Adventures in Interior Design: Diving In

Have you ever assumed you could just magically do something that another person makes a whole career out of? You figure, if you just use gumption to make up for your lack of industry skills, surely it will be fine. If your answer is “obviously yes,” you are probably familiar with the whole oh-this-is-actually-very-hard-good-luck-to-me feeling that tends to wash over you in the depths of your DIY projects. That’s where I live lately. As you’ve guessed by the title of this post, the professional I’m pretending to be is an interior designer… and a design-builder at that.

When we saw Idilio for the first time, it felt really easy to imagine the slivery pinkish fabrics replaced with something fresh and inspiring, the wall to wall mildewy-blush wallpaper swapped for something lively but classic. It shall be the ultimate canvas, I thought, having recently dipped a toe into the world of surface design. It seemed like the most exciting piece of the project to me, being significantly less motivated by transducers and flushing mechanisms and such. 

You could say we dove headfirst into demo. Ripping out wallpaper felt like a cathartic purge and all soft surfaces from curtains to carpets in both cabins came under immediate scrutiny.

The full business of demolition is still unfinished, but now we find ourselves stepping into the decision-making phase. What are we doing with the walls? What will the new trim be like? How are we finishing these cabinet doors? What floors should we be putting down? Like, we need a professional aboard, stat! 

But then, I remember. We chose this. We may not be interior designers or installation professionals, but we have some skills to leverage. Ernesto is a real-life designer and really knows some things. He has the most elegant taste and can model up a boat cabin on sketch up before the morning coffee is gone. I am creative and know what I like. I am a maker, curator, and arranger, and delight in making spaces beautiful. So, despite the last couple months of hesitancy, it really is time to get. to. it.

The most overwhelming element so far has been the Blank Canvas Anxiety. As someone who has ripped the first page out of many a journal after not starting it just so, I find the endless possibilities of a fresh slate to be immobilizing if I think too hard. Starting is just so challenging when there is pressure to end with something lovely! As a crafty friend just said to me, “creating for yourself is the hardest.”

This will probably need to be the first of a series of posts about the whole process of overhauling the cabin finishes because there are just so many steps on the project list. Since this journey is largely just beginning, I’ll start with the thing we’ve spend the most time thinking about so far: The Walls.

The previously wallpapered cabin walls have had us all over the place idea-wise. We knew right away that we didn’t want to re-wallpaper all of them, for both style and laziness reasons. You see, we ripped wallpaper from some very teeny little corners and crevasses and aren’t super keen to try the process in reverse. We are, however, into the idea of some wallpaper for both the convenience of covering up the ugliest spots and for fun (the options really are endless these days). The current plan is to create accent walls out of wallpaper in both the cabins and heads. Hopefully we can coordinate patterns and colors nicely to avoid a funhouse vibe. Hopefully I can manage to even design one of the wallpapers myself. 

We decided early on that we’d love to bring more wood back into our cabins than came with the boat’s original 1980’s aesthetic. We toyed with the idea of panels or veneers in order to accomplish that, but didn’t find just the right thing despite much browsing. Wood is expensive besides and it seemed a little wasteful to bring in raw materials if we could find a more …salvaged option. Weight is also important on a boat, the lighter it is, the more efficient to run. Eventually, we test sanded the wallpaper glue off a couple spots and were surprised by the wood we uncovered… it wasn’t just regular ole plywood. After Ernesto got a couple hours of sanding in, we realized we could actually get away with rescuing some of the wood that is already onboard, rather than covering it up with more.

Some walls are in better shape than others, and a few have screw plugs and discoloration that will require covering up. But between finishing some of the nicest wood walls, wallpapering some accents, and painting some of the recessed parts, we feel like a plan has finally started to take shape. 

Even though we plan to cover and paint some of the walls, the sanding project is pretty beastly because ALL of them need to be sanded free of the copious amounts of paste left behind by the old paper. Lucky for us, our best friend Eric came to the boat with us in February and he spent two long and dusty days sanding the front cabin walls. In the numerous hours spent, he made huge progress and the front cabin is coming along great. 

By the end of the weekend, we put a little teak oil on one of the walls to test the feel of the wood and are pleased by the vibe. 

While we have tons of sanding left to go in the aft cabin, soon enough, it will be time to start making some difficult decisions on what wallpapers and colors to use! In our house, our styles have tended to overlap in the realm of midcentury modern, geometric patterns, and bold colors balanced with gray. You can see some of those themes emerging in this lil sneak peak of one wallpaper collection we’ve been building on Spoonflower. We talked about using a more subtle pattern in the cabins with a bolder, but still coordinating print in their corresponding heads. And yet this is the “stand in” pattern we popped in the first draft of the model Ernesto made for us to play with colors and patterns before making final choices. Not so subtle… we shall see where we land!

While it has felt impossible at times to know where to start, we’ve sort of naturally found ourselves starting with the walls. Once we can decide what to do with them, the biggest component of all, the canvas shall be blank no longer! Basically, if we can just manage to make some big decisions around accent wallpaper and paint colors, the rest will just fall effortlessly into place! …Right? Stay tuned!