Guest cabin dressing room

The basic layout of the cabin area below is as follows: Down four steps from the salon above. Once at the bottom of the steps, you can either turn left through a door and get to the master cabin, or go straight through another door to get to the guest cabin dressing room/hallway. One has to go through this area to get to the guest cabin/kids cabin located in the forward area of the hull. Each cabin has a door to access the common bathroom where the shower and toilet is located. Each cabin ( master and guest) has its own sink. The engine room is accessed from the master cabin through a water tight steel door.

Standing in the guest cabin dressing room, one will find a large sink base with storage underneath, four wall mounted cabinets, and a bench seat with storage underneath it. There will be two ceiling mounted DC lights, and one ceiling mounted AC light with all lights being controlled by switches on the wall. There is also a decent amount of wall space available to have some hanging storage without impacting ones ability to walk through the space.

Because of my wish filled thinking regarding shower sump pumps, I had to re think how I was going to hold the gray water from the shower and cabin sinks. I decided to add a holding tank, and the most logical place for it was under one of the bunks against the dressing room bulkhead. I was going to buy a plastic tank, but since I had enough stainless plate left over from the water tank construction I decided to fabricate my own and save some cash. The tank ended up with 47 gallons of capacity.


Under the sink base in the dressing room is some of the gray water plumbing. The through hull fitting you see is above the water line. When we have to hold our gray water, the blue valve will be shut and the black valve will be open. This will direct the water to the main sump which will then direct the water to the 47 gallon holding tank I just built. When we can discharge gray water, the blue valve will be open, the black valve will be closed, and the shower sump will discharge overboard via the black pipe when the sump selector valve is in that mode. Its a pretty simple set up albeit a bit on the bulky side, but I made everything from parts found in the shop and did not have to depart with any cash. The elbow on he end of the manifold is for the guest cabin dressing room sink once I get that sink installed.

I built four more cabinets to fill up the wall in this room, and stopped them well short of the port light. One of the cabinets will be the medicine cabinet above the sink, while the other three will be general storage. The cabinets are 12 inches deep at the base, and about 18" deep at the top. Im also using these cabinets as the chase for the air conditioning duct that will feed the guest/kids cabin. That duct will be a four inch flexible pipe.

In order to give one as much privacy as possible, there will be a door between the dressing room and the bunk room. The door will be 20" wide.

I had enough room to create a bench in the dressing room so people could sit down while they were getting dressed. I installed a piano hinge on the lid of the bench so the bench could double as a locker for more storage.

The room is a fuzz narrow, but Im able to easily navigate through it without bumping my knees or having to turn the least bit sideways. I think this space will be an important part of the boat in regard to helping all on board with privacy, and a sense of having ones own space. To be honest, this is a very comfortable room even though its function is mostly utilitarian.

I have six doors to build for this room, and one more sheet of plywood to install on the partition between the master cabin and this space. I also have to plug all the screw holes, sand everything, and get a coat or two of finish on the wood. Once those jobs are finished, Im ready to start work on the sleeping room and its four bunks. Once the doors are installed and some finish on the wood, Ill post some more pics.

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Kids cabin guest cabin

Im well into the finishing the wood work in the guest cabin ( kids cabin ), and Im feeling good regarding my schedule of having the wood work finished before the end of Spring. Since I do not need to do any welding regarding the pilot house install above this area of the boat, Im going to go ahead and install the ceiling, doors, and light fixtures before I start a new area on the boat. The pilot house is directly above the master cabin and bathroom, so I have to wait to install those ceilings until after I weld the pilot house to the boat deck.

The guest cabin has four permanent bunks with two being on the port side, and two on the starboard side. The bunks are 24" wide, and 6 6" long. The framing is steel wrapped in wood with a 3/4" plywood deck. The clearance between the lower and upper bunks after the 4" mattresses are installed will be 23". Each bunk will have its own reading light. I wired the guest cabin with an AC receptacle along with a coaxial receptacle on the bathroom wall so a TV could be installed. There will be three ceiling light fixtures in the guest cabin that will be controlled by one switch. Each of the reading lights for the bunks will have their own switch. All off the lights on the boat, along with the guest cabin lights, will be LED type fixtures.

