Part Deux...

The time has come for the roof, as Andy jumped onto the roof of the camper from the deck and said here goes nothing. The one part of this camper that is actually built pretty decent!  It only took him one evening, not even 3 hours, to get the moldings off and rip off the rubber roof.  He only broke one molding and one vent while doing this too.  

Here it is the next day with all the osb board removed too. That only took him a matter of an hour or so to remove.  He found a lovely mice nest right next to the AC, you can kind of see it here in this picture, i was not here for that part so there was no photo taken, sorry!

Andy says this is the least scary thing he has done on this camper so far.  We are going to leave it a day or so to dry out and then replace the osb board with new plywood, put new insulation in, and then glue a whole new rubber roof on. All after we (he), vacuums up the mouse poop and sprays it all down with some bleach :) 

With all the wet wood we have dealt with in this turd the roof is the only area that had mold on it. It was in the insulation on the back side of the camper all along where we think it was leaking from and where NONE of the screw holes in the molding strips were covered with butyl tape or putty.  

Plus don't you wonder how the mice were getting up there? Andy claims they shouldn't get in now, he has everything sealed.  He even plans to take out each window and reseal all around it. 

This is gonna be the best built camper around!!   :)

tires, moldings and such

It has finally happened! Except for a few small details the inside of the camper is finished!!!!

We (he), are now working on the outside.  Andy just put on the first piece of molding last night, and it looks great! The picture i took doesn't do it justice but i will post it anyway.

BTW the molding is Blue, that is the accent color on the Big Rolling Turd :) Oh and i don't want to forget to mention the screws,notice they are silver colored, Andy was really worried that they wouldn't look right because the old ones were painted white on the screw head. Well, when they were pulled off all we saw was the rust color that took over the white paint.  I keep telling him the silver is great, at least these won't rust, and who is going to get that close to it and say uh oh, those are the wrong screws??

So, the tires...I know that i have already talked about how the mens theory is that this thing had a blow out at one point and that is where we found one of the larger water leaks to be. Well when Andy pulled off the tires to lift the camper and put it on jack stands he noticed that the tires were in even worse shape than we thought, shocking, hardly. :)

 This is a photo of one of the old tires. They were actually bursting and you could see the metal inside the tires, that is what the tan looking spots are!  I can't believe they actually made it home from the auction site in Maine! This thing was not safe at all to be on the road!!


She (?), now has 4 brand new tires pictured below.  They are not actually on the turd yet, but I am sure at some point Andy will put them on, when will that be honey???
He has ordered some kind of middle cap so that the tires look better, still not sure what they even look like or what he is actually talking about. I will post more on that when they come in the mail though, with a new pict of what they look like on the tires.

moving along

this is what happens when you saw through solid foam insulation.

 Oh and the cat is fond of rolling around in the foam as well. Try getting that out of her thick fur!! Actually we have found cat hair from her in the small hole that was in the bathroom going to the storage compartment!

 here is the camper, coming together. part of the bathroom wall is up and all the bathroom cabinets are in.  YAH!  I think we have both forgotten what this thing looked like with walls and counters and such. 

The kids have commented that it looks really small now....

Here is all the new duct work going in.  Notice the nice looking fridge, and guess what, it works, really well!!!! The true test will be to see how well it can keep up in 90+ degree weather with the sun beating down on the camper all day. Our hybrids fridge worked in that situation but was definitely struggling, even with the AC on. 

Wait until you see what it looks like in the next blog entry, the inside is just about done.  However there is still a lot of outside work to be done.  We are waiting on a delivery of about 200 screws.  These will replace all the outside screws holding the moldings down.  

trouble in paradise...

