galley slaves

One of the things that came to light when we were fitting out the office, and so needed space to store various bits and pieces out of the way of the building work, was that the galley in the captains cabin was being very badly used as a storage space. When we moved aboard it was set up as a kitchen for the back cabin, which we didn't need, and so we just chucked loads of stuff in there and used it as a kind of 'out of sight out of mind' dumping ground. It wasn't even particularly good for this, as the kitchen cupboards, work surface and cooker filled up most of the space and made the amount of usable space in there really small.

There was also a disconnected gas hob and oven of dubious lethality which took up the far end of the room.

We decided to strip out the kitchen fitting entirely, creating a blank slate of a room within which we could build shelves and create a useful storage space, and also put in a small 'coffee station' comprising of a little electric hotplate, a small sink and a mini fridge, so that we could make teas a coffees while working in the office.

In fact, we didn't really intend to strip it out so soon but i was at a loose end one evening, with an electric screwdriver and a crowbar to hand, and idly thought 'i wonder what's behind there,? i'll just take a quick peek...' and then suddenly it was several hours later and i reallised i had pretty much striped out the room...

The first thing to go was the oven and hob

quickly followed by the rest of the work surface, the head height cupboards and the massive sink/draining board, which seemed more suited for an industrial kitchen than a tiny galley.

I also stripped off the nasty melanine wall covering (which was glued on, making it challenging to get off) revealing the tongue and groove walls behind. The plan is to screw 25mm battens directly to the walls before covering them with 25mm insulation and finally plywood, which will be painted a clean and simple white.


In the meantime though, and possessed with a destructive zeal that always accompanies the exciting progress of stripping out rooms, i couldn't resist seeing what was behind the flat vertical wall that, i knew, concealed the underhang recess of the metal hull wall.

The answer was a whole load more space, a lot of rust and dirt,

and a very handy, sealed off but easily revivable outlet that we can plumb the sink into, which is very handy.


With everything stripped out the room looked so much bigger

and with so much else to be getting on with we decided to not immediately put in walls and insulation, but to just build shelves (from scaffolding planks again), store loads of stuff in a useful manner, and come back to this room when we'd done up some of the more pressingly urgent areas of the boat.