Settee Storage

As noted in some of our other posts the Freeport has a lot of good storage space, but not all of it is as useful as it could be. In particular there is a lot of room under and behind the starboard settee cushions, but access to it isn't great.  The two photos below show Circe's 'from the factory' set-up.

Fwd end of settee.

Aft end of settee.

We wanted to improve access to both storage areas. The four small cut-outs in the settee back made it difficult to store items in any kind of organised way and even more difficult to retrieve them. The two loose hatch covers in the settee base weren't much use either, especially as there was originally a foldaway bed laying on top of them! We ripped the bed out shortly after we got the boat (visitors have to make do with the floor, settee and dinette seats) but the hatches were still way too small for the large storage areas under them. Fortunately other Freeport owners have successfully upgraded this area so we had plenty of good ideas to work with. A couple of different approaches are shown below.

In this one, the settee back has been opened up, shelves installed and new full width outer doors built.

Here, both the backrest and seat bottom have  been re-configured with flush fitting doors and some shelves have been installed behind the settee.







We liked  both of the two designs shown above and decided to go with a combination of both. We took the asymmetrical shelf arrangement from the one and the flush doors from the other. Once again we sought the help of Art Kleiner at The Boat Smith for the 'heavy lifting' part of the job, leaving the trim, finish and paint for ourselves.

Measuring and marking out the new bottom door positions.

Using the hole saw to define the corners of the new door apertures.

Here are the rough cut apertures.

This shot clearly shows how much bigger than the original hatches the new doors will be!

New door apertures finished and cleats being installed.

Test fitting the first of the new, 1/2" Hydrotek bottom doors.

Starting on the settee back apertures using the same technique...hole saw for the corners and Skil saw for the edges.

Cleats installed and all doors temporarily fitted, ready for shelves.

First of the two shelves going into the aft locker. We put simple 'fiddles' on the shelves to help keep items in place as the boat heels.

Getting the correct curvature on the back of the shelves to match the hull, was a pain for Art. Lots of fit, plane, fit, plane, fit, plane. But the final result seen here was very good.

Both aft locker shelves installed.

The single shelf installed in the forward locker. Like the model we copied, we left this locker mostly open for bigger or odd shaped stuff.

We added some simple finger latches to the doors in the settee back.

All done and ready for paint. 

First a couple of coats of a high fill primer.

Next up was two coats of colour matched semi-gloss exterior latex. We hate the shi**y brown colour (literally and metaphorically) that Islander put on all the interior spaces but we weren't prepared to repaint the whole boat so we stayed with it :o(

Looking good with the storage areas soooo much more accessible and functional than before.

Another good upgrade completed. On to the next project.