Interior 

Seating and Upholstery 

Just as you spend a lot of time sitting around in your cockpit, you will also spend a lot of time sitting around inside your boat. You need comfortable seating whether it is lounging around watching TV, sleeping, eating, working on the computer or reading. 

Size and Shape - If you are designing or refitting the interior, try to make the seats as wide as possible so that you don’t feel like you are perching on the edge of a narrow bench, and so that you can sleep on them. Curved seating looks nice, but if you are planning to sleep on it, this won’t work very well. We have a squared off U-shaped settee, and one of the arms of the ‘U’ is long enough so we can sleep athwartships – this is nice for those rolly downwind passages or anchorages. Settees with raised bolsters at the forward edges like bucket seats are not very nice to sleep on. 

Foam - Use the best quality foam you can get – it will feel nicer, last much longer and won’t get all beat down. We made our cushions in smaller sections rather than one big long settee – this way it is easier to pick up a cushion and get to the storage lockers underneath. 

Closures - To close the cushion covers, I used Velcro instead of zippers so I wouldn’t have the salt-air corrosion problems. It works great. Inside the bottom of the cushions I store my folded paper charts, and made an inventory of them so I can find which cushion they are in. I made a little label for the position of each cushion - they are slightly different in size and shape, and if you take the covers off to wash the upholstery, it makes it easier to put them back on the proper cushion.

Fabric - As far as fabric choice – well, you can pick any fabric that works on the interior of a house. It will probably get heavier use, though, so pick a tough one. We had a wild tropical print at first, made of Sunbrella acrylic and we loved it. It stood up great but eventually wore out. Our second set of upholstery is a darker velvety-type which we think is a bit too dark and makes the interior seem smaller. Many boats have leather or vinyl upholstery which is easy to clean, but a good machine-washable fabric may be more comfortable to sit on. I made ‘crew covers’ to cover the seats we sit on the most, to save the upholstery. Instead of elastic (which goes all gummy in the salt-air pretty quickly), to keep the crew covers on the cushions, I used leech line and 'barrel lock' closures. Remember to keep the salt water out of the boat – as soon as you start sitting on your upholstery in salty bathing suits or sleeping with salt residue on you, your settees and bunks will get damp and moldy and will never dry out. The salt, ground into the fabric, will hold in the moisture and actually suck it out of the air. Have your shower late in the day, before bed and wash off your feet or yourself if you are salty, before sitting on your upholstery. 

Lee Cloths - We have never bothered with lee cloths for passages. We just roll down to the low side and sleep there. I just make up the cushions with standard bedsheets and that’s it. 

Sheets and Towels - Speaking of bedsheets, we wind that the cheap cotton-poly bedsheets just don’t last, getting all those horrible little balls on them, and they are hot and sweaty to sleep on. We now use only good quality high thread count 100% cotton sheets. These are not always easy to find but when you find a source, stock up. Cotton rots in the sun, so if you are hanging your sheets out to dry, try to get them down as soon as they are dry to minimize the sun on them. Also, white and light sheets are nice, but you might find that they get dirty brown streaks on them – usually on HIS side worse than hers! This is that tropical tan wearing off on your sheets. Gross, eh? But it’s true. Darker colour sheets make this less obvious.

I also made mattress covers out of the off-the-shelf quilted mattress covers. I altered them, though, to fit the shape of the bunk. Later, I cut away the extra quilted material all around the mattress cover and replaced it with cotton sheeting. This left, in the quilted material, only the part where your body actually sleeps. This means there is less quilted fabric, therefore using less water to wash and rinse this big piece of fabric.

As far as towels go, if you think you are going to be bucket-washing, get the thinnest towels you can find. They take less water to wash and rinse, and dry faster. 

Bunks – We have a standard foam mattress in the aft cabin, but recently had a proper sprung mattress custom made for the V-Berth. It was expensive. But, wow, what a difference. No more sore backs. It is, however, much harder to raise the heavy mattress halves up to get at the storage underneath.