Floor Removal = Rusted Frame

In order to remove our rotten floor, we had to remove all of the lower aluminum interior panels to gain access to the channels running along the floor that the plywood sub-floor is bolted into. We located three drills and Jacob, our friend Michael, and myself all drilled out rivets until our hands were sore. After I carefully marked all the panels and wrote notes how they go back together, we started removing them.

Jacob and Michael remove the first panel - yipee!

The panel falls away, revealing surprisingly in-tact insulation

Holiding a chunk of our trailer :)

Some panels still had their insulation...others did not.

Next it was on to floor removal. For my birthday, we tried hard to get our old floor out of the airstream and to the dump. We got half way and then we were thwarted by hidden bolts in the floor that must be cut off. Brace yourself, Blue Moon is not a pretty sight right now...

Upon closer inspection, our steel frame chassis is rusted through in places! Yikes! We are going to need some serious reinforcement, and then some rust prevention paint. The aluminum belly pan that lines the underside of the trailer was filled with muck - mud filled-uck, literally. So it is no wonder that rust and deterioration were happening. We took 250 lbs of rotted floor/insulation and this "muck" to the dump for my birthday. You can actually see daylight through the end of the trailer there below the insulation, so apparently there was a leak...

Once we tackle the daunting task of reinforcing our frame and wheel wells, we'll get on with re-insulating the floor with foam board insulation and the putting-back-together of our trailer will begin! Needless to say we are both really looking forward to that part! It has been a hard few months of demolition and destruction. It will be nice when we get to start making it beautiful inside...and when we won't have to wear respirators in there anymore.

In the meantime, the drear and wet of the pacific northwest winter has set in...our trailer has its own micro climate in places :)

It was so windy the other day that while working in the airstream, a huge gust blew into the open door and blew out the brand new window that J had just installed. We were delighted to find it wedged into the grass nearby and unbroken, but a step back all the same.

We found a home for our one-of-a-kind airstream tub. It will be getting shipped to Ohio after the new year to someone else who is restoring a vintage land yacht and has been searching for our exact tub! We connected via the airstream classifieds. Yay!