Because of the way the bunks had to be installed, I created a divider between the two lower bunks. This is a fairly good sized room in terms of a bunk room on a mid sized yacht, but I am cramming a lot of function into a relatively compact space and I have to pay attention to make sure the occupants have their "own space". The divider walls off about 16" of bunk, and goes a long way towards helping those in the lower bunks feel as if they have some privacy. If I were going to sleep on one of the lower bunks, without the divider, Id be in a constant state of bad attitude given the closeness. The divider will also serve as a point to locate the ladder that will be needed to access the upper bunks. The divider also ( some more dumb luck) acts as a vent for the blanket chest which in turns will allow ventilation into the bilge. A small fan placed in the open bottom end of the divider has the potential to provide air flow all the way down the bilge to station #9 which is the water tight steel bulkhead of the engine room.

The guest cabin area of the boat is a pretty complex room given the extreme curvature of the hull, the odd shapes Ive created, and the obvious challenge of getting so much sleeping and storage area into a tight space. To be honest with you , a 55 footer would have suited us a little better, but that was not in the budget. The maximized space of the bunk room works well in my opinion now that I created the guest cabin dressing room. These two rooms compliment each other extremely well and one room now relies upon the other. With the future installations of bunk curtains, privacy, might be a little easier by all on our little trawler yacht.

This room is going to take a few posts to work through, so being the creative guy that I am, I decided to start at the beginning. Breaking the bunk room down to a basic level, the room is sheathed with 1/2" birch plywood, then all the bunks and cabinetry are being built out of the air dried Cherry.

We will be using a deck winch to handle our anchor gear, so the huge anchor chain locker in the guest cabin will not be used for the anchor chain. Im acting like the locker will be used for anchor chain ( possible future use), so I installed the drain in the bottom of the locker along with the water tight door I fabricated. The water tight door kind of ruins the ambiance of the wood work, so I built a wood door to cover the steel door. The wood door is held in place by a wedge and some Velcro, and takes about two seconds to remove. One heavy duty door dog along with a heavy 1 1/2" rubber gasket is what creates the seal for the steel door. The door dog came from the water tight door I cut down in order to make a door for the rear of the engine room.

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Sign Our Guest Book and or Register Your Yacht

We would like to hear from you. Please sign our new guest book, comment, discuss and/or register your Sparkman & Stephens Yacht. From this we will build a database of the yachts and their current locations.

Data will only be used to build our database. Numerous readers have introduced themselves as owners of S&S yachts through either the Comments field for a particular posting or through a direct email to us. We hope this is a simpler way to let us know where the S&S fleet is worldwide.

The database we will construct will be accessible by blog readers and will list yachts by LOA, design number, year, name and location. The database will not include the owners name nor contact information. For example:
Sailboats 40-60ft LOA
45-4", 125, Falcon, Castine, ME
47-9", 1976, Puffin, Thomaston, ME

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Sailboats 40-60ft LOA
50-3", 1534, Diogenes
55-8", 85, Avanti

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Guest cabin dressing room update

The six cabinet doors are finished and I have two coats of Urethane on all the wood in the guest cabin dressing room. I also have the sink base top completed, but its not installed yet as I changed my mind on the sink. I had purchased a square stainless steel sink for this room, but because the top is an odd shape, I could not get the sink installed in such a way that it looked aesthetically pleasing. A square sink on a trapezoid top just doesnt look right, so I decided to sell the square sink, and buy a round sink. Im still waiting on the round sink to arrive, then Ill finish the sink base install.

I had enough 1/4" Cherry plywood to use for the doors, so I decide to use a flat panel vs a raised panel for these six doors. I used the same style and rail method of door building as the master cabin. Using the flat panels shaved quite a few hours off of the door construction while helping preserve my stock of air dried lumber.

This room, along with the master cabin, are as finished as they are going to get for right now. Once Ive got the boat at the launch site, Ill give all the wood one more coat of Urethane. Ive still got quite a bit of work to do and it makes no sense to me to spend my time putting any more urethane on the wood as its going to get banged up. Theres enough protection on everything to get it through the rest of the build.

Im going to start on the kids cabins sometime next week. Im feeling confident that Ill get all the cabin wood work finished this Spring.