Here comes trouble!  So we quickly water tested this thing last week.  There was no snow on the camper, not much on the ground and it was relatively warm out.  Andy put a hose on the roof and let it run over a bunch of different spots for a little while.  Well, i guess we have a slow leak (or two), along the top edge where the molding strip is that holds down the roof.
What was happening is that we taped and put a tarp all around the open wheel well and fridge vent in the anticipation of the snow storm we were getting.  Love New England....Anyway, we got about a foot of heavy wet snow over the course of a day.  The following day Andy realized that a small corner of the new wood was wet by the fridge vent in the wall.  So we (not me), took one piece of the roof strip/molding off and guess what?  There was no putty tape where there was supposed to be, shocked?? Were not, just really bummed out.
So now the new plan is to pull the roof material up and replace any wet/rotten wood and put a whole new roof on with all new sealant and putty, where applicable.  :)

yup, it is a camper, wow!

Andy screwing in the wheel cover. One side of the camper is closed in, finally!

Here is the kitchen counter, with this and the benches it makes it look and feel much more like a camper rather than a storage unit.

 Andy installing the benches, i now have a seat to sit in and read while i watch him work each evening :)  Oh and my internet reaches out here so all is good!!!!

 The view from the opposite end of the camper

OK, so this one is taken from the inside of the camper where the shower will be.  Andy is in the storage area hooking up the hot water heater and water tank. This is one to be framed!!

This one is from the storage area door. Notice they put the vinyl in the storage area too. It looks really nice! Andy figures a couple of people can sleep in there too ;0)

Could it be a camper???

So, I actually think we have a camper here.
A lot has happened since the last blog entry.  The big rolling turd is looking better and better with each passing day.  We put in the final pieces of the sub floor that went under the bunk room, and I think those were the easiest ones to put in.
The next step was to buy and put in a floor, so we decided on sheet vinyl. Not my first pick, but the easiest one to work with and it is growing on me.

The vinyl went in very easy!

 The results! Not bad, huh?

We also had a new helper today, thank goodness cuz this stapler would of been smashed into thousands of pieces.  It would work for about 3 staples, then had to be taken apart !!!!! What a pain, the men stapled the edges of the vinyl and around the tank holes.  Special thanks to Paps, who is always there when we need him :)

And here is the other helper, working his magic

After the floor went down Andy was so excited, it was like a weight had been lifted off of him.  So we went ahead and put in the Kitchen cabinet.  It barely fits in the camper door and had to go in before the bathroom wall was put up.  The benches for the dining table went in too.  We, (me) briefly thought about putting in a real table with chairs, but in the end it just doesn't make sense with our large family right now, maybe further down the road.

Then Andy just went nuts, he started cutting holes in the floor for the water lines and tub drain. And just a bunch of little things that have to get done.

He also started to fix the wall that we had taken apart.  He left that for 2 days and it never set, the glue just ate away at the foam board, (I told him that foam needs special glue, no one listens to me), although in his defense the adhesive he used did say it worked on foam.  So now we have ordered special Polystyrene glue and will put that up in the next day or two, hopefully.

new toys & a bit happier!

So one of the better parts of this project has been that Andy has got to buy a few new tools, which always makes him happy.
He bought a pocket hole jig to ,well, put really fancy angled holes in wood, but I am sure most of you already know what it is.

So here it is, with the new drill!

 Our helper, who really thought we were all outside to throw her ball.

I am not sure if you can see it but the foam is EVERYWHERE!  Notice the van is covered and so is the cutting table!! The worst part? We thought we were done with it but we (he) has to cut more for the inside wall ;)

bad words...very bad words.

Let us start with a picture. This is what the camper looked like Saturday night, after a hard days work. The day started out very well, our son and I stayed in the camper and took measurements while Andy cut out all the foam. Here is what that looked like:

We, (not me) had to cut out foam to fit between all the supports. However, because we could not find 

1 1/2 inch board foam we had to buy 1 inch then 1/2 inch and put them on top of each other. So that means double the cutting, and the first foam was awful, it looked like Andy was in a snow storm when he got done making just one cut. I think it is pretty funny, i know he doesn't, and he still has to cut some for the wall, but that is for another post. 

