Kitchen Lighting & New Boat Seats

I may have fibbed a bit when I said that the work we are currently doing doesn't have "big results right now", because this week we made some major strides in the kitchen!

We had two areas of focus that were not at all related: kitchen lighting and finishing the boat seats.

Let's start with the boat seats. To catch you up a bit, we bought the boat two years ago (pre-Covid) and it only had one back seat, but a spot for two. The dealer said he'd get us a seat. Well, a couple months went by, then Covid hit, and he said he couldn't find the parts for a seat and that we'd have better luck calling the manufacturer. We did that, and they said they didn't have the parts either and we'd be better off having someone fabricate it for us. Ugh. So for two years poor Padre sat on a cooler where a seat should've been because we just didn't know what to do. Scott was able to take apart the one seat we had and create a template to make a second but we still had no way to attach it. We tried to setting it in the spot for the seat, but it would slide and lean forward when the boat stopped and it almost sent me flying a couple of times.

We tried to find the seat attachment and googled every imaginable combo of "seat bracket", "seat attachment", etc. Finally, Scott reached out to a local fishing group to see if they knew anyone who could fabricate the bracket we needed and some kind soul took pity on us a sent a link to the proper bracket. It's called a "Hatch Hinge" and we would've never guessed that:

Less than $30 later we had the appropriate attachment in hand.

We took off the old cover from the seat we had, hoping to be able to save the foam, but that was a no-go. I didn't take any photos of that part, you're welcome. Ha! It was in pretty sad shape.

We were able to buy Marine Vinyl from our Joann's (and use a coupon!) and we ordered foam online (seriously, it's so expensive in stores). I sewed the seat covers by creating a flat top and a side panel that attached around the top and will fold down over the seat.

We cut the foam to the shape of the seat and used a spray adhesive to add some batting to fill it out:

Then we put it together, stapling the vinyl to the underside:

Finally, we did the same for the other side, creating the elusive second seat we've needed for TWO YEARS!

Are they perfect? No. Are they fancy? Also no. But do they serve the purpose of being comfy seats for our boat-riding guests? Absolutely yes. Plus, I got to break out my sewing machine, which I don't do often enough, so it was a big win!

We'd like to redo the remaining seats (one behind the wheel and one on the front of the center console), but those are a bit more complicated in design, so we'll see!

Alright, now on to the rest of the work we did: the kitchen lighting.

Our kitchen has gone through quite the transformation over the last few months, and everything we've done has made it both more functional and more attractive, but I don't think there's anything that's made a bigger difference than the work we've done on the ceiling.

Here's a reminder of what it used to be:

We ordered an island light in January, but when it came we realized it was tiny (or our island is huge... but possibly both). So we picked a different one but it was unfortunately back-ordered. It finally came last week!

Hanging the island light wasn't hard (for me... I just watched), we removed the temporary light we had in the kitchen and put up the new one in the same place. Scott is a pro at replacing light fixtures.

There are globes that cover the bulbs, but they shipped separately, so we didn't quite have them up yet.

Did you see the under-cabinet lighting? We're getting to that too!

Once the island light was up we moved on to the recessed lighting. We bought these cool super thin ceiling lights from Amazon, they're dimmable and you can change the light temperature (from "daylight" to "warm" and everything in between), they were super easy to install.

We had previously mapped out the ceiling for coffers, but pumped the brakes on that "nice to have" project to continue our focus on our "need to have", but we used those measurements anyway to plan out where we want the lights.

We drilled 6.25" holes in the ceiling in all of the places we marked (7 lights total) and then went about installing them. Scott gave me the hardest part to do: add these little wire protectors into the boxes, and stripping the wires, my thumbs were so sore!

Each light has its own box that just has wires and push-connectors, so Scott was able to wire them pretty quickly.

We also switched out the old switches (there were two for this circuit) with dimmers so we can control the mood lighting.

The last piece of the kitchen lighting was the under-cabinet lights. We only have two upper cabinets in the kitchen so the under-cabinet lights felt like something that maybe wouldn't make a big difference, but also with just two we could afford to splurge a bit and get some nice lights. Scott had previously wired for the lights through the back of the cabinets, leaving out the wire he needed to attach to the lights, so he had everything in place to just wire these in without too much trouble.

These lights are hooked up to a switch but they are also smart-lights so we can ask Alexa to "turn on (or off) the kitchen lights" or "dim the kitchen lights to x%". It's AMAZING! These can also be different light temperatures, so we set them to match with the overhead lights (4000k if you're wondering).

Here's the full kitchen in all her lighted glory!

And a couple more angles because I cannot help myself:

LOOK AT THE DIFFERENCE!

I am officially a firm believer that lighting can change the entire feel of a room. Now, of course in that before photo we didn't have all the new cabinets in yet, so that was different too, but it was the best angle for the before/after. Once the kitchen is done it's going to look like a million bucks!

Next week our goal is to get outside and hopefully at least start the process of painting the exterior of our house (which I'm sure the neighbors will be excited about!). We'll be back with another update in two weeks!