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!

Ta Da! Paint-be-gone, and...A Very Rotten Floor

The paint stripping is done, yay! Our friend Michael came over and helped us bust it out. We now have a shiny silver interior. With that behind us, I think it is safe to say that it was a lot more work than we had hoped, and not all of the areas turned out as shiny and beautiful as others. Some sections of aluminum we revealed are permanently textured from when they were installed at the factory, and unless we re-textured them with a grinder or something, will always look that way. In any case, the walls will always have our stamp of sweat and toil, so we will just love them for what they are!

Last night we started peeling up the carpet and investigating our rotten floor that needs replacing. We knew from the beginning that the floor was completely shot, so we were not totally surprised when we punched through at times while stripping paint.

The floor basically disintegrates in your hand and crumbles into a wet pile - yuck! The worst water-damaged area is of course where the old tub/shower, bathroom sink and toilet were located. It is hard to tell what is going on in the photo below, but we just peeled back the fiberglass box cover that was situated over the wheel well. We weren't sure exactly what we were going to find, but underneath it is the steel wheel well covered in what's left of a bunch of insulation. Let's just say that if I were a mouse, I'd want to live in there too.... ew. We were both a bit dismayed to discover the terribly poor condition of both the steel wheel wells. They are very wet in places and nearly rusted through. Working on an airstream is one way to officially learn that steel rusts, and aluminum does not! It's also a great way to see what materials "survive" mother nature after 50 years, especially in the damp pacific northwest.

This is a good time to point out that it will unfortunately be necessary to take off all of the lower aluminum panels inside in order to access and replace the floor. This involves drilling out about a hundred+ rivets... and then putting in a hundred+ rivets to put it all back together again. Amazingly, the side lower panels are one solid piece of 23 feet long aluminum!

Finding a new use for the linoleum tiles: "salad-tongs" for picking up mouse-poop laden 50-year-old insulation. Very happy to be wearing a respirator right now.

Goodbye nasty carpet

For some good news: you wouldn't think our airstream is still keeping secrets from us after all this time, but we have been unable to locate the actual plug to get hooked up to electrical! So we have had no idea if the wiring was still good inside or if the lights even worked. Jacob was pretty excited to find it the other day, buy the yellow adapter and plug it in...and find that all the lights came on!! And the airstream gods and goddesses shined down upon us and there was light :)

The Great Purge, & Other Things

Moving into roughly 180 square feet requires purging one's life quite a bit. Good Purging takes time, so we decided to start now. If you allow yourself enough time to purge, you can make money off of things you no longer want - in the last month we've sold many random pieces of furniture we had acquired (all second-hand), and taken a lot of clothes to consignment and thrift stores. It feels good. J and I have lived in 8 rental houses together over the past 9 years (don't worry, we're totally stable, reliable people!). Over that time we have acquired and purged 8 couches, 4 dining room tables/chairs, 2 sets of dishes, and countless other "things." The house we rent now is furnished, so there isn't a huge need for us to own our own stuff. And that's all it is - stuff. We are down to pretty much our mattress, in terms of furniture, and that will go in the airstream when we are ready to move in. Moving into the airstream is our affordable version of putting down roots. We'll own the roof over our heads for the first time in our lives, and we'll have built and customized everything inside. We don't want to rent a storage unit or have other things stored somewhere that we don't use, so we are downsizing our life everyday to just the things that we really use, or that mean the most to us. If it hasn't been used or worn in a year, it definitely has to go!

 Let the purging continue...

We are nearing the end of the paint-stripping saga (finally)! And it is looking great... so we'll save the photos for the surprise ending :) Lots of folks have asked us why we are bothering to strip the paint since it is such a pain. It is hard to explain unless you have been inside Blue. When we walked inside with just the white paint, it felt like any old RV. We wanted to feel like we were in an airstream and to expose the shiny aluminum on the inside that makes it so iconic on the outside! We hope that light and colors will reflect in fun ways in the metal throughout the interior. 

We have been trying to seal up the airstream so that it will be weather-tight before we put in our new floor and everything else. J replaced this crapper job (above) that someone did. He cut out another piece of aluminum from the old fridge and riveted it in place! It looks so much nicer :) 

While each coat of citristrip is setting up (6-8 hours), we like to dream and plan! We've gone through a lot of floorplan ideas for Blue in the last few months, tape measure in hand. Currently we are designing the kitchen and bar area. Our "big" house is decorated for the holiday and feels warm and cozy inside. Hope you and yours are enjoying the season :)

Tiny House Inspiration

Well, we have bought all the citristrip paint stripper from our hardware stores and now they have to re-order it! It won't be in 'till Monday so not much work going on in Blue this weekend. It's a soaker up here on the island, so it's a good weekend for couching and tea-drinking. Blue is coming along though. We have a large chunk done:

 The white endcap is fiberglass, so will remain painted...haven't decided on the color

J is a fan of trying to remove paint in all in one piece - this one was his biggest yet! It is a good thing we are not any shorter, or scraping the ceilings would really stink.

