She's Orange!...and lots of other progress.

"Orange is the happiest color."

~Frank Sinatra

Lots of progress since the last post!

I now have walls for the galley, the head, the pantry and the closet.  The floor is almost complete (just a few areas near the engine compartment left) and I have hatches all over the place.  My new stairs between the salon and the galley are almost finished.  And the stairs going through the stateroom to the back deck are actually mahogany!  When Jerry sanded the old, painted, beat up stairs...he discovered that they were mahogany.  We are going to refinish them.  And...we have the first coat of orange paint on the outside!

First, let's look at the walls!  Here they are with just the boards nailed to the floor:

And here it is all framed in (but you're looking at it from the other angle--the closet and pantry are closest to you in this pic):

It's all painted white.  We used Fiberlock IAQ 6000 and KILZ Original primer/sealer/stainblocker.  In this pic, look at all of my hatches:

We painted the the bottom of each floor board with the Fiberlock IAQ 6000 (mold and water resistant), and the tops with KILZ--just to help seal the boards.  This is the KILZ we used:

Here are the stairs between the salon and the galley the first time we walked through the boat:

Here they are with the carpet removed:

And here are the new ones:

These are built so that the treads have hinges, and each step is now a handy storage compartment.  I haven't actually seen these yet--they are at my contractor's home.  Can't wait!

Now let's look at the steps going from the stateroom to the back deck...Here is a shot of the steps as we found them (painted, scratched, and looking sorry):

This pic also reminds me how much work has been done.  Wow!

 And here is a pic of the wood after it was sanded.  What a surprise to find mahogany! I'll take more pics of the stairs soon.

And finally...the orange paint!  This week the weather is supposed to be beautiful, and I was afraid that if we didn't paint now, we would have to wait until next year.

We started by sanding the green stripes.  We used these Very Fine sanding pads:

And we lightly sanded each stripe:

Then we used this to clean away all the paint debris:

This part of the process was not fun.  Very tedious work.

Also tedious, was taping all of the stripes:

In this pic, you can see how we are extending the width of the orange stripe on the bridge so that the stripes are parallel with all of the other stripes:

We used Amershield paint:

This stuff is pretty heavy duty.  It is used on water towers, windmills, stadiums, naval ships, etc. (and my boat).

It is a two-part process--you have to mix the resin and the cure in a 5-1 part ratio:

And the first paint was applied:

The paint is relatively thin, and will require lots of coats.  Im not completely sure how much I like it...I need to see it with more coats.  You can see the green stripes (we have only applied one coat so far).  Also, the white stripes are coveres with tape, and painted over--so there will be white stripes btween the orange ones again when we remove the tape.

I do know that I like that you can spot my boat easily from a distance.  :)

Can you spot my boat?

I am excited to see how it looks with a couple more coats.  I do love the color orange--it makes me happy!