 This is me measuring for the top piece of foam. Notice my hair is up in a bun, one can never be too sure :)

The top piece of foam is down. This was our helper for the afternoon.  Him and I actually cut all the holes in the foam for the grey and black water tank attachments too.  I think Andy stood out side and cut foam for about 3 hours.

Everyone was still pretty happy at this point. We went ahead and put down the next top piece of floor, which is next to the wheel wells and was fairly easy to put down. No walls had to be lifted for this one, a few well lined up holes were made and down it went.

Now this is where it started to go bad.  The day was waning, it was getting colder and we were in a
time crunch cuz i had to leave for a sporting event practice.

We lost our helper, this was really just a 2 person job. Andy contemplated cutting the next floor board in half so that we only would have to lift one side of the camper at a time, but in the end decided to lift both up.  This involves tie down straps to be placed on the walls above the wheel wells and tightened just enough. I do believe i have posted a picture of this previously.

Well, first of all i have to say that one side of the camper is almost against a hill that is sand and mud and on this day snow and ice too.  This has made it really difficult to work on the floor just because you are slipping and sliding while trying to position wood and push it into a tight area at a certain angle. I can't tell you how many times we (Andy much more) have fallen and landed in the mud.

Where Andy was lifting the floor, at the wheel wells, he had to re position the placement of wood and straps many times. Everything started falling apart, literally.  The more aggravated he became the more things went wrong & the quieter we were and i was just trying to stay the heck out of the way at that point.  One of the walls above the wheel wells is just basically falling apart and the more he was tightening the clamps the more it crumbled.

So we (he) just raised it as much as possible and hoped the darn thing didn't fall apart on itself.  I am actually shocked that it didn't fall apart. And getting that last piece of flooring in, OMG, you have no idea.  It wouldn't go, then it was crooked, like really off, then we (he) pulled it back out a bit and we just started hammering on the edge of it with a block and hammer.  That worked, slowly, but it also destroyed the edge of the wood a bit, but hey it went in.  Then we leaned on the camper walls and lowered the sucker one last time on each side.  Andy screwed the floor down and that was that.  Well, he was still pretty mad at that point, and when i left i really thought i was coming home to a burnt down camper. There was tons of bad words flying around and at one point he actually punched the camper...

BUT..The Floor is in!!! YEAH!

A Quick note:
 I am also forgetting to mention that Andy has dubbed this, are you ready, "the big rolling turd."  He wants to get it vanity plates with that on it, something like ROLLTRD. Suggestions on this would be helpful.  :)

date night..

So, it's Friday night, the oldest two kids are gone skiing until later, the youngest has been put to bed, what do you do??? You work on the camper of course!
Actually we started working on the camper around 5pm, stopped for a quick bite then kept on going until about 11pm, that is when the kids came home in case you were wondering.
Here in New Hampshire we started the day off with a wonderful snowstorm that brought us about a foot of snow and a call saying school would be cancelled. Just when we were able to see the ground and work a little bit easier around the camper!
About the camper...we were able to finish putting down the sub floor inside the camper and we also added a bunch of supports that we did not plan on adding. Why you ask?  Well, what happened was that we had ran out of the 1/2 inch pressure treated we had been using so Andy said he would run to depot and buy one, we needed some 2x4's anyway.
45 minutes later he returns, we are looking at it, and it is almost half the thickness of the other boards we have down!!! So we put it in anyway, and that is the main reason we had to put in more supports. However, we will try to avoid buying wood at depot in the future.  Did I mention that Andy had to run back to Depot again because the 2x4's he bought were mis-marked and only 6 footers?? We needed 8 footers.

Ta-Da  the finished sub floor!! before the extra supports were put down. Of course the cheaper, thinner piece of wood is right in front of the door and at the bottom of the step that goes into the bunk room. You know the kids are going to jump down that step no matter how many times we tell them not to :)

tomorrow comes the foam.....