Our friend Michael moved back to the island for the winter (yay!) and we went and visited him at his new place. He is living on kind of a compound - very cool! Peggy, whose daughter is the violinist in the Colorado-based band, Elephant Revival, also lives on the compound, and last week, her tiny Tumbleweed house arrived. We have of course looked at lots of Tumbleweed Houses online but have never been in one! So we all meandered over to her place and Peggy graciously showed us her new tiny home on wheels. It gave us hope that our messy, sort of toxic, trashy-trailer will someday be homey inside :)

A Tiny Tumbleweed House, about 7.5' x 14' with a loft!

Cozy, cozy, cozy

Climb the ladder to the loft. Peggy wants to build a tiny permanent staircase instead.

Canned goods are great in tiny kitchens too :)

Just Keep Scraping...

That's what we keep telling ourselves...just keep scraping. We have unanimously decided that stripping/scraping paint in the airstream really stinks, there is no doubt about it. We've moved onto the ceiling and I am remembering how much work it was for my mom to scrape the 1980s "popcorn" texture off of the ceiling in our entire house when I was young. We are still chugging away though, hoping to have it done by thanksgiving. I think we are going to kind of cheat and not scrape paint where we are just going to put up cabinets or things. After they shipped us the wrong thing, our plastic razor blade holders finally arrived, which have made the job a heck of a lot easier on our hands. (Our local ACE hardware sells the blades, but only a teensy crappy holder that gives you a hand cramp!)

In the meantime, lots of ideas float around in our heads about the layout and design, flooring options, wood stoves, etc. I have even been contemplating installing a living wall in there - my own personal mobile garden! It's all a bit daunting and overwhelming at times, especially when progress is slow.

The true Land Yacht? Jacob found this on our recent visit to Fort Collins :)

Lovely November day on the island yesterday, we watched the 'Round the County Sailboat Race from our house and from South Beach in between scraping coats of paint off Blue Moon.

Paint Stripping 101 and...Zolatone!

Last weekend we went to the hardware store, got ourselves some nasty chemical paint stripper and dove headfirst (with respirators on) into attempting to expose the shiny aluminum that we knew was underneath the 50 years of most likely lead-based paint inside the Airstream. After 6 coats of the nasty stuff, and both of us scraping with plastic scrapers hour after hour, we were pretty tired and here's what we had accomplished:

The aluminum was showing through, but a nasty film of something that we were pretty sure wasn't quite paint still remained. A little web research to our friendly Air Forums and we quickly learned about "Zolatone." It was a TOUGH layer of primer/auto body paint used in the 50s and early 60s. Someone said that they thought 1965 was the last year it was used in Airstreams. We have a 1963, ugh. Many folks had run out of energy trying to strip the paint from their aluminum and simply ordered new skins! No way we said, that would be way too much $$. So we went in search of an answer and stumbled upon this blog about another 1963 Overlander named Moonraker of all things! Citrastrip - a much less toxic stripper, and plastic razor blades (of all things!) are totally the answer! Two coats of the pink goo:

 

And some plastic razor blade scraping, then a quick shine with mineral spirits and Blue has some shiny aluminum walls to show off! We really like the way they look :)

 We also learned that the area above Jacob is actually fiberglass. Our trailer has fiberglass endcaps at both ends, so those parts will actually get painted. But we are hoping to expose the rest of the ceiling and walls into a nice light-reflecting aluminum.

As I finished up scraping the walls, J went to work on another project. The original propane-electric heater was still stuck inside the trailer. In order to extricate it, the exterior heater vent had to be removed in order to get access to the screws keeping the heater in place! The heater came out and we were left with a hole in the side of the trailer. J is so creative - he removed the all-aluminum sheet that encased the original fridge (see below):

 

 ...and created a patch for the trailer. The heater is the big box in the picture below on the left. The patch is now riveted on there and looks great! 

 J using his riveter!

That's all for now folks...don't fall in my bucket of slime :) You should be able to subscribe to get email updates now if you'd like. Just enter your email address in the feedburner box up top.

