Sounds nice!
Yes you have to have usable space. When you come down our companionway port side is the engine with cover. Gives me a lot of room in the galley since it’s like an island for food prep. We pulled our the propane stove on gimbals when we bought the boat. Replaced with a 2 burner ceramic cooktop and large convection oven below. Our boat is open and airy. Everyone here that lives on a sailboat is jealous of the room we have. With teenagers it’s still not enough. Lol. She’ll sleep six but boy is that tight quarters.
Good luck with your project! It sounds nice. We’ve had this boat about 15 years and I’ve never stopped working on her. Lol
We had a 43’ Columbia, fin keel 7’ draft, blue water boat with a cutter rig and set for single handed sailing. We were always asked what size boat should we get for live aboard, and we said, “find the boat you like and that you feel will be comfortable for you, and buy one ten feet longer”.
Living aboard or full time in an RV, you learn quickly what is and what isn’t important materially.
My objective, as budget allows, is to have it “autonomous” on a LiFePO4 (lithium iron phosphate) lithium ion battery bank other than water and black tank dumping. A land bound “lifeboat” if you will. Designing an enclosed rack for about 1600 watts of solar on the roof, designed to mimic the look of the old roof storage pod so it won’t look obvious or ugly up there, the curved fuselage look of the vehicle is why I find them so appealing in the first place, so I don’t want to go messing it up, up there.
It has a great retro-looking original roof rail system up there, too, sort of a hybrid between deck railing on a boat and what you would have seen on station wagons of the era, I’m coming up with ways of making that more utilitarian. For one the solar rack would clamp onto it when parked and deployed to help avoid any wind damage or need to “un-deploy” the system if a storm comes up or if it’s just a very windy day.
I’ve found that, other than the Australians, who seem to be way ahead of the US as far as this sort of thing for an RV, that the marine industry has a lot of what I’m looking for. Stands to reason I guess, a boat at sea has to be relatively autonomous. No shore power, fuel needs to be conserved for the engine.
Fascinating project for me, works both sides of my brain, left and right. Quite the puzzle to pull it all off and still have it just as pretty as it was originally intended to be. CAD, CNC and 3D printing have made a whole lot of things possible on a one-off scale that weren’t accessible to anyone but the very wealthy just a few short years ago. Still not exactly cheap, but way more affordable than paying a custom shop to hand build what you’ve got in mind.