Interior Finish

The interior finish as delivered from the factory is oil. They use Daly’s SeaFin Teak oil which is a high quality interior finish. The selection of teak and teak veneers are well matched for color and the fit is extremely good, but the coating of oil provided by Island Packet was light and the surfaces were not well sanded. Rebecca J. Whitman’s book Brightwork The Art of Finishing Wood is excellent and one chapter is devoted to finishing the interior with oil. She shares professional advice on varnishing and oiling techniques.

When it has come to interior finishing in our home Linda almost always is the painter, while I tackle the wallpapering. It seemed a natural fit for her to undertake the project to finish the interior following the steps recommended in the book Brightwork The Art of Finishing Wood. This required several applications of Daly’s with wet sanding between applications with 400 grit and eventually 600 grit sandpaper. This resulted in a professional finish that highlights the beauty of the teak and provides a very smooth surface. On-going maintenance is very easy, just requiring one new application each year which is applied with bronze wool.

This was the most labor intensive project we have undertaken on Ariel. In addition to many many weekends, Linda stayed at the boat several weeks, while I was away on business trips. We removed all doors and drawer fronts and took them home to our basement to be finished over the winter. Many of the doors are louvered so the work was challenging. It is hard for even us to believe but we, almost all Linda, invested 600 hours to this single project. It was a good thing not to know the magnitude of the project before we started, as it would have been extremely difficult to get motivated. Pictured is part of our basement converted to a teak finishing facility.