Down and Dirty in the Airstream

We got busy on the Airstream again today after a two-week hiatus. We have been on our Puget Sound Paddle Party kayaking trip and then hanging out with my mom and Pete, who arrived from Canada to spend a beautiful autumn week with us. We saw a superpod of whales go up the west side of the island, paddled out of Roche at sunset, and did lots of fun island things. Then we all headed over to Camano Island for my cousin Laura's wedding. Yesterday I got to go in a rennovated bus that a friend-of-a-friend told me about. Guisepi has been living out of Edna for 4 years and the bus has some very cool features that gave me lots of ideas! He installed the Little Cod wood stove from Navigator Stove Works over on Orcas Island, and I was psyched to hear his very positive feedback on it. His roof has a 200 watt solar panel on it, which powers a neat Engel fridge, all his lights, and more. He travels around in his bus and gives out free tea! Very inspiring :)

So....today was actually the first time since we bought Blue Moon that J and I have had a chance to work on the airstream together. We started by going to our local thrift/salvage yard to gain inspiration! We found lots of usable parts that will be great - we resisted buying anything until we are actually ready. We got to work, and J removed our curvy bathtub! That and the toilet/black water tank were a bit of a bear to extract. After today's adventures, all that really remains are the fridge and an old electric heater. Jacob plugged in the heater just for grins today - it made lots of noise, threw a spark, then blew the breaker. I think it's toast. Tomorrow we begin stripping all the nasty paint on the inside of Blue!

Jacob in the tub!

Tub is now posted for FREE to pick up and take away!

Maggie demonstrates the size of the galvanized steel water tank that took the both of us to lift out of Blue.

We are very lucky to have a small shed on our property that we have been putting all of the wood pieces and cabinetry in that we would like to try and re-use in Blue. The shed keeps everything nice and dry! This shed is so cute and so well built that sometimes I just want to live in it :)

New Toys :)

J got new toys for his birthday from his wonderful family :) A drill, impact driver, and a gift card to our local hardware store are sure to bring him lots of winter fun this year! He already put them to work and took out the remaining cabinets in Blue. She's all empty except for the bathtub, toilet, fridge and water tank! All of that remaining fun will have to wait though because we are off on our inaugural Puget Sound Paddle Party (PSPP)! J and me and a few friends are circumnavigating Orcas Island and visiting many spots along the way that we have always wanted to see. We are looking forward to sunny weather, friends, and enjoying the islands.

In the meantime, we toasted Blue and all the happyness she has already brought us :)

The Beetle and the Airstream

Heyo! We hooked up the airstream to the beetle...

:) Just kidding...this is actually from an old VW advertisement, but I couldn't help myself. No worries, my bug remains safely on the ground. Back to demolition! I unearthed a crowbar in the airstream and it has been very helpful! I also ripped out the back sink (it's amazing how helpful a solid karate kick can be in remodeling) and the floor is so rotted away i can see the chassis. Good thing we were planning on replacing the floor anyway!

The "Before" Video Tour

Enjoy this tour of Blue Moon before we did anything to the inside!

Demolition Begins!

Jacob is gone on a trip - I hope he likes what I did with the place while he's gone :) That big metal cylinder is a hefty water tank that will go bye-bye as soon as Jacob returns and can provide the additional muscle to move it! (Jacob has the camera on his kayak trip, so these are taken with the computer webcam = low quality). It was really fun to take all that cabinetry out - we are going to be able to save and reuse all of the drawers and some of the wood. Much of it is covered in a plastic-y shiny veneer that just peeled right off. Lots more demolition to do, and we are going to have to find a home for that one-of-a-kind curved bathtub in the back! Anybody want it? :)

So We Bought An Airstream...

On September 5, 2012, we became the official owners of an airstream! She is a 1963 Land Yacht International Overlander 26'. Whew, if that ain't a mouthfull! We named her Blue Moon because she came to us under a beautiful island blue moon. After quickly becoming disenchanted with the price of owning a house here, we decided to seek other inspiration from the tiny house people, like Tumbleweed Houses, Airstream owners, and many others. The idea of buying an old trailer and making it our own was very exciting (and much cheaper than buying a house!). We started scanning airstream and argosy trailer classifieds for the right one. After months of looking, and dismay settling in, I finally put a wanted ad up on craigslist describing our desire and budget. A few weeks went by and out of the blue an email came through from some folks not more than three miles down the road - they had an airstream and were too busy to get around to renovating it - did we want it for $2,000? We zoomed over to take a look - poked and prodded all of the cabinets, chassis, and carpet (*ew). We went home that night with airstream dreams and a promise to call in the morning with our decision. The very next morning the owners sentimentally signed over the title to us and she became ours. J towed her home to our driveway behind the Astro van and I "supervised," driving behind and providing the break lights/turning signals from the Beetle. Over the next several days we took measurements, foamed out active wasp nests, and emptied drawers and cabinets of various "presents" from previous owners. Safety glasses/dust masks are a must! Blue Moon has a nice aluminum shell, and then the "nice" ends. When you step inside the door, which is held shut by a bungee-cord, 1963 + 49 years of not much love greets you immediately. The plan is to completely gut her and put in a whole new floor. Then the fun will begin; turning Blue into an off-grid tiny house on wheels! Follow this blog to join us in our remodeling, renovating, restoration fun!