Camper Day One – Demo

What’s in a name?  Our house doesn’t have one because it’s just our house!  I think our camper needs a name though… I like ‘leaf’ because we plan on blowing around wherever the wind takes us.  It’s also an ‘Aloha’ camper, ‘Kona’ is a Hawaiian name we like.  And it would be pretty cool to take it to every state except Hawaii, and with that we think maybe it should look and act Hawaiian.  What are some other good names?

Some of you know, my brother had a pretty big atv accident last week, thankfully he is going to be ok by the looks of things, he is still in the hospital but doing better than expected.  Some other weird things happened that made it a much less than stellar week, almost to the point of being so bad it was funny! A good end to that was to get to do some demo on the new addition, [insert camper name here].  It’s amazing how a little destruction can make  things feel better!  Also a stay-cation including packing the family up, eating candy for dinner and staying up way too late watching cartoons with the kids and Denver getting his own bed, in a hotel room across town!

Really, I have an awesome life and I am so grateful for friends and family, my complaints are few and I am very glad my brother is going to be ok!  Tread lightly, Nate and take it easy, please!

Here are some random pictures of the destruction… I mean demolition:

I tested out using a paint stripper, it took about tn minutes to get this far, that makes for a big job!

Turns out it is all bare aluminum under this cruddy paint job. It does look like there used to be white which was maybe stripped off before

The ceiling came down with ease

There is a leak, well several, there are nail holes throughout the seams of the metal, I think someone along the way thought nailing a seam would be a good idea... but it's funny, he sellers claimed it was 'water tight' which was a joke as soon as we got there, but they stuck to their story... we played along...

therapy

you can see the water damage, a couple of the structural members were totally rotted out

we will be stripping this all the way down to just the metal and structure. We're going to reinforce a few of the structural members and replace at least three at this point.

We only got about half way demo'd

James had fun destroying the cabinets, they were pretty destroyed anyway.

This is one of the totally rotted members, seriously, on the roof someone naled all along the seam, it looks like to try to fasten it together but a nail through a roof just makes a water hole every time it rains...

some preliminary sketches on the panels

we have to figure out how to get the heater out. We considered reusing this so we're being careful but in reality we will most likely use something else. We cant seem to figure out how to take the outside vent off without ruining the unit though....

We are guessing this is at least the 4th renovation this camper has had, pretty crazy considering it has most of the original parts still... a couple layers of flooring, walls, paint. we've probably taken a couple hundred pounds out already... we're going to go for ultra light.

the subfloor looks great really

and the hatch from outside. This will be able to house a small generator hopefully...

probably something like an r-.5 insulation we are guessing... we'll be doing better than this! 🙂

about 1/2" of fiberglass batt to come out.

sketches

sketches

sketches

sketches

We're thinking of incorporating solar over this window and adding a battery for power

We bumped into the home depot build day so we stopped in and let hazel make her own first construction project

Miles Watched

She picked the colors, not just because it was home depot but because her favorite colors are actually orange and white... I just realized we may have influenced this by spending too much time at the orange store...

She did great! Way better than me at two!

And she did it with style too

She's been great at helping put Miles (and cat in the Hat) down for naps...

Grandma

Random walk pictures

I debated including this but... omg... she's pretty well self contained now... and proud of it!

This one likes to lounge.

and drive

with no pants

(we werent really driving, we were waiting for the camper people to show up...)

He's got purty eyes!

Hazel already shares clothes, this is mmy skirt and my 'gloves'.... though it started as a swimsuit wrap and toe socks, but Hazel knows whats up.

Denver loves grandmas house

Poppy teaching Miles to crawl, hes ALMOST there!

I leave Denver for one second and he gets stuck in the window at the hotel!