Tag: demo day

rosy progress report / september 24

‘Vick and I are experiencing very sore muscles (and each a very minor facial injury) this week.

We got a lot done last Saturday! Funny thing is, the camper still looks pretty much the same as it did when we got there – the mess just keeps getting rearranged.

We have been sweating the kitchen removal – which is hilarious, because, in our camper, the kitchen is literally one lower cabinet and one upper cabinet, each about 5’ wide. It’s just the wires and the plumbing and the gas lines… oh my! It’s so much to deal with, and could be dangerous if done incorrectly.

We (loose “we”… Arnavick was most of the muscle here) managed to get it done with one very long break and a trip to the hardware store. Having the right size wrench makes a world of difference when disconnecting gas lines for the stove/oven.

Pretty much everything in this camper is riveted into the interior skin, so to get the cabinet out, we used a tack puller, hammer, and elbow grease to pop all the rivets out. 

Then there were the gas lines. Of the approximate 40 wrenches we have, we didn’t have a single on that fit the nut that was holding the gas line to the stove. No adjustable wrench either. That’s when we hit the wall.

Arnavick wasn’t feeling good, and we were both hungry, so we went home. After some lunch, though, we both got a second wind and decided to run by the hardware store for the right size wrench (as well as an adjustable one for good measure).

We also picked up a strap wrench, which came in handy for loosening the slip nuts connecting the sink drains to the pipes. 

A few turns of a wrench later, and the gas lines and pipes were disconnected – voila!

That made it easy peasy to pull the stove and the cabinet out! No more kitchen! It looks pretty much the same, but it was a check mark next to a to-do, and we’re satisfied by that! So here it is, an anticlimactic before and after of pre- and post-kitchen removal!

With Kitchen:

Without Kitchen:

Anyone else have reservations removing the kitchen like we did? What got you through it?

rosy progress report / september 4

We’ve been hard at work pulling apart miss Rosy the Argosy, and I realized that I don’t really have an update here, just on social. Let’s take a look at the state of things shall we? Here is a progression of what we’ve done so far:

We’ve pulled out the following:

  • Five divider walls (1 wall-dining to kitchen, 2 walls-kitchen to bedroom, 2 walls-bedroom to bath)
  • Both twin beds
  • Upper cabinets above beds
  • Various brackets and metal framework

It took us two full days over two weekends to do all of that werk werk werk werk werk. In the Texas heat, y’all. At least we plug in the trailer and run the AC while we work.

Demo day on TV consists of folks smashing up cabinets with a sledge hammer, and pulling wreckage to the curb to be picked up by a disposal company. Demo day in real life, when you don’t have a Hollywood budget and have to be careful about the frame, walls, and windows of your camper, consists of hammering or drilling out rivets one by one, and removing hundreds of screws individually. We are replacing all of the particle board pieces with real wood, so we are being careful not to damage any pieces so that we can use them to measure. I REALLY don’t want to do the math it would take to measure out those Airstream curves.

We feel like we’re making pretty good progress! It’s hard doing our nine-to-fives and school all week when all we want to do is be working on Rosy! Gotta pay that reno bill, though, ya know?

Anyone have any reno stories to share? Post ’em in the comments, we’d love to hear from you!