Most people are surprised when I tell them that the hardest part of building the Eun Mara was deciding to do it. Since starting the Alistego.com website I’ve heard from all kinds of people from all over the world and every one of them were going to build an Eun Mara. I sometimes wonder how many even got started.

Most prospective builders start out enthusiastically enough, many even buy the plans, a few set up the building frame. That, it seems, is where reality kicks in-hard!

So what things have to be present before you can even get started?

First you need the burning, passionate, desire to build “this” boat. Seems obvious, doesn’t it? You must be brutally honest with yourself about why you want to build a boat.

Do you like to sail more than build? If this is you, building your own boat is probably not for you. You will spend many perfect sailing days working on your boat and in the end you’ll probably resent it. Get yourself a good used boat or have some else build an Eun Mara for you.

Would you rather build than sail? This is a tough one. Presuming that you’ll want to keep and sail your boat when it’s done, you’ll be fine. If you think you’ll recover your costs by selling the boat, to finance your next project, you may be out of luck. Home built boats usually sell at the low end of the scale and the best I’ve heard of was a newly built Eun Mara selling for “about” what it cost to build.

Are you looking at building a boat as a cheaper alternative to buying one? In the smaller sizes of boats this can be done. You can even build an Eun Mara cheaply, but do you really want to trust your life to that boat? Any material that permanently goes into your boat should be the best you can possibly get. Yes, marine plywood is expensive, yes there is cheap epoxy out there (don’t even think about using polyester resin), but at the end of the day the extra costs will only be a few percent of what the whole boat costs. Poor materials may even prevent you from insuring our boat if it can’t pass a survey. The bolt-on stuff can be what you can afford right now, provided you can upgrade it later.  A properly built Eun Mara may well cost as much as a similar sized production boat but you’ll get a much better boat.

OK, so we have our motivation sorted out, what else? Your spouse. Without the support and blessing of your spouse (or partner, significant other, etc.) don’t even consider a project like this. Your relationship will suffer and it’s just not worth it. In my case I had my wife “on board” from the beginning and it made the building of our boat a terrific experience. Even with initial support, over the long haul things might get tense. You’ll spend countless evenings, weekends and other usual family times working on the boat so try to spend some time on a regular basis with the important people in your life. For the same reason, try to keep the project moving along so it doesn’t seem like it will never end.

Now that we’re motivated and we have our family on board, what’s next? Space. No, not the final frontier, but enough room to actually build this thing.  At first glance it might seem that somewhere about 20 feet by 10 or 15 feet might work. Well,  I’m here to tell you it won’t. The boat is about 20 by 7 feet or so, but you’ll also need space for materials storage, tools, moving around the boat itself, some workbenches, etc. I had a 22 by 30 foot tarp garage to use. There was a 10 by 10 foot corner I couldn’t use but the rest was mine. In addition to space for the boat I had a 4 by 8 foot storage table for plywood and lumber. A bench 3 feet by 8 feet or so is good for fasteners, an epoxy station, gloves, small supplies, and so on. It was really handy to have a very long (20 feet plus) two foot wide bench for scarphing planks, working on spars, etc. A bench for stationary tools like a drill press, sander, thickness planer, cutoff saw, and so on is worth having. Running long stock through a table saw takes a lot of space and this needs to be included too. Everything should be able to be left set up as much as possible, so you aren’t needing to move everything around just to spend a few minutes working on the boat. Those are quite a lot of requirements, but the biggie is that you need to have it all going for what might be several years. People have built Eun Maras with less space but it was certainly more difficult to do.

As with most things, there is just one more thing you need for your project. Money. Not too surprising is it? In today’s world most of us just do not have the money to go out and buy a boat, car, house, etc., outright, so we finance it. I’m not suggesting that you get a loan to build a boat but you will need to consider where the money will come from. At first, $20-30 thousand looks pretty scary for a do-it-yourself boat. Don’t panic! Consider that you don’t need all of it at once, and it will likely be spread out over at least a few years, so it will be more manageable.

If you’re the type that will do so, put aside some money each month to build up a balance to draw from and go from there. Treat it like a loan payment to yourself and you’re most of the way there. If you’re like me, you’ll pay as you go and hope for the best! The cash flow is pretty continuous through the building as there are always things to buy but there are a few phases where the costs are larger and it is best to be prepared for this.

The first large cash outlay is right at the beginning. No, not the plans, I’ll write about people who complain about plans costs later. While it did cost a few hundred dollars to get the building frame and moulds built, the first big cost was for plywood and epoxy.  To get started on the hull we bought 10 sheets of 9 mm ply and a Group C size of West System epoxy with all the needed additives. The next big purchase was the bronze hardware for the spars and ports. True, we could have avoided this cost but the bronze looks just so darn nice. Here’s the worst time of the build, the finish. This is when you need, sails, a trailer, an outboard, and more. If you saved a bit as you built, this is where it will pay off.

At this point you’re clear in your purpose. You have the appropriate motivation, you have your family’s support, and you have considered how you’ll pay for all this. What’s next? Like they say in the movies, “What we need here is a plan!”