Our Grandchildren moved aboard the boat with us about two months ago. They are 9 and 2, both girls. We are lucky with the size boat we have that the 9-year-old was able to use the double berth forward of the salon. This way she has privacy and space to call and make her own. The 2-year-old, on the other hand, needs a LOT more supervision. We didn’t want to have her sleep in our bed but did want her close by at night to keep an eye on her and hear her.
The Formosa 51 has a large athwartship bunk that is about a queen size. It also has a small seating area to port and starboard and forward of the bunk.
On the starboard side forward of that is a built in sort of dresser/table top. We had the TV there and used it to store some items. When the kiddo’s (affectionally known as ‘Squids’ or ‘Swabs’ came aboard, we used one of the seating areas as a bed for the 2-year-old. This worked, but it seemed that in the first three weeks she had already grown to the point where her feet her hanging off.
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| This was the old seating area converted into a bed |
It was time to come up with a better solution, so we were going to convert the table/dresser into her bed. It would be twice as long and wide. It would require that we relocate the TV to the Port side of the boat, but that also meant rerunning the satellite TV connections, the Ethernet connections, the phone cables as well as adding outlets to that side of the boat where we were moving the TV too.
After surveying the wiring and what not, I decided the best thing to do would be to disconnect the electrical outlet in the head and run the wires to the new outlet, then from there extend to the outlet in the head.
I had to run to the store to get supplies, a nonmetallic electrical box, and the outlets, wire, some flexible conduit to run the wires in as well as some decorative caps to cover the hole in the top of the cabinet where the wires run through.
After running the new electrical wires, and the communication lines, it was time to mount the TV bracket. We went for one of the full articulating arms so that we could set the TV facing the centerline of the boat, or swing it along the forward bulkhead of the stateroom to face back toward the stern. The hardest part of this job seemed to be measuring and getting the right mount and then mounting it in the right place on the bulkhead. At the time, we looked at the mounts in BestBuy and Walmart, and they were about $100-$125 at those stores for the full motion mount. I measured what I needed and online and ordered one from Amazon for about $30. It worked great and was a little bit longer which allowed us to extend the motion of the TV as well.
After moving everything, we cut a cushion to be the right size to fit over the dresser top, and the fiddle rails on it help to hold the mattress cushion in place, so it doesn’t slide off. We put the baby on it for a test run, and she certainly seems to like it a lot.
The only challenge has been that her head is close to the port on the starboard hull and she has bumped her head on one of the wing nuts that secure it closed, and I am sure that didn’t feel so well for her.
In this photo, you see her particular look of approval for the new bed, and she doesn’t fall off of this one like she did the other one since there wasn’t a lot of room if she moved around a lot while sleeping.
Below is a youtube video showing a how we went about this project. If you are receiving this blog via email or on a device that won’t play the embedded video, click this link for the video directly on Youtube. The link is https://youtu.be/UQ4HbioMois