Passport's Adventures: Renovations

When standing on the brink of demolition to begin renovations, there is a point where the question must be asked: Will I make it better or worse? Of course the goal is to make it better, but will something get damaged unexpectedly in the process of taking it apart? Are there unexpected surprises, not necessarily good ones, lurking under the surface? These are all questions that must be faced and evaluated, or just completely ignored and hope for the best. We had a couple improvement projects that were touch and go for a little while.

When we began evaluating moving the quarter berth shelf and found that it was recessed into both bulkheads, it was a little hard to tell what it would entail moving it. As it turned out it was not so difficult, and only left a few areas that needed trim. The contemplation of how much worse we could make it, turned out to be far more stressful than the actual process that went very well.

Our biggest surprises came in more unexpected areas. The nav station desk was one of the first items we stripped to re-varnish. Our first surprise was finding that the wood was a very different color. If it’s teak, it’s a very white teak, I think it more likely that it is spruce and was disguised as teak under the factory finish. The original finish was colored and somewhat opaque to hide the grain. Once we saw what we had, this became one of the last items to get varnished. In the end it turned out well, but it took some trial and error mixing stains into the varnish and getting a color that at least blends in with the boat.

And then we come to the dining table. We contemplated long and hard as to what to do with it. The varnish had deteriorated over the years, leaving many small black dots where the wood was exposed. When the rest of the varnish was finished and turned out well, and the nav desk was under control, we chose to jump in; strip the table and re-varnish. It didn’t take too long till we discovered this was an “oh s*#%” project. It turned out that the veneer was as thin as paper, and in a lot of places came off with the varnish. After much rum and contemplation it was decided to buy some veneer and re-do it. Our table was not just a solid sheet of veneer though, rather it radiated into a center point. So of course we wanted to replicate the original. It turned out that all my unused quilting tools came in very useful for cutting and fitting the pieces of veneer. In the end the new table has turned out very nice, although it was an extra project we could have done without. I will assure in the future the varnish remains in good shape with refresher coats, never to be stripped again.