat, a few inches can be the difference between workable and terrible.

We’ve come up with two possibilities:

Solution number 1. Distance from the aft wall to the edge of that middle section is 48″.

Solution number one leaves the starboard berth as is, extends the port berth out about 6 inches, and brings that middle section out  just to the corner of the drawers on each side. The corner of the port berth (hint: we are facing aft in the photo) has been clipped to make it visually more pleasing and protect our thighs from a sharp corner. This is the easiest solution. The distance from the aft of the cabin to the forward part of that middle section is 4 feet, ample room to lay side by side athwartship.

Our other option is this:

Using the cockpit cushions allowed us to play a little more with the space.

It’s difficult to photograph this entire cabin at once. In this instance, the starboard berth is enlarged at an angle from the forward corner, and the port berth is brought straight across, intersecting it at a right angle. That little triangular piece of cardboard that shows in the above photo would be gone. There would be plenty of room to lay side by side in a fore/aft position, rather than athwartship in this scenario, but it would take a little more carpentry work, and the door would not open all the way. It would open enough, but not competely.   Here is a pitiful sketch, not to scale or anything else, but you can get the general idea.

Dotted lines represent what we have now. Note there is a shelf in the middle section that already keeps you from walking or standing there.

And here is a photo of the original drawing of the layout so you can get a better idea of what we are dealing with. Note in the drawing that the little white triangle between the berths is actually a cushion insert, like in a V berth. The solid rectangle connecting the two sides is a seat that is below the level of the berth: 

That’s as far as we’ve gotten at this point. We are playing with how deep to make the mattress. We tend toward having memory foam or latex, or possibly the gel foam that is supposed to be a bit cooler than memory foam. All of that is heavy. Mike wants to be sure that the weight is not an impediment to getting under the berth. I want it to be easy enough for me to do it without his help. Wooden chocks could help hold the mattress and underlayment up and take some of the load so we could tie it off securely. I’m imagining having to get at the steering mechanism out on the open sea and not wanting the thing to come crashing down.

Finally, I want to keep resale value in mind because it’s always a good idea to do that. Of course we plan to have this boat for years, but I wouldn’t want a wonky aft cabin to get in the way of a sale if it came to that.

If you have ideas and thoughts, throw them out here. Any idea what we could use for an underlayment, besides heavy plywood, that would allow us to lift up pieces of the mattress to access the underneath compartments? (Yes, the mattress will be hinged in places, but that’s a different post.)  I’d love to think there is something like a fiberglass grid that would allow airflow under the mattress. Surely someone has invented that already.

Update: August 3, 2016  Want to read the entire Aft Cabin Remodel series to see how long it can take us to make a project happen? Here’s the next entry.

Bidden or unbidden, God is present. This hangs in our aft cabin, as it hung in my office for about 20 years. Nothing to do with the remodel. I just like it.

Damn, I sure hope this works. As plans go, lately ours feels like it may not be quite so ‘cunning’, and it’s certainly not very ‘little’. In spite of these feelings, we move forward into the winter, anticipating the spring when we are hoping all these loose ends we’re dangling into the void of the Universe will coalesce into something solid. That ‘something’ will be living on the boat while our house pays for itself with renters. This is not a small endeavor. In the words of a certain infamous business man, ‘It’s ‘HUGE’.

Freshly graveled driveway and simplified gardens. Can’t wait to take a photo in the spring or summer, when things look better.

Pretty much the color of our blood right now is green. Having never gone this route with a house before, we didn’t anticipate how much it would cost to get things ready for someone else to live here. Dang! Some of these are big ticket items like having the old Douglas Fir trees thinned to reduce windage and yard debris. Most things, though, are small things like buying linens for beds and painting a room. At first, we didn’t really notice the expense of these things. But as we start adding it all up, we realize it’s like death from a thousand small cuts. The bloody green is just everywhere. If you are considering making this kind of move in your own life, you can consider this your cautionary tale.

It’s not just our current spending that makes money seem like it’s flying out the door. It’s also coming to terms with money we spent on stuff that is no longer useful for the life we will want to lead. Like the money I spent on my lovely turquoise velvet swing coat. And my vintage Frederick and Nelson raincoat that I bought years ago. I love these things, but there is no place for them on a boat and frankly I don’t wear them much. They didn’t sell at our garage sale, and I have been unsuccessful selling them on Ebay.

Mike’s working on repairing Puddler, hoping to sell it to a new home. We love this little dinghy. It has come along on many adventures. See that garage? Still a lot of work to be done there.

This brings up the concept of ‘sunk costs’, which is something we’ve written about before. I’ve held onto those two items, as just one example, because I know if I can find the right market for them, they will sell and I could recoup probably what I spent on them. But it takes a lot of time and energy trying to sell stuff. Craigslist was a dead end and I have better things to do than to field calls from people who will never follow through.  And even though Ebay makes it dead simple to list items to sell, you still have to photograph, figure out shipping, do the listing, then wait for things to sell. At this point I’ve decided my time is worth some money and could probably be better spent doing things like writing this blog post telling you to just cut to the chase and give most of the stuff away. Those costs are already sunk. Kiss them bye bye.

My favorite photo of Puddler, circa 2010 in Barkley Sound.

I’d like to say that money is coming in at the same rate it was before, but this would be a lie. At the same time that we’re spending so much money on the house (which, to be fair, we’d also have to do in order to sell the house), I’ve gone into semi-retirement from my practice as a psychotherapist. This has been in the works for over a year, but now that it’s happening it’s a very scary proposition.

I’ve begun seeing people on a cash-only basis, rather than continue to bear the responsibility of billing their insurance for them. I knew this would cause a decline in my client population because people would generally much rather feel as though they are getting something for nothing. And, after all, as a population we’ve been trained that the ‘doctor’s office’ will do that paperwork for us, especially as insurance is a complex dark hole into which most people don’t wish to wander. When clients have to pay up front and then send in a receipt for reimbursement, well, let’s just say that separates ‘the men from the boys’, as it were. Still, even though my salary is a fraction of what is was six months ago, letting go of all these kinds of land-based ‘contracts’ is required in order to move forward. Cutting back my practice may seem like the right thing to do overall, but it sure doesn’t feel right some days. It’s more like I’m hanging onto the end of a rope with one hand and have not yet located the net that is supposed to be under me.

Freshly painted second bedroom. Last year at this time it was my art studio. Kind of miss that.

We’re at the point where we can see the weather changing in the distance. The barometer is dropping in our comfortable middle-class suburban lives. I think we’re as ready as we can possibly be for the changes that are coming. We have a storage unit at the marina now. I finally found an insurance agent to help us with all of the new insurance needs we’ll have. I meet with him on Monday to look over the bid.  I met today with a friend who will do the gardening and housekeeping between renters. We’re working on a website for the house, and on a ‘users manual’ for the home systems. The next step is getting the house on the market, which will happen at the end of this month. After that, we wait to see if the booking calender will get filled. If and when that happens, it will be a wild flurry of activity. Keep your fingers crossed for us!

We gave Andrew an entire apartment of furniture. Where did we put it all when it was in our house? We like this room better now.