Preparing our Jeanneau for living aboard and cruising, Part 2

It all began one cold winter evening. I made the two hour drive from my home to marina one Friday night. I fired up my trusty chopsaw and proceeded to remove the entire salon, cutting it into small pieces and depositing it all in the dumpster. No going back now!

I began by adding two 20 gallon water tanks against the forward bulkhead. The airconditioner was re-located followed by the installation of an 11 gallon hot water heater. Finally the mountings were fabricated to position a stand-alone Fridge Freeze deep freeze. All of the aforementioned equipment would be under the new salon seating. Needless to say, all had to have new wiring and plumbing. One of the mose difficult tasks was plumbing new coolant lines from the engine to the water heater which would enable us to heat hot water off the engine while underway.

Once the mechanical was completed, I, with the help of my good friend Darrell Cole, started the construction of the new salon. Cabinets and a book shelf were fabricated along the hull side. The compression post was concealed by a pantry which features eight small cabinets which open into the galley area. My goal was to make it appeared that it had come from the factory whcih required that the corner pieces had to milled from solid teak. Think $$! Finally, I visited a paint store in downtown Dallas where genius for matching of stains worked. After providing him with samples of the both the original colored teak and the new unstained teak, he mixed up a perfect match. I now refer to him as "The Sultan of Stain"! The helpful folks at Jeanneau America assisted me in obtaining cabinet hinges and latches which matched the orginals.

I have to admit that even though I had under estimated the magnitude of this part otf the project and it took months of very hard work, it has turned out to be so worth it.