Significant Upgrade!

Hi there.  Sorry for the delayed post…. I figured I’d hold off on posting yet another entry about the unbelievably cold temps, lots of snow and/or us hating winter until I had something new to talk about.  I’m generally a glass-is-half-full, lookin’ on the bright side kinda girl, and prefer to keep things a bit more upbeat.  This was a hard winter, not gonna lie, but it’s nearly over!  It’s March already and we’re currently only 14 days until the official start of spring!  That’s all I need to keep on going.  Every morning as I do the long walk down the dock at 6:30 in the morning, I chant “in like a lion out like a lamb” and know that the warm days of spring are right around the corner.

While we’ve been hunkering down and riding out the last few weeks of winter, we’ve been making some progress on interior renovations.  As in, completely new salon cushions and curtains!

It’s no lie that we were hating on the original teal cushions and curtains that the boat came with. Not only did the color not jive with our tastes, but they were microsuede.  Ick.  Not to mention that the cushions were almost completely flat and the lining on the backs were all tearing.  We knew when we bought the boat that we wanted to redo the upholstery and now seemed like the perfect time to do so.  I saw a pillow in Target a while ago with a grey/cream/orange/navy color scheme and knew that is what I’d eventually like to do in the boat.  Sort of a Modern Nautical look.

Whatever you want to call it, let’s all agree that it is a Significant Upgrade.

Before:

Intermediate:

Current:

It really brightens it up a bit, right?  We are in LOVE.

Before you go and give us high fives all around for doing such an amazing job, I’ll confess that the seat cushions were done by a professional.  The amount of sewing and tufting was waaaay beyond our skill set.  Plus we threw out the original cushions so we didn’t even have a template to use.  They were ridiculously expensive, but they turned out great, and are definitely a game-changer for the look and feel of the boat.  So in our eyes, they were worth every penny.

The curtains, however, were all Matt.  He really is such a handy fellow.  I sure am a lucky girl.  Who would have thought that one good experience in a HomeEc class in the 7th grade would result in him taking on this curtain project twenty years later? Thank you, Anne Arundel County Public Schools.

Because our windows are all funky angles – more like trapezoids – he had to think about the best way to not only measure the windows, but cut the fabric so that the stripes would be straight up and down.  After stewing it over for a week, he came up with a great idea to use lines with fishing weights to see where he needed to take the measurements for the curtains.  Worked like a charm.  Like I said… I’m a lucky girl!!

Meanwhile, while we were busy measuring…re-measuring… cutting and sewing, the dogs assumed their typical supervisory post.  I had just bought them new toys after Corona shredded the last one all over the salon floor.  She sure is territorial about her toys!  I bought one for each and Corona immediately proceeded to slobber over them both, effectively marking them hers. Every time I grabbed the one she was playing with to give it to Yingling, she would get all frantic and grab it back as if to say “But, Mom, that one’s my favorite!”.

Yingling, on the other hand has gotten quite used to this charade, and frankly didn’t give a damn.