Thoughts on a Narrowboat Part 6–Galley

Jan thought she could manage with a six foot long galley and as most narrowboats are approximately six foot wide the area to work within is a square.  All the boats we had previously hired had a ‘C’ shaped galley with a corridor down one side.  My concern with this type of layout is it’s an inefficient use of available space.  If you imagine the galley floor area is comprised of nine 2’x2’ squares then a ‘C’ style galley utilizes five of the nine squares.  The brown boxes in the drawing below represents bench space and the blue floor space.

By opting for a ‘through’ galley layout an additional 2ft of bench space is obtained.

The question was “would two people be able to pass each other in the corridor.  We’re both “bulky” but that didn’t provide to be an issue.  Another advantage of the “through” layout was it allowed us to fit kickboard drawers at the base of all six cabinets.

There was a four burner gas hob on one side and a single stainless steel sink on the other. The boatyard manager wanted us to fit the sink and hob in the middle of each bench.  Jan thought this would significantly reduce her bench working area and insisted they be located at one end of the bench.  She was right!

We had opted for granite worktops.  It was suggested we have the granite top routered with drainage grooves on the sink side.  The idea being any water from washed dishes would be directed back into the sink rather than spilling over the corridor edge of the granite top.  However if we had cut grooves in the granite that would have reduced the amount of available flat bench top.  Instead we opted to have the entire granite surface on the sink side routered down by 5mm to create a 5mm lip around the outer edge of the bench.  This eliminated the possibility of water running over the edge whilst still providing a flat surface.

Jan had already identified many boats have a ceramic tile splashback.  She didn’t want this as she finds the grout between the tiles hard to clean.  We fitted glass splashbacks instead.

What would Jan do differently!

She wouldn’t have granite tops.  The granite was actually likely to chip if something hard was dropped on it.

The fridge was at floor level and she would have preferred it higher.  Actually we could have raised it higher and installed a deep drawer underneath. 

Installing a microwave was a waste of space and money.  you could count the number of times we used it on one hand (probably because we were rarely on shore power).