Kitchen demolition
As every mayhem it started innocently: having just a few hours in the evening I went to the boatyard with a plan to simply cut mahogany plank to serve as kitchen door. I wanted to hang it on piano hinge which right now sits on cockpit locker. As I already bought new, massive hinges for cockpit locker I felt it is time to remove the old piano hinge and use it in the kitchen.
And so the troubles begin. This hinge was screwed with a mixture of different screws. Most of them brass (disintegrated upon removal), some bronze (good as new) and to my despair someone also used steel screws!
They corroded to the extend that, even after recreating the slot, I could not unscrew them. Welded into wood. Since the hinge turned out too ugly to be re-used in the kitchen anyway I sacrificed it and used it as a lever for removing damned steel screws. At least I managed to save the wood around but was sweating after half hour of this ugly job.
So back to the kitchen. I looked onto now emptied cavity where Origo spirit kitchenette sits and didn’t like these old, white resin plates sitting there. They must have been added at some point in the 80’ because originally they were not there. They sported many old holes and burns and in some places they delaminated from the underlying surface.
Heck, I thought, I’m not gonna put fresh, expensive mahogany to something like that. Let’s do it properly for once. And so I started removing these plates by prying with screwdrivers and lifting as much as possible before the resin plate was breaking.
Luckily they were glued with rubber-like glue so it went rather easily to remove them but the smell… In places where they were delaminated there was humidity causing the resin plate to smell old cupboard.
No way back - I decided to remove the whole thing and make it all again. At the end of the day I was left with a black hole covered with sticky rubber-glue.
So much for a quick job for the evening!
I need to figure now what to use as a new lining, to have it “homy” and at the same time easy to clean and keep tight. Mahogany inlay? Cork? Tiles? Stainless steel plates or copper?