A year ago, we brought Hobbes to a marina/boatyard and got to work. We had a budget, a list of projects, and an estimated cost for each. Today’s the day we break down our catamaran refit costs and see where we landed!

We initially estimated $20k for our refit budget, mostly because we thought for sure we’d have to replace the mainsail and maybe the genoa as well (for both sails the price could have easily exceeded $10k). As the biggest budget item, and something that we could not do ourselves, we took care of this August 2018. We were shocked and pleased to be told both sails were in good shape, so we paid for minor repairs to both sails as well as a new spinnaker sock (total: $1843). With this out of the way we somewhat informally lowered our budget to $15k, since we didn’t need new sails we shouldn’t need the full budget, right? RIGHT?!

PROJECT	ESTIMATE	ACTUAL
Sails assessed/repaired	2000	1843
Radar	1500	483
Running rigging	3000	869
Solar	1000	3202
Hard top	2000	see solar
Arch welding	500	see solar
Tablet/navigation	600	624
Trampoline	1000	1246
Sink	150	97
Bottom paint	1500	8449
Safety gear	1000	439
Winch repairs		261
Spares		1154
Saildrives		645
Dinghy		221
Fuel shut-off valves		35
General/outfitting	750	2352
	15000	21919

Categories with no estimate were “surprise” projects, or things we totally forgot to budget for. The solar/hard top/welding ended up being one big project, so I lumped all the costs together.

Bottom Paint

Estimate: $1500
Actual: $8449

This was our biggest disaster. A boatyard had quoted us $1500 (and they let us bring our own paint), and for that price there’s no way I’m sanding old bottom paint. You’ll notice right off the bat we forgot to add the cost of paint into the budget estimate – bottom paint is not cheap!

What actually happened was that they started sanding then realized no one had ever sanded off the old bottom paint on this boat before, and the boatyard manager was happy to let them put as many labor hours into sanding as they wanted. A week’s worth of work had them about halfway done…with one side…of one hull. We put the kibosh on that nonsense and hired a gritblaster. Already on the hook for a week’s worth of labor, we could no longer afford to let the boatyard do more work, so we bought a ton of painting supplies and got dirty.

WordPress is being really irritating with tables so I’m just going to post screenshots of my spreadsheet. Here’s the breakdown:

Hard Top / Solar

Estimate: $3500
Actual: $3202

I’ve got a detailed post on the solar panels that we added, but it only covers the solar. We added a hard top at the same time that we added solar power.

We had a welder come out and weld more cross-bracing (and a few other repairs). Then we created a hard top out of starboard, including a non-skid walkway. The hard top fab deserves its own post, maybe someday I’ll get to that.

We had some minor costs associated with getting our wind gen prepped, which I lumped into this category, but then we found our wind gen was toast and we weren’t able to send that out for repairs until June.

Spare Parts

Forgot to budget!
Actual: $1154

How did we miss such a basic category for budgeting?! I will say that we bought three spare RAW water pumps, and shortly after we left the boatyard we had a FRESH water pump fail. Naturally. We spent a week waiting on that to arrive.

General Outfitting

Estimate: $750
Actual: $2352

There’s not much to say here, I’m including this because the breakdown of this category is really interesting. The best things we bought, without a doubt, are the fishing gear, the vacuum sealer, and the Cobb grill. We caught a lot of fish and we froze a lot of fish and we grilled a lot of fish. The spotlights and binoculars are also worth their weight in gold.

Other Categories

Radar: we bought a used radar and saved big here. It works as an overlay on our current chartplotter so we didn’t need to buy/install another screen!

Running rigging: I don’t know why we budgeted so high for this. We replaced our furling line, the genoa sheets, 3 halyards, and the main traveler.

Navigation: we bought two Samsung tablets, one for navigation and one as backup. We also bought a waterproof case/screen protectors and hardware to install it at the helm. We have paid for charts but I believe they didn’t get included in the cost because we bought those right before we left Florida.

Sink: we replaced the tiny bowl-shaped kitchen sinks with a large, usable kitchen sink. Marriage-saver!

Dinghy: we didn’t expect any issues with the dinghy, but we didn’t use it while we were living at the dock in Charleston. It needed some work – we gave it some TLC, but then it was still overheating, so it took some swapping to diagnose that (it was an impeller! I didn’t even know dinghies had impellers otherwise that would have been my first guess!). It looks like we bought some spares for the dinghy that ended up in this category rather than the spares category.

Safety Gear: this is our First Aid Kit, which I’ve already detailed pretty extensively, and some climbing harnesses/gear/rope (used for climbing the mast and/or attaching to jacklines when we’re offshore).

Conclusion

Our refit costs ended up in the neighborhood of 12% of the cost of the boat in refit. I’ve heard typical figures are 10-30%, so we got off easy. At the time, I genuinely felt like we were spending money on things that weren’t really necessary, but looking back over the list I know these projects were worthwhile. Sure, we could live without radar, and maybe we didn’t need to buy quite so many spares, but part of being comfortable at sea is being confident in our ability to handle whatever is thrown at us. I have no regrets.

We saved where we could, by watching West Marine sales, buying used when possible (for instance, our new sink came from Ebay), and having friends in the business doesn’t hurt either! I’m sure if we paid list price for everything brand new our spending would have been much closer to average.