THE PENULTIMATE PROJECT

 When we bought the boat it had horrible, dirty, oil stained carpet throughout. It is OK in the bedrooms but the main salon was a mess. So----Diane made it her mission to replace the flooring. At first we shopped replacement carpet but received ridiculously high bids for the cost of the carpet. This led us to reconsider and ultimately decided to replace the carpet with a vinyl flooring product that looks like the popular teak and holly wood product. We found the vinyl product by cruising through the Mainship on-line forums and then found it at Defender.com, a large marine product store located in California. This is, I believe, the same flooring we had in Opus V, our prior Mainship 400 and we really liked it. When we were shopping for the boat this time we knew we wanted the vinyl flooring but with the dirth of Mainship 400's on the market we had to settle for one with a dirty salon carpet.

On our way through this flooring journey we came across a young flooring installer by the name of Alex Parera. We met with him a few times to assess the job and finally he agreed to do our installation even though he had never installed this particular product before. Alex emigrated to the US from Cuba in 2014 during the more lenient Clinton policies with regard to Cuba. Later he succeeded in getting his parents here as well. Having had no carpet laying experience before, he learned the trade after he came to the US. He started his own business after a while---Parera Carpet---and has been quite successful staying much busier than he wants to be. He is truly a terrific young man and I've never seen a tradesman work as hard or as meticulously as he did, completing the job beautifully in a day and a half. He was assisted by another Cuban emigree and also by his father. They had worked a couple of hours on 2 different days and finished the job on a Saturday, working non-stop from 8AM to 5PM (without a lunch break). They had a particularly difficult time removing the old glue-down carpet and padding and then the hundreds of staples that had been used in the original installation. Then they meticulously laid the new flooring and made the cutouts for the 4 different removeable panels that lead below decks into the engine room and the equipment room. Here's what it looked like during installation:

                                                                 And here's the finished product:

                                                        

                                                                            

                                       

                             Diane is a happy camper. And you know what they say:  Happy wife--Happy life.

I call it the penultimate project because we have one more major one to do. When we get to our next marina, in the Ft. Myers area we will contact  a guy that built a new fly-bridge enclosure for Opus V and have him build us a full enclosure for Endeavor. Right now it only has an unenclosed bimini cover. So---Kaching, kaching--(sp?) and we'll finally be finished with all the major projects that we felt we needed to bring this boat up to Opus V standards. It really is a labor of love because we truly love this life-style and want it to be as pleasurable and comfortable as possible.