Cabin & Storage Compartments | Painting The Interior

As explained in the previous post, resolving problems with bilge paint led me to realise that the interior of the hull needed a better finish to be ready for paint than I had previously achieved.

I sanded the hull and the bulkheads to a very smooth and evenly matt surface, going through the grits to P220. It didn't take that long using the excellent Festool Rotex 90 sander in random orbital mode.

I purchased plenty of a good quality, oil based interior paint and undercoat. I selected brilliant white with a satin sheen finish, which is my preference for large surface areas. It is easier on the eye than a gloss finish.

As with the bilge paint I used a good quality felt sleeve on a 4" roller, and painted the storage compartment and the cabin area.

Here is the cabin after one coat of undercoat.

You can see that it is quite patchy, so a second coat was applied.

This covered the surface pretty well.

I then applied three coats of the topcoat to achieve a nice, smooth, even, fully covered  surface.

This is the final coat in the cabin.

And this is the finished storage compartment.

It is looking pretty nice!

There is one issue, however. You will see in the cabin that we stop painting the hull half way up the sides.

This is done on purpose because the topside panel will be joined to the side panel sometime soon, and will require a stitch'n'glue join covered with glassfibre tape reinforcement and a fillet.

So we can't paint it yet. The rest of the sides will be painted when the boat is upside down and I can get inside to paint the cabin and storage compartment roof.

That's all very well but as any painter knows, the golden rule of painting is 'always keep a wet edge'. In other words, always paint your piece or section in one go so you don't leave a dried and hardened edge to the paint which would be unsightly and difficult to remove.

Here we have deliberately abandoned our wet edge.

I will have to see what I can do to feather it out and conceal it when I finish painting the interior.

I just hope that I don't end up with an ugly VPL (Visible Paint Line).