Spring Light

It's hard for me to believe we made it through the winter in our Airstream, but the daffodils outside are living proof, literally! We've officially entered spring, and I couldn't be happier to say farewell to frosty nights, frozen pipes and the four letter word that starts with the big R (rain). While there are still many wet days to come, I'm sure, spring comes with such relief that the long nights of winter are truly over. September doesn't seem so long ago when we were pondering whether or not we would be able to maintain our sanity living in 180 square feet throughout an island winter. With some help from friends during the cold spells, a handful of vacations when we needed to get away, and more than a few bottles of wine, we came through all right. 

Sunny spring days turn into beautiful west side sunsets at the lighthouse.

First daffodils harvested! LOTS of joy!

We also finally got around to ordering some 12v lights and installing them. The idea behind keeping our wiring 12v was to have overall less draw and someday have a rooftop solar panel setup on the Airstream. But somewhere in this whole project, the lighting situation got too complicated and we threw our hands up in the air, capped all the wires sticking out of the wall, just got two floor lamps and plugged them into our outlets. Mid-winter we decided to tackle the lighting saga again and spent a ridiculous amount of time poking around Amazon searching for 12v track lighting that we liked. We finally ordered some and they got lost for 35 days with FedEx. When we finally tracked them down, to our dismay we discovered we'd somehow ordered regular household voltage lights, not 12v --- arrrgh! So we threw our hands up in the air again, returned the lights, and settled back in to life with our floor lamps. The kitchen sink was still a very dark corner (therefore I was not responsible if there were still food chunks on dishes after I cleaned them), and J was always moving his bedside reading lamp over to the kitchen counter top to have better lighting for food prep. The only light we ordered that ended up working out was a cheap, 12v task-style light with a switch on it that we had gotten for my side of the bed so I could read. 

 

So we decided to just order a few more of those and be done with it! J wired them into the kitchen area on Saturday!

I got one over the sink (yay!!!! and also ewwww I need to clean the sink now that I can see all the grime in it...)

And J got one right over his chef prep area and the stove. Seriously, once you get light, there's no going back to living in the dark. We got rid of one floor lamp and it feels like a lot less clutter. I was worried about having all the lights be on their own switches instead of being able to flip one switch and have them all come on. But I actually like having the option to turn each light on or off, especially since we don't have any dividing walls in the Airstream. It's nice to keep the lights off at the sleeping end of the trailer if you're just hanging out on the couch reading, or if one of us is still asleep back there (that would be me). 

My favorite new Airstream addition is this chalkboard/mail holder/key and coat rack thingy. I ordered it on etsy from The Wooden Attic, and it's awesome! Current chalk art above is by J. I've learned you can never have too many hooks in the Airstream. There are also slots on top of the chalkboard that hold mail, DVDs, pens and of course, the chalk! Fun to write messages on and free's up our counter from piles of mail, keys, hats, whatever :)

Some spring days are still quite gray. But Agnes doesn't care what the weather, it's always a great day to be at the beach in her mind. Thank you for all of the kind words, phone calls, and emails when we lost Maggie. She will always be in our hearts. We are able to smile and laugh now when we think of her and it hurts less. Agnes is our fur-ball of good times - she has been always been good at that, so thank goodness for her! Here's hoping spring reaches you soon, wherever you are.

Maggie

It is with an unbelievably heavy heart that I have to update our overdue blog with the news that our wonderful furry companion, Maggie, has passed away. She was "a grand old lady" in the words of our good friend Michael, and although her passing was unexpected (I think deep down we pretended she'd live forever), it must have been her time to leave us. Maggers was such a big presence in our little home, and she's left us with some emptiness, both physically and emotionally. It's been a week now, and there are still times when sadness overtakes us and all we can do is sit there and cry and give little Agnes lots of snuggles. Maggie was 13.5 years old, and Michael reminded me that when Mags turned 13, I had said that each day since then was a gift. Really, all the time we had with her was such a gift, and she will be missed and reminisced of often. I still like to think of her nestled in down there at the end of the Airstream underneath the fireplace, comfy as can be. The Airstream was definitely home for Maggie, and I think she might have liked it in her older years more than any other place we've lived because it required no great effort on her part to keep an eye on her humans, thanks to our one-room concept, so to speak. Our hearts are full of memories of her over the years, from Colorado hiking trips to sleeping in late all piled in our bed - Maggie having stolen most of the covers. As nearly every one of our blog posts proves through photographs, Maggie was with us every step of the way through our Airstream shenanigans, and we will miss her supervisory skills and her time-to-stop-working-on-that-aluminum-trailer because it's-4pm-and-i'm-starving(again) dancing jig. Here's to our Magoo, a truly great dog!

It's 2014, and We Still Live in an Airstream!

Happy New Year! We've made it six months living full-time in our 180sq ft. Airstream. We got to have an island Christmas this year with J's parental units! Jan and Lyle visited us and we spent a fun week with them on SJI and on Orcas island. We got to show them our little Airstream during our first snowstorm on the island in two years. Since we're up on the mountain, we got quite a bit more snow than town did. It was an adventure getting up and down our steep road. Blue Moon survived the heavy wet snow without a problem though - some trees nearby were not as lucky. The snow was gone within a few days - replaced by rain and then finally some sunshine.

After family left, we got back to work on our never-ending list of improvements to make to Blue Moon. We'd ordered a 12v kitchen exhaust fan to go above our cooktop about a month ago but just hadn't had the chance to install it. The goal is to try and reduce some of the condensation in our trailer by being able to vent out the steam created by all of the delicious meals J cooks. So once the rainclouds cleared, J dove right in and cut a hole in our roof, which always makes both of us very nervous.

Ah, just another day in the Airstream life.

But the hole was quickly covered up with the new fan, with the wires back in the wall where they belong! The vent fan works very nicely and moves quite a bit of air. It has a cap on the outside that can be closed from the inside using the white handle when the fan is not in use. Of course as soon as the fan was installed, it promptly rained very hard and we were glad to be all sealed up again!

For my birthday, J surprised me with something I had been eyeing purchasing for awhile. He built a food/water station for our pups from beautiful pine, that fits their bowls and their tub of food underneath perfectly. The dogs took to it immediately and I am a big fan of how much space it saves! Thanks hubby :)

Blue Moon's Christmas present, courtesy of a few family members who gave us Amazon gift cards, was a flat screen TV! We felt pretty techy installing the first TV we've ever bought -holy smokes, having a remote is so convenient - now we know what we've been missing, having to reach over and press pause on the laptop, plug in the power cord when the battery is low etc. We put the TV on an articulating wall mount at the end of our bed. (Note that our window has a red frame around it and is not the TV! The TV is on the left at the end of the bed. I learned there is absolutely no great way to photograph a television).When we initially designed our trailer we thought we'd watch movies from our sofa, but it turns out we always just end up propping the laptop up on a pillow at the foot of the bed and watching it there. So we opted for the totally lazy-look and put our flatscreen there too :) We kicked things off by piling 3 people and one dog into our bed and watching Julie & Julia. "Bon appétit!"