Galley Cabinetry

With the new sink, countertops and Force 10 range we recently installed, the rest of the galley cabinetry was looking really shabby. The sliding doors on the flatware locker, the louvered locker doors, the drawer facings and veneered surfaces on either side of the range were in bad shape and needing some varnish. Time to spruce things up a bit.

The new 3 burner Force 10 stove we installed back in January (no blog post) was approx 2 inches deeper, front to rear, than the old Hillerange unit it replaced. Although it fitted the original gimbal locations it intruded into the slide away feature for the countertop filler. We would have to come up with a solution to that problem during this project.  

Here is the old range. The stove top burners worked OK but the oven temperature control was a bit vague and there was no broiler. The Admiral decreed it had to go. 

Here we've started pulling things apart. Getting the sliding doors out from the flatware lockers was a challenge. Either by accident or design they wouldn't lift out the way sliders normally do. We had to remove the lower track and even then it was a fiddly job.

We knew from our experience refinishing the cabinetry in the head that prepping the louvered doors would be the biggest challenge. We had used Cetol in the head but the prep work was the same, sanding all those little louver slats is very time consuming and a real pain but......

......once again we were fortunate that one crew member had the necessary patience!

Doesn't she do good work.

Here are the sliders, before and after. Top one cleaned and sanded ready for varnish. 

Here is another before and after shot of a couple of drawer facings.

We decided to use Bristol Finish two part varnish for all the trim as we had good luck with it when we refinished the cockpit table several years back. It is a two part fast build product and is extremely hard, ideal for high wear areas like the galley.

Here are the louver doors starting to look a bit better after the first two coats of Bristol. We put four coats wet-on-wet and then waited a couple of days and sanded them lightly prior to the fifth and final coat. 

Same routine for the sliders and.........

.....also the drawers.

At this point we had to decide what to do with all the veneered surfaces. The lower edges of the area around the flatware locker had bad delamination damage due to water spillage on the countertop running down and laying against it. We stripped it off and began preparing for fresh veneer....then we had a brainwave! 

After we installed the Bomon windows in the main cabin and started trimming the bulkhead and walls we decided to paint over the shabby veneered bulkhead to brighten things up. That was three years ago and the painted surfaces have held up well. The exterior vinyl paint we used is very durable, any nicks and dings are easily touched up and any marks wipe away with a damp cloth. Why not do the same for the cabinet facings in the galley?

Purists will probably cringe at our decision but, for us, the resulting brighter and more modern looking cabin was well worth the small sacrifice in originality. Here we have sanded and applied a blocking primer to the areas above the counter.

Here we've got some colour on and started to re-install the sliders on the flatware locker.


















Here we've finished painting the facing panels on the fridge/freezer side and replaced the drawers.











Ditto the facing panels below the sinks, and the louver doors have been re-fitted.

The depth of the full size stove created an interference between the outboard louver door under the sinks and the handle on the oven door. To restore full opening of the door we  cut it down  by approx 4" and made the top section a fixed/removable piece.

 



This shot shows the shortened door opening below the oven door handle and the upper part still in place above.

This shot shows how the the upper section of the door is mounted with snap latches. It pops right off if necessary for full working access under the sinks. 

In this one we have started fitting new trim molding around the edges of all the counters. Notice the 'clean off notch' we cut into the molding over the drawers. Just visible on the sink side is the 'clean off corner' of the counter where there is no trim.

Here is a close up of the notch. It will make wiping the counter a bit easier on that side. 

On the home stretch here. Pretty much everything finished and starting to look a bit more like a galley again. Next we need to do something about the counter filler over the range.







Update 08-10-15


After throwing around some ideas on what a new counter filler might look like we quickly realised its size would be controlled by where it could be stored when not needed. With the bigger Force 10 range we had lost the 'slideaway' feature for the old filler so the new one would have to be easily removable, and designed so it could fit alongside or under the range, or elsewhere. Some quick measurements showed us that there was enough room under the range to fit a 22"x 18"x 1" filler. 

Here is a shot showing the available space under the range, a little over two inches.  

We went with half inch ply and edged it with teak channel molding. Here we are making a trial fit. The new filler will be slightly smaller than the original but it will have the advantage of moving with the range on its gimbals and providing a useable surface under way.

Here is the finished filler in place on the cooktop.

To hold the filler in place we cut four notches in the back side edge molding to engage with the two side rails of the cooktop. Here is one pair of notches. 

Here is a close up of one of the notches. They are only about 1/4" deep but seem to keep the filler securely in place......at least so far........we haven't had the cap rail in the water lately!   

This shot from the underside shows how the notches engage the cooktop. 

Here is the filler stowed under the range. It fits in the available space quite snugly but it does restrict the movement of the range at the extreme limit of swing on the gimbals.

So, if we need to use the range while under way then we slip the filler into one of the lockers under the settee.    

New Sink

We've always wanted a sink that that was more modern and a bit bigger than the factory original which, after nearly 33 years, was quite shabby with some bad scratches and dings. Also, washing the pressure cooker and other large pans was a major challenge. Another irritation was the flat bottom bowls never fully drained, always leaving a little standing water. Finally, the faucet spout was too low. Time for a change. 

We bought a twin bowl Scandvik unit from Defender. First lesson learned......... marine stainless sinks are crazy expensive! How can a double sink half the size of a domestic one cost more than twice as much? Anyway, the footprint of the new sink was very close to the old sink, but it had asymmetric bowls. By reducing the outer rim width and narrowing the bowl divider they are much more usefully sized. The small side is almost exactly the same size as the ones in the old sink, but the other is significantly bigger. 