(our yard and neighborhood seems to be loaded with flying foam) that stuff is awful to work with, at least i am not the one cutting it ;)

This was the extent of our date night, we are a really exciting couple !

Floor Update

Here is the second piece of floor getting ready to be put down. Notice the helper.

And here it is with the top piece of wood.

Now this section that was done took a whole day to do what you see here. This part sits over

the tanks and needed holes drilled into them and there was a lot of fitting issues. He also put in some extra supports that he didn't originally plan to put in.  

So due to bad weather and family commitments not much work has been going on with the camper 

this week. What you see in this picture is what it currently looks like.

stupid hair..

Ok, so i am a reasonably intelligent person, sometimes, i thought. hmmm...well it started out simple, my job was to go under the bunk house part of the camper and try to scrape away the layer of wood that was at the bottom of the foam insulation. It seemed to be an easy task considering that part of the floor seemed to be wet and rotten and was pulling away from the foam anyway.  

This part was my idea, by the way, instead of taking out that whole section of floor we will first try to scrape the bottom layer of wood off and lift that section enough to slide in a new piece of wood, and that would be that for the floor. You see the top part of that section of floor is the storage area and only the corners of the front were damp but didn't seem rotten, they only needed to dry out.

Anyhow, back to the scraping. I started off laying on a creeper and using a scraper, which went really well, the wood was coming off in large sheets, at first. Then i attempted to roll further under the bunk and OH MY GOD! My hair rolled right under one of the wheels and I started screaming. 
So i calmly grabbed my hair that was stuck and while loudly whimpering, rolled off the creeper until my hair was unstuck. Now at this point a normal person would go into the house and put their hair up, well, not me. I figured i could gather it up and lay on it so that it wouldn't get loose again. Well about 5 minutes later the screaming started again and i became angry at my stupidity and finally went into the house and put it all up into a large bun at the very top of my head, not to be taken down again! 
Lesson Learned!
Oh and i am sure most of you are wondering how the scraping went. It progressed nicely after that. I took a break and went back to it later in the day. It only took 1 hour and 45 minutes to completely get all the wood off the foam, all of course except the parts that sit under the walls.

This is the underneath of the camper bunk section, mostly scraped.

Notice there is no wood on the bottom of the foam. :)

there's a water leak??

Oh and i forgot to mention, the water leak!!  So obviously this thing has (had) a leak, are you shocked? Well we all originally thought that the water was coming in from the roof near the bathroom vent, because well, it was all separated in that area, and other reasons that i forget right now.

I think we have to go back a bit on this one...So the day Andy drove this into our yard he stood there, as men do, and took a really really good look at it. And he comments that one of the fenders is all cracked and then looks closer and sees a newer tire than the one next to it. So he deduces that this thing must of had a blow out at some point and they (the old owners) put the spare on and thought that was that.  Well as it turns out when he was taking all the "stuff" out of the camper he found the wheel well cover to be FULL of water.  What happened was that when the tire blew and hit the fender it separated the sealant from the camper and that allowed water to drip into the camper that way.  
Along the way he has found many places that could be possible water leaks. None of the seals around the whole camper, roof included have ever been maintained.  So he did take a tube of self leveling lap sealant and go over all the seams and vents on the roof after he tore everything out of the camper.  

The other big area that was leaking was from under the front part of the walls, between the fiberglass of the camper and the wall it attaches to.  Not sure if i described that too well; basically under the storage compartment door area on both sides of the KZ.  Well it turns out that it was coming from 2 cracks in the fiberglass that are in the front of the camper in the section that holds the battery and propane tanks. The whole side seem seal was separated and as i mentioned there were identical cracks that almost looked like they belonged there.  
So as of yet those are not fixed but are covered with tape to prevent any weather getting into them; because of course we are due to get rain and some snow for the next couple of days. 
Good news. I just checked and so far the underneath of the camper is dry, and it is currently raining out, YAH!  
Maybe all the leaks have finally been taken care of?? I guess only time will tell...