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Guest cabin dressing room update 2

The last few weeks have found me getting the Carver boat ready for its new owner so not much has been getting done on the boat build. Now that the carver is finished and out of the shop, Im back working on the boat build.

I received the new sink so I was able to complete the installation of the top, the sink, and the faucet. All the cabin plumbing connections are now complete. If I had the pressure pump and a couple of days work, Id be able to use the sinks.

I installed a new valve for the through hull fitting under the guest cabin sink. The valve I had originally installed was a cheap gate valve that was probably doomed for failure. I installed a more corrosion resistant ball valve in place of the gate valve and hopefully saved myself a future headache. I had read on another forum that gate valves have no place on boats, and I agree.

The through hull fitting under this sink is the only through hull fitting for the cabins sinks and shower. This through hull fitting is a stainless steel piece of pipe, welded in to the hull that is threaded on the inboard end. The ball valve threads on to the pipe, and that is my basic through hull fitting. If gray water needs to be held, the red handled ball valve is shut, the black handled ball valve is opened, and the sump pump selector valve is moved to the holding tank position, then all the gray water goes to the holding tank. If we can discharge gray water, the red handled ball valve is opened, the black handled ball valve is closed, and the sump selector valve is moved to the discharge position so all gray water is either pumped or gravity flow overboard.

The galley sink, the clothes washing machine, and the half bath above will have another holding tank and one through hull fitting to deal with that gray water.

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Guest cabin updated 3 Storage

For the cabinetry Ive built on the boat prior to building the guest cabin, Ive used frame and panel construction. The cabinets Ive built in the guest cabin are what I would call frame less construction.

There are four bunks in the guest cabin. Each bunk is 6 6" long with a minimum width of 24". The overall average ceiling height in the cabin is 6 8". Underneath the lower bunks are two cubby hole frame less storage spaces. Underneath the port side bunk Ive added a large drawer, and one more not so large cubby. The 45 gallon gray water holding tank is underneath the starboard lower bunk so no cabinets were able to be built in that space. Between the port and starboard bunks is another cubby on the same elevation as the other lower cubbies. Each set of bunks has a bulkhead. Because of the the standard bunk length and the left over space I had after laying out the bunks, I created a large blanket chest forward of the two lower bunks. The blanket chest is a huge storage space, and all the linens for the cabin will easily fit in this space. All the linens for the rest of the boat could also go in this space. The lid of the blanket chest serves as a step to gain access to the anchor chain locker when one needs to get in to that area. Since Im using a deck winch, I see the anchor chain locker becoming storage for one thing or another. To both port and starboard of the anchor chain locker, I created four more cubbies that are behind the bulkhead of each of the upper bunks.

For the drawer and not so large cubby, I stuck with the frame construction method. I could have probably made a frame less unit, but the framed method seems to work best for drawers. Ive not yet built the drawer, and this will probably be the last major wood working project I will do in the guest cabin.

It seems like a battle is being waged to gain every inch of storage space on the boat. In all honesty, there is a tremendous amount of storage space, and it is kind of fun to develop it. Once I get finished with the cabinetry in the engine room, the salon, the wheel house, the companion way from above , and the lazzerette, I see us having to develop a chart or map to inventory where we store all the "stuff" we are going to stash on board.

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Guest cabin update 1

Ive found that one of the problems with my plan is that I really have no plan other than making the boat look like the picture ( for the most part). It seems that every time I get going on finishing a wood project, I have to stop and attend to a metal project Ive been blowing off. One of my biggest goals has been to build the boat so I can always easily get back to critical systems for future maintenance. Since I dont want to bury some things behind wood work, I wait until Im doing the wood work before I finalize some of the metal work decisions.

The bow thruster resides under the sole of the guest cabin in the bow of the boat. Because of the extreme hull shape in the bow and me wanting to get the most space out of this area, I waited until now to install the bow thruster and finalize how the sole interacts with the bow thruster compartment. Im using a hydraulic thruster ( Key Power Inc. ) and from the start of the build, I knew I wanted the thruster in a water tight compartment so that is what I framed. I cut the hole int the thruster tube to accept the thruster saddle, and once I saw the saddle installed I felt the water tight compartment I had framed was too large for the hydraulic thruster. This are of the boat is where my ballast gets installed so I decided to re work this water tight box and give some of the box area back to its original purpose of holding ballast. I cut the box lid in half, and welded in a bulkhead to create a bow thruster box alongside the ballast box. This ballast compartment is one of seven ballast compartments ( the bow thruster occupies the eight ballast compartment). I have a gut feeling that the boat is going to trim heavy on the port side, so I decided to put the thruster on the port side and re activate the starboard side ballast compartment.