Another nice feature with the new sink is the regular style drains with quick detach fittings that are close up to the underside of the bowls. This is much tidier than the old hose and tee arrangement, makes it a lot easier to deal with clogs and gives us much more room in the locker under the sink. 

Back in 2011 when we converted the ice box to a fridge freezer we also resurfaced the counter top with a Travertine patterned laminate to replace the original white Formica which was quite badly scuffed. We knew that eventually we would do the rest of the galley counters, so we bought enough extra Formica  for the sink and stove areas. It had been stashed under the mattress in the Pullman for the last 4 years. Time to drag it out!

After first disconnecting the sink drain hose we went to remove the sink hold down fasteners.....Oops.......no nuts or washers on any of the 6 pull down studs! 

As seems to have been par for the course for this boat (most Freeports?) (most Islanders?) the sink installation was a cowboy job, no fasteners, just gobs of silicone. So here we are cutting it out, a long and painful process. 

Here is a close up of one of the corner hold down studs.....never saw a nut or washer in its 33 year life!

The mixer faucet was similarly buried in silicone......although it did at least have nuts and washers on the pipe stems. 

Finally we got it out........next step the dumpster.

First the good news! Because the new sink had a very similar footprint to the old one the aperture in the counter top didn't need much adjustment, approx 3/4 inch added to the long dimension and approx 1/4 inch added to the short dimension. A few minutes with the jigsaw and sander and then the new sink dropped right in.

Now the bad news! Because the lip of the new sink was quite a bit narrower than the old one, all the cut outs for the hold down studs were now visible. We had expected to drill fresh holes for the fasteners at the bowl divider, which were no longer in the centre of the sink, but we had hoped the corners would work.....no such luck......we'd have to fill the all six of the old cutouts.  

We decided to get the old laminate off first and, predictably, it didn't go as smoothly as planned. We used the heat-gun-to-soften-the-adhesive technique that has always worked well for us elsewhere but, because the plywood that had been used for the counter top was poor quality, the top ply split and pulled up with the laminate in numerous places. Should have had some penetrating epoxy on the counter top before the contact cement but hey.....it's an old boat right!    

First step in repairing the surface of the counter top was to tape under the faucet holes and then fill them with thickened epoxy. Next we built some little dams with waxed paper and painters tape and then.........

.

......then the six cutouts also got the thickened epoxy treatment.

Next step was to get some wood filler into all the splits and tears in the top surface of the counter and..........

.........and finally sand it all smooth and flat ready for the new laminate. Here we are working on the hatch cover, which highlighted another little issue.

The piece of plywood that had been used for the cover was really rough........looked like something picked up from the scrap pile! It almost disintegrated when the laminate was peeled off and needed a lot of Filler, epoxy and TLC to bring it back.

Anyway, lots of elbow grease but finally we were ready for the new laminate. Or so we thought! 








Here we had actually roughed out the apertures for the sink and the hatch and were getting ready to glue it down. At the last minute we realised that because of the narrow lip on the sink, the mid bowl hold down studs were positioned inside the aperture....! 

Here is the problem, all the hold down studs are positioned directly on the edge of the aperture! The 4 corners are OK because there is a generous overhang but the mid bowl ones have no overhang. This meant that we needed to build something to secure them to.  

We used the blank from a 2 inch hole saw, cut in half to create two 'ears' to support the mid bowl hold down studs. We epoxied them in place with small biscuits.  

While waiting for the epoxy to dry on the 'ears' we cut the hole for the new single spigot mixer.

Finally we got the new laminate mounted. We were able to run the laminate trimmer around all the edges except for the outboard edge of the counter top hatch which was so close to the cabinet that we had to use the Dremel.  Visible in this shot is an area where we had removed of veneer due to water damage from the counter. We will be re-veneering and refinishing the whole face of  the cabinet as a later project.

Here we have mounted the new mixer faucet and .........

..........and here is the sink in place. We used a 3/8" x 1/4" closed cell foam strip to seal it instead of caulk. It is the same stuff we used on the Bomon cabin windows and means we can easily remove the sink if necessary. If it's good enough for windows it's going to be OK for a sink.

We were a bit concerned at the strength of the skinny hold down studs (4 mm) but they snugged things down without a problem, although putting the wing nuts on the mid bowl studs was fiddly.

We had to make a little tool to get the wing nuts started.

The last thing to do was to hook up the supply lines to the mixer and the sink drain hose. The supply lines were pretty straight forward. We used 1/2" x 1/2" nipples to splice the mixer lines to the PB supply lines. We plan to replace the PB with PEX at some future date when we replumb the boat but for now these temporary splices will do the job. 

The drain hose was another matter! When we ordered the drain kit it called for 1 1/2" hose, which is what we have, but when we tried to hook it up we found that the stub was 40 mm, which is close to 3/32" bigger than 1 1/2". 

Even with application of the heat gun and plenty of soap, no way could we assemble the 1 1/2" hose onto the drain stub. Even more bizarre was the fact that the stub had both 1 1/2 inch AND 40mm marked on it? Darn Italians, can't take simple measurements. Very misleading specification.

To solve the problem we picked up a PVC 1 1/2" adapter and opened it up a little with the Dremel and a flap wheel. Then we cemented it onto the drain stub and used a hose barb.

The finished job. Now we have to get on with re-trimming and re-finishing the  hatch, the cabinetry and surrounding woodwork, install the soap dispenser, the faucet for the galley foot pump, and.....and......and......