This is the area in the front that was leaking, it is in the exact same spot on the other side as well.  Just thought i would give you an idea of what i was talking about there.

 

This is the bathroom shower skylight.  See how it is separated a bit there?  We (Andy) still

needs to fix that, hey Hun when are you gonna get to that?  You sure are taking your time

fixing my camper....  :)

To Lift or Not?

So now comes the big question, should we (he) lift the walls or not?  Of course to do it right they need to be lifted, but did he want to? NO. Is it going to be a pain in the but? YUP. Did the wife (me) question this decision endlessly? Oh Yes. But in the end the only way to do it right was to lift the walls, you see the wood under the walls was so rotten it just fell out. Seeing as the walls sit on the floor and we are replacing the floor, we should replace the whole floor, even the part that sits under the walls (that is what i was told, i think?)  :)

And of course nothing is simple or quick or goes the way you want it to. All the way around the camper the walls were screwed to the frame so all that had to come off.
So we are only lifting the walls up enough the slide the new piece of plywood in, then lowering it when we are done.
Here are pictures of what Andy concocted to lift this sucker up.

Oh and did you know that the rear slide has to get unattached from the roof when you lift the walls? I didn't. And did you know the walls have to be pulled together with straps otherwise they want to bow way out? I didn't. These are just some of the things you learn when working with your significant other.

:)

who said you can't?

It all started out so simple..then it kept going and going and going. The wet floor boards just kept coming. So Andy (the husband ;), decided to take out the rest of the items that were sitting on the floor, including all the cabinets and appliances. Just a quick side note here, most of these things get to be stored in our basement and living room, and there are a LOT of pieces and parts to one of these campers let me tell you!
So after working all day he would come home and start disassembling the camper. Then the real work stared.

 Above is Andy still working on taking out the floor by the couch and dinette.  Worried about mold he wore a mask, but thankfully we found none.  The only thing he did not remove are the grey and black water tanks, the floor sits over those.

 Below is the "raw" camper with no floor, kitchen counter, bathroom, bathroom wall or duct work! 

Every one Andy asked and any site we went to looking for help or information on what we were about to attempt told us we couldn't do any of that, we were nuts. Well maybe they are right, time will tell, but we are going for it anyway, wish us luck!

In the Beginning

It started like anything else in this family does...I wanted something. :) After traveling a bit in our new to us hybrid last summer i realized that it just was not big enough for us.  We are a family of 5; mom, dad, 3 energetic growing boys, one mellow Beagle and one hyper Golden. We won't even mention the other animals that don't travel with us...The hybrid was nice and also a long wanted item of mine, but the one we got was just too small. Our teenage son could barely fit on the couch and the other two would fall onto the floor if they even tried to sleep on it.  So all three of them slept on the queen bunk and my darling husband and I cuddled up in the double, with one of the dogs, while the other dog got the couch. While we were dry,warm and a little too close for comfort, we really couldn't afford to get anything bigger and refused to go back to our pop up days. We ended up finding this camper through a friend of ours that sells them as is, and usually with some kind of problem, but the price was right. So we hauled it home with a borrowed truck, backed it up and started wondering where to start.
This was the middle of January in New England, but hey we can handle it, and by we I mean my husband ;)
Now we know that there is water damage to at least part of the floor towards the back of the camper. We knew going into this that the floor would need replacing but boy did we underestimate what needed to be done! I didn't expect to get into this project until spring, but my husband had said on many occasions , i just want to rip up a piece to see what  I am dealing with, and so he did. Before the end of that day he had the couch, dinette and some of the floor under the couch ripped out.

You are probably wondering what kind of camper, how big?  Well she is a 25 foot KZ bunkouse camper with a 5 foot rear slide.  The one thing that caught my eye is the bunk room with the 4 bunks. The kids will have room to sleep (separately), play, and store all their clothes and toys.  Plus each bunk has a window, and as our 10 year old said "mom there are plugs in each bed so we can charge our DS's," he is officially hooked.