The boat designer calls for about 5200 lbs of ballast ( increased by 900 lbs due to increased fuel tank size). The cubic footage in my seven compartments is more than enough to accommodate all of my ballast.

I welded a tab on to the bow thruster lid and ballast compartment lid so I could bolt on cleats for attachment points for the sole. I also held the hull liner up off of the sole by 1.25" in this area to allow me to remove the sole in this area to access the bow thruster. This was a tricky part of the boat in regard to having a removable sole, but it did work out nicely. Ive been holding all the wood 1/2" off of the sole so I can have a place to tuck the carpet vs having to add base board later.

Ill install the thruster later this summer once Im back into the mechanical systems mode. All the cutting and welding is finished regarding this area so I re painted the compartments and lids before I screwed down the plywood sole.

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Guest cabin complete

Ive finished the work in the kids cabin, and Im moving my tools back to the engine room. All the major wood work is completed in the cabins and bathroom except for the building of the passage doors. Ive got to decide on the door hardware before I commit to building the doors. Im a little burned out on wood work, and a little time away from wood working will do me some good allowing me to finish some of the mechanical systems.

I had a visit from fellow boat builder Brian Russell last year and took some of his comments to heart. Brian is building a Dix alloy sailboat and you can check it out here:Welcome to Odyssey YAchts
While Brian and I were looking over my build he had some concern about the lack of ventilation in my hull. His concern had been gnawing at me for a while and so I started to make some choices about how I was going to keep air moving in the cabins. Since Im blogging about the kids cabin, I might as well talk about the ventilation plan for this room. The guest cabin has a 20" x 20" Lemar Ocean Hatch as its primary source of ventilation. I wanted more vents in the cabin that would work while under way and while we were off of the boat, so I added two six inch vents in each corner of the cabin. I found some 6" SCH.40 galvanized pipe at the scrap yard and purchased eight feet to fabricate the passive ventilation system. I carefully laid out the vent locations then cut away the insulation two inches larger than the pipe. I wedged a metal bucket with a little water in it tight to the ceiling @ the cut area, then used my plasma cutter to cut out the deck large enough to accept the pipe. I welded in my pipe vents and extended them up to an elevation lower than the cap of the Portuguese bridge. Because of the high bulwarks and me wanting the vent intake up where it will actually catch some air, I want to make sure the cowl is above the Portuguese bridge when Im finished . Ill fabricate some Dorade boxes to work with the 5" cowl vents Im looking for. When its all said and done, the air intake will be above the Portuguese bridge, and the cowls will look quite shippy. I primed and painted the below deck pipe work then glued some plywood on the below deck pipe ends to act as a nailer for the bead board ceiling. Because Im paranoid about sweating metal, I wrapped the pipe in closed cell foam gasket material I had in the shop, and spray foamed the rest with some of those cans you get at the hardware store. Doing metal work in a finished section of the boat is a bitch and really slows me down, but this was something that had to be done. I also added a 12 volt fan in each corner of the cabin that will be controlled by their own switch. The kids cabin also has one four inch duct for air conditioning and heat when the weather calls.

The last wood working project in this cabin was building the drawer unit under the port bunks. There was really not enough usable space to build the lower of the two drawers so I built a cubby and installed a drawer front on the cubby. I installed two self closing cabinet hinges on this cubby/drawer along with a catch to hold the drawer front fast. The drawer unit is built against the bathroom bulkhead, and that angle turned out to be 28 degrees. Building the angled drawer was a challenge that took more time than one would figure, but I think the effort was worth it as this drawer added a fair amount of easily accessible storage. The drawer will have one inch of clearance as it slides past the bathroom door casing. The bathroom door will have to be closed to use the drawer unit, but Im pretty sure it will be closed all the time since having the door closed makes the room just a fuzz larger.

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