FIXING A HOLE: HEADLINERS AND HANDRAILS

Builders of production boats have tended to put decorative headliners into their design so they could make them all nice and pretty for some buyers. The sleek clean interior helps sell boats along with other useless things like three burner stoves and ovens. While headliners make things all nice and "purty" they can also cover up deck fittings that are leaking and also make maintenance of deck mounted items harder. As I found out several years ago when I decided to remove and remount the handrails on BIANKA. The boat builder drilled small little holes in the liner to access the screws that held the handrails to the deck:

They then covered the holes with small plastic caps. It looked neat but, it was a pain when I started on the project to remove the hand rails so I decided to...
make things much easier for myself by cutting out the headliner under the deck with a Dremel Tool to make access to the screws much easier:

While this made the job of removing and remounting the handrails much easier. It did leave ugly rectangles where I cut through the headliner.

This spring I decide to spruce things up and finally cover these spots. I went to Home Depot and found a piece of thin three inch molding that was perfect for covering up the holes. I trimmed it to size and mounted it to see how it fit:

 I then removed it and used and put on three coats of  Interlux Cetol Marine Natural Teak Wood Finish. Once again I found the Painters Points very useful  when applying the Cetol: 

After I finished applying the three coats of Cetol I remounted the molding over the holes:

I'm very happy with the results since it covers up the ugly cuts and will also allow easy access in the future to the handrail screws. I will will now do the same for the starboard side of the cabin.