monkey fur
February, 2009
We've spent the last four
months cleaning everything we could touch and
putting four or more coats of oil on the seriously thirsty
interior teak, plus doing endless repairs and maintenance projects
that weren't terribly photogenic--things like
replacing every single battery on the boat and installing a more modern
type of
drain
pump for the bathrooms' sinks,
bathtubs and showers.
Morley also
reconnected a million loose wires that were the
source of most of our mechanical problems.
Hello companionway
lights and engine gauges, nice to have you working
again.
We also made a
shopping trip to the carpet mills in north
Georgia to choose something to
replace the butt ugly blue carpet we'd been
enduring since we bought the boat in September. At long last we're
getting new carpet on this baby. Can I get a
'Hallelujah and Amen' here?
The weekend
before the carpet installers came to do their magic we
got some dirty work out of the way: we stripped
the stateroom walls of their carpet and hull
liner coverings. In case you aren't familiar,
"hull liner" is the proper name for a strange
fuzzy fabric used as a low cost, easily
installed interior finish on boats, but it is
often referred to as "monkey fur" or sometimes
"rat fur".
And while it might look okay
when new, hull liner--like many of us--does not age well. Ours was
permeated with dust and the aroma of 'eau de
diesel', plus a few stains from red colored
beverages that had been spilled many years
before. Plus it just looked....well, creepy.
Instead of
installing new hull liner, we decided we wanted
those areas upholstered in a nice
marine-grade vinyl. Vinyl is not
only easier to clean but it looks
more better than any product with a nickname
like "rat fur" ever could.
The Big Day of Destruction
arrived and our friend Carol (the hardworking
redhead in these photos) gamely volunteered to
help out and the extra set of hands made the
project go a lot faster.
The carpet glued to the hull came
off pretty easily--all it took was one big yank while gritting
our teeth and making a grunting noise akin to passing a peach
pit--but that "monkey fur" went down swinging. It
literally disintegrated as we pried and cajoled it off the walls
and soon the entire cabin was filled with floating particles and
fibers, along with a fair amount of decidedly unladylike
language. Handling it made our skin itch
so gloves and face masks became the fashion of the
day for me and Carol.
While Carol and I were
busy yanking on monkey fur and making peach pit noises, Morley
was busy removing the salon sofa. Our brother in law Jim will
take it and all the other cushions on the boat to his shop
in Knoxville, TN to replace the current hippy
dippy fabric with a very nice leather type
fabric we bought online.
The sofa came apart easily once
Morley figured out where the screws were* and
while it is in pieces he wants to tighten up the screws and reinforce a couple of
joints before we hand everything over to Jim.
He
will also cut a hatch into the corner section of the sofa** so we can use that
space for storage (the other two sections already had storage
hatches in them).
*See
detailed notes
here on how to remove the salon
sofa on a Bayliner 4550 or 4558
** Update: as it turns out,
due to the way the sofa structure
underneath is laid out we
didn't get a corner hatch after all. Dang--dead space!
Morley gives the low down:
How to remove
the salon sofa on a Bayliner Pilothouse:
