Rebuilding, Outfitting, and Adventuring aboard a Grampian 26: In with the new

So what do you do when you've managed to clean up and rip out most of the interior of a 26ft sailboat? Walk around your local home improvement
store of course! Always keep an open mind and a rough sketch of an idea when you're wandering around a store looking for inspiration on the cheap. My first stop was to look at the insulation. My Grampian was known for having a thick solid fiberglass hull, good build quality, but bad for condensation. The soft puffy fiberglass insulation is useless when it gets wet, so that stuff was out from the get go. That left me with several either close celled or open celled Styrophone boards, or an aluminum bubble wrap type material. In the end the choice was pretty straight forward. 1 inch close cell board glued directly to the hull both as insulation and a condensation barrier, then the 'aluminum bubble wrap' as an extra bit of insulation followed finally by more of nice toung and groove cedar slat closet liner I had picked up earlier to built my forward hatch out of.

Pre insulation and cedar, Note the ugly ancient red tweed

As you can see, I glued wooden stringers to the hull every 16", glued the insulation and aluminum bubble wrap between each stringer, and covered it all with the cedar. I also decided to install A car sterio here with plans to eventually add a VHF and somple NAV station.

All done with this corner! I picked up the VHF from craigslist for 40$ got my hands on a Barometer and Hydrometer for 10$ at a yard sale, and added an atomic clock with weather reporting I got for christmas

Forward Berth still covered in red tweed

No more tweed, more stringers, more insulation, ran out of the foil insulation but better than nothing.

I decided since I had the extra space and no more of the foil insulation I'd give Water resistant spray foam a try and fill up the void where the foil would have gone.

Insulation done and slats in place. I decided to leave the shelve space bare except for a single coat of brown paint. My Grampian may be big for a 26ft boat but I sure could still use all the shelf space I can get.

Close up of the cedar with mahogany trimmed shelves after I oiled and varnished everything.

I also decided to raise the floor by about 1 1/2 inches, sacrificing a bit of extra head room in exchange for almost doubling the available floor space I glued, tabbed and finally epoxied pressure treated wood onto the original floor stringers and laid down some 1/2 inch marine plywood. I coated the plywood with several coats of epoxy, then glued down some thick plastic vapor barrier to both sides and finally laid down some bamboo flooring. I know the Bamboo flooring wont likely hold up as well as some other materials, but it was very inexpensive, looked pretty good, and has held up for three years so far. When it comes time to replace it I still have over half a box left from when I originally bought it, given the tiny floor size thats more than enough to do it all again.