For the last few seasons, we've talked about making here pretty again, and this year we decided to try.
We're renting a heated garage, which has compressed air, water, and most important, a refrigerator for the beer! The renter doesn't object too much to all the sanding dust and we've been trying to keep it relatively clean with compress air and a shop vac.
The deck paint was one part and was dull, scuffed, stained, worn through to the gelcoat in places, and worse the gelcoat delaminated from the fiberglass in places. The non-skid was worn and smooth. The hull is the original gelcoat and very oxidized. The brightwork has been sanded many times, including twice by ourselves. The last finish we applied was two part varnish. By the second season, cracks developed and the varnish lifted from the wood, causing it to turn grey in those areas. Rather than trying to sand yet again, we decided to replace almost all of it.
The plan is to paint the deck something like off white using Awlgrip, some mix of white and grey Interdeck non-skid, and flag blue Awlgrip on the hull. The brightwork is planned to be African mahogany, varnished with a traditional varnish (at least 10 coats).
So far, we've removed the hardware (except chain plates) and brightwork, sanded the paint off the deck (including the original non-skid texture), sanded the topsides, filled, sanded, filled, sanded, filled, sanded, ..., applied high build on the deck, sanded, sanded, sanded, ... Just last night we applied the first coat of 545 primer. It didn't go entirely according to plan, but we moved up the learning curve and are expecting the next coat to go smoother.
Here are a few "before" pictures (actually, "partially into it" pictures). We'll add more as time permits.
I guess that's it for now.
