I’m a few days late, but here I am with the February progress report! It’ll be short and sweet, because LORT we are busy. Feb is awful in Texas because WEATHER, and it’s also busy busy because it’s my birth month, and my amazing nephew’s birth month, and it’s short. So between family time and work and school schedules, and working on the Rosy, I dunno how we had time to breathe… But breathe and work and study and party and renovate, we did… and here’s where we’re at on the whole reno process…

Basically, the current status is that we’ve got frame exposed, interior skins out, insulation gone, and a mess EVERYWHERE. We only have March to get this gal ready to sleep in without danger (more on that later), but thanks to some touching generosity of our friends we have a place to crash if sleeping in Rosy is still a health hazard come April 1. Here she is in her icky glory.

It feels like we’ve worked on her a ton with no visual difference. Okay, slight visual difference. I’ll be so glad to put all of this rust brushing and muck cleaning behind us! Today we’re going to make a first attempt at using POR15 to cover the rust on the frame and protect it from damage. Neither of us have used this product before but I’ve done a lot of research over the last week or so and have gotten some good advice from some of our little renovation village. Fingers crossed it goes well!

This is our last month in the apartment. I’ve paid the final rent payment, which felt really, REALLY good. We have just a few weeks to get Rosy what I call “minimally livable”. We define minimally livable as subfloor in, new insulation in, new interior skins in, and said skins painted. If we can get that far along, we’ll toss our mattress in the subfloor and “rough it” (if you can call it that) while we continue on with construction. If we can’t get that far along, we have a back up plan consisting of our very kind and generous friends’ guest room on the same property where we keep the camper. The hardest part in all of this has been packing.

We procrastinated too much, and have now put ourselves in a really tight spot. I work around 52 hours a week between my full time job and freelance work, and I go to school two nights each week for a total of about five hours. Vick pulls long hours in a warehouse all week. We are TIRED in our free time. At this point we are donating or trashing everything we are sure we don’t want, and we’re boxing up everything we do want or are unsure of. It’s hard to say what we’ll need until we’re in the thick of living the lifestyle, so we’ll just pull stuff from storage as the need comes up, which will help us determine what else we can get rid of. Well, we’re off to go do all the things! Happy camping, everyone!