rosy progress report – february

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!

our aesthetic is…

When people find out we’re remodeling a camper and plan to live in it, generally, we get two schools of response. Response A – people think we’re crazy hippies (they’re not totally wrong). Response 2 – they’re fascinated and ask tons of questions.

One that’s been challenging to answer is what it will look like when we’re done. Its a little tough to just ball all of our wild ideas into a compact little package of aesthetic explanation in one conversation. But I thought it would be fun to talk about it here, while we’re still in the midst of pulling Rosy apart. After all, the designing and decorating is where the real action is at, amiright?!

So here are some high-level representations and annotations of our ideal aesthetic:

*Painted white interior skin and walls. Don’t have a solid visual representation of this, but you get it, right?

*Weathered/barnwood style flooring. The second one here is my favorite! I love the slight warm tones with the burnt grays.

*Counter and table surfaces will either be faux concrete or hardwood (undecided)!

*Pops of sage green, rose, peach and rose gold! Most of the metal in the camper is already rose gold (that was a freebie) and I’ve seen some pretty rad rose gold spray paint on the market.

*Black on white simplistic, linear graphic accents (like the cacti sheets I bought to turn into curtains).

*Plants. All the plants.

We are really going for a light and airy, minimalistic aesthetic, with well thought out storage, and multi-use zones.
We also got a lot of inspiration (and the decision to go with white walls) from following Mavis, Dunes, and Tin Can Homestead on insta.

Hopefully that gives whomever so reads this some sort of mental picture of how we plan on outfitting Rosy. Now if we could just pick a floor plan. I made some templates for us to draw out multiple layouts, which should help us get closer to nailing that down. DIY pun intended.

Happy camping, everyone!

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?

our awning works?!?!

Arnavick got really brave last weekend and decided to pull open our awning!

When we bought Rosy, her prior owner told us the canvas was trashed. We were expecting a rotted, nasty mess.

You guys, LOOK AT THIS AWNING RIGHT HERE!

It’s in pretty darn good shape compared to the image we had in mind. And the colors! The colors match our beloved exterior striping! Swoon!

So, there IS a little problem… well, two little problems.
One, there’s some gunk at the very top of the awning. We will have to give it a good washing to see whether it’s just gunk, or if the canvas is rotting. I’ve never wished so hard for something to be gunk.

Two, the thread came out of the seam that’s right by the door, causing a hole. I can sew really well, but I don’t know how to go about fixing this problem. I don’t want to take the awning off, and I am not confident in my sewing when I have to raise my hands over my head to do so. The great news is, the fabric there is intact.

I was thinking to possibly just gorilla glue the seam back together? Is that crazy?

cacti fabric!

I love an impromptu sister date! If ever there were a best sister award, mine would certainly receive it. We’re incredibly close, sometimes to the point of annoying our family with giggle fits and inside jokes. She’s the absolute greatest!

So when she threw out an invite to meet her at Target after work, I. WAS. THERE. I love catching up with her, and seeing my sweet nephew!

Target and I have a longstanding friendship (we see each other, like, all the time), which can get pricey if you’re not careful. I’ve even posted before about my trick for taking it easy on my wallet – my red sticker rule. If I focus my attention on clearance for non-essentials, my bank account doesn’t seem so anemic.

So when I saw that these sheets, these super cute cacti sheets, these sheets that I’ve commented on EVERY TIME I see them, were on clearance – I was all about it!

One clearance bedding cartwheel discount, one red card discount, and a $10 bill later, and I was on my way home with the cutest little cacti fabric you ever did see!

Sooo, I really want to use this for curtains in miss Rosy the Argosy! The sheets are white, so I’ll need to pair it with a thicker fabric backing for more privacy – wouldn’t a bright cactus green to match her exterior stripes be just perfect?! I’m trying to come up with a way that we can do two-layered curtains that we can use independently. As in, have the privacy curtain, but then also the option to use just the cacti curtain if we want some light to come thru in the daytime, but don’t want folks seeing in (like if I’m in my p-jams or something). More on that if/when I get it figured out.

It’ll be quite a while before I get working on curtains, we still have tons to do! But in all the hard demo work, it was nice to pick up something that’ll eventually be used for the decorating portion of the reno! I love the hard work of pulling things apart and rebuilding, but prettying her up will be so fun!

Peace, love, and camping, friends!

xo – J

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!

rosy the argosy – the before tour

If we’re gonna chronicle our renovation progress on Rosy the Argosy, we must start with the obligatory “before” tour, yes? Follow me…

Rosy is a 1979 model Airstream Argosy. She is 27′ long. The thing about the Argosy models that’s different than other Airstreams is that their exterior is white, not the shiny silver most people think of when they hear “Airstream”. Ours is the first Argosy I’ve ever seen with green stripes on the outside. I’ve only ever seen orange or blue striping. We are going to do our darnedest to preserve that striping! If it doesn’t make it through the reno and a vigorous exterior cleaning, we’ll replace it with an exact replica. We love the retro look it gives her! She’s a little rusty on the outside in some spots, but we plan on brushing/sanding/sandblasting and re-painting the rough parts.

We have yet to open our awning, but we’re told that the canvas is trashed. Sad face. The good news is, we can buy a custom awning to match the green stripes. The bad news is, it’s an expensive fix. We’ll post on that when the time comes.

Shall we go inside?

(we are the bottom layout in above)

Rosy’s plumbing and electric work are intact – impressive for a gal her age! She’s outfitted with a seating area, fold out dining table, kitchen with 4-burner gas stove and oven, twin beds, a back bath with a commode, sink and bath tub, three storage closets, and overhead storage cabinets throughout.

We’re keeping the bath and kitchen where they’re located but replacing the breaking, aging plastic and particle board with new, high quality materials. The twin beds will be pulled and replaced with a murphy-style full or queen bed and storage cabinets. The dining and seating area will also remain in the same spot, but will be updated with newer, better materials and a style that is uniquely #teamjamavick.

Perhaps our favorite feature (and part of how we chose her name) is her rose colored glasses!

Her previous owner tinted the wrap-around windows in front! We love the ROSY shadows the tint casts in the dining “room”! It’s weird, and we’re keeping it.

We have TONS to do before getting Rosy live-in ready, and we’ll post the ups, downs, ins, and outs as we go!

Happy camping, everyone!