The Refit Grind: How a 22kg Floor Fits Into a 600kg Weight Loss

Another floor, another number on the scale worth sharing — and this one’s a genuinely satisfying result after a stretch of the refit that hasn’t been easy.

Weighing the Old Floor

Half of the original floor at the back of the boat — running from the doorway bulkhead to roughly where the toolboxes sit — came in at 15.23kg on its own. Extrapolated across the full section, that puts the complete original timber floor somewhere around 30kg. It’s old growth rainforest plywood by the look of it, topped with a non-skid vinyl layer that adds its own weight, with a considerable amount of internal plywood bracing built in around the hatch cutout just to keep it stiff enough to walk on.

Weighing the Replacement

The new floor — not half of it, the entire finished piece — came in at 7.84kg. That’s roughly a 75% weight reduction, and it’s not a comparison between similar things: one heavy half-floor at 15kg-plus versus one complete floor at under 8kg for the whole span.

Lighter, and Genuinely Stronger

The weight saving isn’t the only improvement. The original floor was never actually structural — it sat on cleats, held down with a handful of screws, doing essentially nothing to tie the surrounding structure together. The new floor is laminated directly into place, which makes it a genuine structural component rather than a piece of furniture resting on top of the boat. Lighter and stronger isn’t a contradiction here — it’s exactly the point of building this way.

Getting Better at Hatches, One Build at a Time

The hatches going into these floors are improving with each one built, and it’s worth being honest about the learning curve rather than pretending every hatch came out identical from the start. The first hatch built this way used full 1,200g skins on both the top and bottom face, coming in at just over a kilogram — solid, but heavier than it needed to be. The next one kept the 1,200g top skin but dropped the bottom to a lighter combination — roughly 400g and 300g cloth layered together, around 700g total — while also refining where the overlap sits on the panel edge, moving it somewhere far less visible than the first attempt. Small, deliberate adjustments, each one making the next hatch a little better than the last.

A Genuine Morale Boost

It’s fair to say this stretch of the refit has had its harder patches — plenty of refits do — and a result like this one is exactly the kind of tangible win worth pausing on. Numbers like 30kg down to 8kg are the proof that all the incremental, unglamorous work adds up to something real.

With this floor infused and in, the next job underneath is painting it out ready to run cables through, with face plates and fittings to follow once that’s done.

In This Series

The Refit Grind: How a 22kg Floor Fits Into a 600kg Weight Loss is one part of Paikea’s floor replacement. Follow the rest of the build here:

Follow the rest of Paikea’s interior transformation on the Paikea’s Refit page.