With the last post about Eben’s Mandatory Tools, you may be wondering where the heck we keep all of them! Although I would love to have a garage just for all of his stuff, (we could tow it behind the boat!), that’s just not the case. 

   The term “live aboard” boat is exactly what it sounds like, people who live aboard on their boat, be it cruising around or sitting in one spot. Their boat is their home. We are an offshoot of this. As you have seen from prior posts and pics, we are live aboards, but on a workaboard boat. We have the same amount of stowing room as most boats our size, but rather than filling it with just our life essentials, we also have to make room for every tool known to man, or at least known to my man. 

   Eben has a huge assortment of tools for all those expected, and unexpected jobs. We even get calls from other boaters wondering if we have a certain tool or part, and you know it, Eben does. We have managed to find spots for all of these “extras”, carefully calculating their size and importance, and then having Eben play tetris with our belongings. I let him do that job since my spacial concept skills are not top notch. Instead you will often find me shoving and pushing stuff trying to get it to fit. (He hates that!)


   Everything is stowed in accordance to how often it gets used. It has been quite the puzzle and Eben has reorganized it all several times to get it set up just the way he wants and is most practical. And once a project is completed, things need to be moved around again for the next priority project. 

   Luckily we live on a Morgan 41, she was built with large amounts of storage space, and to top it off the past owner changed a few of the extra bunks into more storage space. Because of this we can make due with having all these things on the boat, on top of the space needed for other things, like food, kids toys, our other life essentials. 

   We have also become a little creative with some storage, such as the vberth bed being a “princess and the pea” bed having three layers of foam on it (extra outdoor cushion foam, extra memory foam, and then the actual bed mattress foam). It will only continue to get better as we accomplish each project, slowly reducing our stock of materials and parts, and minimizing the need for certain tools that can then get stowed to “back of the shelf” spots.

   Now we need only keep working on our memory to figure out where it is again that we stowed that missing jar of Nutella.  

This is an older pic (you can tell by how little the girls were) but it had a good view of our storage spaces.

Now pics inside all those cabinets!

Top shelf, sewing stuff. 2nd shelf, paints and such. 3rd shelf snorkels and dive gear.

Everything from fiberglass, to pulleys, to hand sewing stuff. But all in their own containers.

Big, awkwardly shaped tools, like extension cords, rivet guns.

Dremel, tapes and glues, and spray cans that need to be standing up.

ClearCan storage containers. LOVE THESE!

This is 1/4 of the shed!

First cubby has our sailrite and more fiberglass stuff. 2nd cubby has paint brushes, rollers, trays, etc. Under the table, new bilge pumps that haven’t found a home yet!

A strong and flexible tool bag, and lots of well labels containers. As you can see plastic coffee containers work great. Those are full with different sized ropes, sockets, brushes and odds and ends.

Storage containers for screws and electrical bits.

And then everything else that is just too big to store goes to the back of the engine room.