Blow by blow account for varnishing - Varnishing questions - 2011

The blow by blow account for varnishing the stateroom door is not only for me but for anyone who is about to varnish. It is a bit of a decision on what kind of varnish to use?

March 2011  - At Marina Cortez Harbor Island, San Diego, CA

Water based or oil based?

What sandpaper and how many different grades do you use?

Use paint remover?

What brand to use?

How to prep the wood?

How many coats to apply?

Do you varnish the inside of the drawers cabinets? If so how many coats?

What schema do you use? All satin all gloss or a combination?

These are a few of the questions to answer. We, having had no real varnishing experience hired a consultant to come by and give us advice. We took his advice and it has served us well so far. The hardest part is the time it takes to varnish. He did mention that he varnished a boat (was hired to) and it was about our size and it took him two years.

So it is taking us quite a long time to make any progress. Time is ticking away for moving aboard etc and we think it may be wise to reduce the amount of coats to five in some places where it would be easy to return and add more later. As of now we are still applying ten coats.

 You can see the dilemma when you are varnishing.

Five coats looks good.

Six looks better

Seven is starting to look really good.

And so on and ten looks great, deep and glassy.

Ok I do not know what more would look like but I would think fifteen would be fabulous, like you had a full time crew on a super yacht.

So each time I think this will be the last coat it looks nicer and I do not want to stop. We are going to be living on this boat for ever and we will be looking at this varnish every day so how do you say good enough? Well we are at some point going to have to say that because we will never get the boat cleaned up and have a nice living space if we do ten coats on every piece. The teak has been oiled at times but not for many years. There are places where the sun has bleached it out. It is a bit dirty looking and needs a good cleaning up😀  So there is the rub sot of speak. Pick your spots and do tem where we will likely never get another choices or it would be difficult. The other places will start getting five.