Monday, June 3, 2013

More aft cabin cabinets

I've decided to put some attention on the cabinets and storage along the back of the boat in the aft cabin. I've been kind of dreading this job, because its another one of those spaces where nothing is square to anything else and there are a lot of challenges with transitioning from the steel hull to the wood framing and interior. To complicate things further, this is where the stairs come up through the transom to the aft deck overhead and there is the rudder post and steering gear to work around. It's kind of like building a three dimensional jigsaw puzzle from the inside out. I like the way the forward part of the stateroom (the big closet project from a couple of weeks ago) turned out so I decided to match that type of construction and finish. Instead of building face frames, I used birch ply (which will be painted) and cut all the openings needed. All the cabinet door and drawers will be the same wood and detail as the rest of the cabinetry, and will be framed in with 1x2 mahogany like sliding closet doors. The final layout that we came up with has a smaller hanging locker to starboard, then two sets of big drawers. Above the drawers, there will be cabinet doors to allow access to the steering gear and additional storage. Below there will be two removable panels to access some plumbing and heating stuff. I have transitioned to doing as much cutting, sanding, etc. outside on the dock next to our boat to reduce the amount of mess inside on "work days". Since I only have so many trips back and forth from the boat to the outside workbench in me on a given day, I have been making use of templates for all these big odd shaped pieces of ply. Not having to do multiple trips with a big piece of plywood for fit-up and adjustment is worth the extra time spent playing with the cardboard and the tape. Next job will be to frame the openings and order the doors and drawer fronts. I'm also figuring we will install cedar T&G on the back wall of the smaller hanging locker one of these days, like we did on the other one last weekend.












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