Sunday, March 24, 2013

Wires, Stoves, and Rivets - Oh My!

Upon returning home from Austin, J and I both promptly got sick :( which halted Blue Moon activities. After a few weeks of babying each other and coughing constantly, we are over it and back on track to have Blue completed by the end of May. Since the countdown to move-in-date has begun, we pretty much live and breathe all things Airstream at our house. As we speak, our living room is littered with trailer appliances, wiring, tools, things from Amazon, and wine glasses. It gets a little crazy at times. But now that Spring is here, those extra hours of daylight after work allow us to get a lot done. Today was t-shirt weather -- yippee! Here's what we've been up to:

2-4-6-8, RAH, RAH, Insulate!! Replacing the "mouse hotel" sections of insulation.

What ho! A foe? Is that rain leaking into our brand new sub-floor?? We can't have that. J and I did some seriously creative custom-made (by us) rain-guttering to solve this problem. This is the only advantage we have discovered to NOT having a nice warm, dry garage to be able to work on our trailer in all winter: we find out each and every leak each and every time it rains.

J has been super busy working on our electrical while all of the wiring is exposed. He literally learned everything from library books and the internet. He's got our trailer all wired so we can use 12volt DC power (batteries/solar = "boondocking") or 120volt AC power (plug-in to normal power), so no matter where we are, we'll be electric...boogie woogie woogie... if you want to know more, just ask him - All I do is ask if the wires are live before I go in the trailer so I don't get electrocuted.

Many lovely custom aluminum patches have been made in all shapes and sizes to button up holes in the trailer, hoping to eliminate any further "mouse hotel" incidents.

Caulking in one of the windows. We experienced an incident earlier this winter where one blew out in a storm. Can't have that!

Some people walk on the ferry with suitcases. We went to Anacortes and got a stove from some nice boaters. We walked off the ferry and did our deal in the parking lot. Then we put it on a dolly and walked back on the ferry to go home about 20 minutes later! We found the little stove on craigslist and it is great! It is a Kenyon Marine stainless steel cooktop/oven (runs on propane). We were originally thinking of just getting a cooktop, but then my mom reminded me how good cookies smell and so we opted for the oven too. What was I thinking- no cookies?!


We got a lot of funny comments riding the ferry with our stove. Our favorite one was, "Hey, we used to have a stove just like that on our boat. Do you guys need an AC/DC fridge too by chance?" Ummm, why yes we do. So the very next day we drove about 10 minutes from our house and met more boaters who were remodeling their galley and had recently upgraded to a fancy fridge. We took their older fridge off their hands and they were more than happy to see it go. So now Blue Moon has all her appliances, and we saved a bunch of money :)


Heidi the Riveter... and... Rosie the Riveter :) Let's get those walls back on, We Can Do It!

It's so nice to have the walls back on, about 250 rivets later. We're getting ready for the really fun stuff now, like building our bed, kitchen, couch... so stay tuned!


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