Raining buckets

Woohoo! That seemed to do the trick. Heavy rain coming down right now. Left side is still leaking but the right side (where I caulked) seems to be keeping dry. Once it dries out a tad, I'll caulk the whole damn thing. (Oooo, big thunder!)

And just in case you're wondering, yes, I unplugged the computer. Three cheers for laptops & WiFi!

Rain, rain, go away...

Well, it looks like we're due for our four nice days for the month. It's just been raining for weeks on end and I popped in during one particularly energetic thunderstorm to see where the leaks were coming. To my surprise, the windows seem okay, but there we rivulets dribbling in all along the seam between the walls and the floor and flowing down into the pan below the floor. At least all along the areas where I had cut out the panels. I guess this explains the rusty spars and perhaps the rotted floor panels as well. So one more project; I removed the trim on around the outside and discovered there was no caulking at the seam at all and several of the rivets had corroded away. So I corrected that on the curbside and am now awaiting another rainy day to see if makes a difference. It felt good actually installing rivets rather than removing them. One of these days I'll start constructing something rather than just ripping it apart.

Damn dome done.

After great internal debate about whether it was worth it, I decided to remove the front dome. It required drilling out many rivets that secure all the internal aluminum panels, three of which run the entire length of the trailer. What a pain. But I'll try repairing the cracks and painting the sucker to see if I can make it worth putting back in or doing some great design to take its place. In the meantime it will collect dust in the garage as the basement is now full.

Okay all you faithful followers, as I had requested of you, you've been hounding me for updates, so here it is: there isn't much progress. In January I got suckered into another show at the Opera House and, well frankly, I shaved my head and spent my free time pretending to be someone much richer and more influential than I am. Besides, the trailer looked better on the outside than the inside, so that's how I chose to view it.

But at last the show is over, the weather grows warmer (if not drier—rain, rain, go away...) so I once again engaged the fray, swatted dead the sundry squatting wasps & yellowjackets and took the circular saw to the bits of rotted plywood. 

Nice clean holes, if I do say so myself. That's all the progress I've made this spring. In the next few days, I'll patch them in and then try to get the cracked plastic dome out of the front, and then either rip out the rest of the interior skin to see what things look like inside the walls, or skip it and try to start building something back up. I need a new shower and bathroom, so I'll need to do some real designing and then hunt down some plumbing expertise. Unless, of course someone else wants to buy it first. Hint, hint.

In frustration, a month or so ago, I threw an ad on Craiglist to unload it. The only offer I had was a trade for a gorgeous MGB, which I probably would have taken if I didn't already own a convertible. Maybe I should do it anyhow. I could fit two of them in the garage...

I hate winter.

What else can I say? If I were King of the World, I think I would banish it.

Glum.                                           Glummer.

Hitting the Wall

Wow. A month and a half without a post. How could you all stand it? I do have excuses. I'm good at coming up with them. For instance, I was away for a couple weeks around the holidays and after that it was just too dang cold to work out there. It was a balmy double digits today. You'd think growing up in New England would make me a hardy soul, but in actuality, my blood's pretty thin. That, and I just didn't feel like doing anything at all.

But today I pushed myself to get out there and

start gutting the bathroom. My initial goal for the day was to remove the bathtub. Can you believe it? A bathtub in a trailer. Personally, I'd rather have that space used in the bedroom rather than the bathroom, but they never asked me. It turned out to be about the only item I was unable to disattach. The whole day was a tad discouraging. Plumbing always scares me a bit anyway and I couldn't figure out how to take off the fixtures without cutting the copper pipes which, in the end, I did. The weather was cloudy and snowing towards the late afternoon which made everything that much more uncomfortable and gloomy. But the good news is that the carpet was in fact not under the toilet as I'd feared, and I was able to remove it fairly easily. The plywood flooring was kind of dampish, but not rotted, so I think when I reinstall the bathroom I can just cover it with some sort of sealant rather than replacing all the plywood. 

So, in short, I was feeling incredibly discouraged today for some reason and at one point was screaming at full volume my frustration. (Luckily my neighbors aren't too close.) I didn't even clean up my mess at the end of the day. I just slunk back inside and made some hot cocoa. But all in all, I guess I made progress. If you can call destruction progress. It's just that I know this is the easy part and I'm regretting biting off so much more than I can chew. But it's too late to spit it out now. And of all the regrets I have in my live over the last five years or so, this one only involves money and not enough to get worked up about.

Anyone want to buy a disemboweled trailer?

So, I've actually got a little paying work this week, so I'll try to get back there and take out the tub and the shelving later in the week and clean up the mess I ignored. After finishing the gutting I plan to take thorough measurements and start drafting up some plans and ideas for the new design. Whatever that may be. I'll really have to start from scratch because I don't think I can salvage much. And when it warms up a bit I'll take a stab at replacing the bits of rotted floor boards. How hard can that be? (Famous last words.)

But right now I'm tired. I'm going to bed and hoping I have good dreams tonight. Last night I dreamt my car wouldn't start. Lame. I need something more inspiring than that.

Middle Gut

Wow. I've really destroyed this thing. Yesterday I carried the chaos right to the back bathroom bulkhead, taking out the bed, bedroom cabinets and the bathroom closets. Everything but the closets came out fairly easily, but again there's not going to be much worth saving. I'm really beginning to hate that dark fake wood panellin

g and I'm wondering what the hell I ever saw in this trailer.

So today was a just cleaning up. I removed all the cabinet debris into my basement for later sorting and shop-vacced up the dirt, rivet shafts and assorted grunge that had collected in inaccessible spots over the years. But it's too damn cold out there to do any more work today. And I'm at a good stopping point. That bathroom is going to be a bear to renew/remove. The counter is cracked, perhaps repairable, but it definitely needs painting, at the very least, with new, spiffier fixtures. The toilet was installed after the carpeting (carpet! in a bathroom! eeewww!) so I'll have to figure out how to get that out. And I need to remove the tub for access to the plumbing and electrical I want to upgrade. I'd like to replace the fuse box with a breaker panel, though I'll need help figuring that out. But that's for another day. I need a break from this beast.