Galley Deconstruction

After a couple of days of the flu, then a 5-day z-pak for bronchitis, Mike is back up and tearing the boat apart.  This time it's the galley.  The icebox didn't have enough insulation, which means taking out what's there and putting in better insulation.  Once the project got going, it took on a life of it's own.  Now we can design the galley any way we want, because most of it has been torn out:

Since it's all apart, we tried two options for locating the refrigerator and the stove.  These are the two we played with:

Of course the stove will sit up higher.  We also are tossing around the idea of putting an Engel drop-in freezer in one end of the refrigerator.  The refrigerator is kinda huge (in our minds), so we can put one end to good use.  However, we're concerned with having to take it out for any possible maintenance, so that is still under discussion.

We also managed to get in a couple of smaller projects, especially after the heavy rains we've had.  Mike noticed a few leaks:  one in a porthole, one in a prism (we'd already re-seated, but it drips in the engine room), and one in the mid portlight on the starboard side.  Oh, and believe it or not, one small drip is coming in through the mid-ship dorade.  So today we took out the leaky portlight (again) and found where the butyl tape had not adhered to the fiberglass.  We were more attentive this time and after dousing it (and the porthole we re-seated), we have no leaks from those locations.  Because the portlights were re-seated this past winter, many nuts were loose, so we tightened all of them on the portlights and feel much better about having gotten rid of the leaks.  We're not expecting any more!  ;-)

Before we left today, we also took off the 8 loop grab rail on the starboard side.  It's too expensive to have an 8-loop shipped to us, so we're putting in a 5-loop and a 2-loop.  The last loop was under the dodger windshield, so if we decide to put a hard dodger on her next year, we won't have to cut or go over the grab rail.  So this works out much better.