#airstreamremodel

[welovesp-blog]

Pierre Bouvier

Sanding time!! : : : #airstreamremodel #airstream #nicezitbro

[heirstream]

Mick came home from work and immediately started sawing through the floor. I almost puked.  He had been wanting to remove the subfloor for quite some time to reveal the gray and black water tanks.  He was hell-bent on moving the bathroom for a while, and after seeing the size of the tanks I think his need has been quelled. Don’t get me wrong, he’s still pissed about it! “It’s a stupid design,” he’s still adamant about that one.  Our only option appears to be switching the bathroom to the opposite side, but why bother.

[heirstream]

As many of you know, Craigslist is both the biggest blessing, and the most disappointing selling forum ever.  I posted all of the parts that we were discarding from our Airstream on Craigslist.  We hadn’t finished our demo yet, so I didn’t list any prices or specific items that we had.  I eventually received a call from a woman a few towns over.  She had purchased an already gutted Airstream for her husband as a hunting trailer.  She wanted to outfit the trailer in original parts.  Parts I possessed. We arranged a meeting, and they brought a trailer to haul away the parts.  We had agreed on a price over the phone.  You know how the rest of the story goes… The Craigslistee shows up with a minimum of $50 less than what you had agreed upon.  Sometimes they show up with no money at all.  Our situation was the latter.  They wanted to set up a payment plan… gah! We were obviously annoyed, so miraculously the woman’s mother had some cash on her.  They gave us the cash and promised to pay us the rest of the agreed amount at a future date.  We told them don’t worry about it. They will get you every time.

[heirstream]

For a few days, I puttered around doing menial tasks again.  Meanwhile, Mick built this rather impressive contraption to measure, and 3D model, the entire Airstream.  It took a few days, but we have a 100% accurate scale 3D model of Vivian.  She’s a 31ft Airstream Sovereign Land Yacht... if anyone is interested in purchasing plans, I’m sure we could work something out.  It’s an untapped market.

[heirstream]

Some more time elapsed before my fuzzy seal arrived, so I decided to continue priming into the hallway.  I removed light fixtures and basically wasted a whole bunch of time.

me

[heirstream]

A Little Screen Time

In Mick’s absence, I felt the best use of my time and talents would be to tackle replacing and repairing the screens.  The screens were painted with a cream color that has faded and rusted over time.  We wanted to bring them back to the original aluminum color.  Plus, during demo of the bedroom, a wayward curtain track had sliced open the back right screen.  I began by removing the screens in the bedroom.  To remove an airstream screen, you must first remove the little plastic handles on the arms of the window.  These little plastic handles are basically rusted in place, and to re-iterate, they are made of the same yellowed, crusty plastic as most everything else.  While removing the back window screen, I shattered one of these handles. I was using an electric drill, which probably wasn't the best idea, and it happened almost instantaneously. I called Airstreamsupply.com to see if replacements exist, and of course, they don’t.  I bought some contact cement and glued all the little shattered pieces together, before it [Mick] dawned on me that we could replace them with lovely turned wood handles. Apparently, I don't learn my lesson, because I later shattered another handle on one of the front windows, and glued that one back together as well. I guess it’s my back up plan.

To prime the screen frames, I first scrubbed them down with a white vinegar and water solution using a steel wool pad.  Vinegar is a natural metal etching agent. After a quick hose down, I sanded them with a palm sander, and again they got the hose.  Instead of wasting a bunch of time sanding all of the paint off, I decided to repaint the screen frames with Rust-oleum 2x Cover spray paint in the aluminium color.  Despite its 2x cover claim, I had to do 2 coats of the spray paint to get them looking fresh. When the paint was dry, I laid out the fiberglass screen, purchased from the nicest man in the world at Jerry’s Home Improvement.  Seriously, this guy gets the most compliments on customer service in Jerry’s history. His name is Dave, and I almost hugged him when I left, but settled for 3 handshakes instead. I cut the screen to the appropriate size, about an inch overlap on all sides.  I clamped down two opposing sides of the screen over the frame, and went along the spline track with my little red plastic spline tool.  I then inserted the spline, pulling the material tight as I went along.

The hardest part of replacing Airstream screens is the cursed “fuzzy seal.” This is exactly as it sounds.  It’s a gray, fuzzy seal that borders the gap in the screen where the arms of the window come through. Its function is to keep bugs from flying through the gaps.  It looks like a tiny old man’s mustache, or a long line of toothbrush bristles, and nobody knows what it is, or how to find it.  I called around all over the place to find this stuff.  Most of the time I was met with long silent pauses, before a flood of questions on if this material actually exists, or was I just making it up to pester RV supply dealers.  After some google searching, I found that the correct term for the part was “fuzzy seal.” I had used any number of adjectives to describe the tiny mustache material, and for some reason, fuzzy seal never came out of my mouth.  Good. I can order it from a supply place in North Carolina called Out-of-Doors Mart $1.59 a foot.  36 feet will do the job, but shipping was an additional arm and leg.  In cheap skate mode, I kept thinking of all the other parts we were eventually going to have to order so I could combine the shipping cost.  After many debates on the phone with Mick, I decided on 101 feet of rubber window gasket, and the adhesive for replacement.  Out-of-Doors Mart is really cool, they will refund you any overage in the shipping estimate, which saved me $4. This whole process of ordering only took about 2 weeks.

While I anxiously awaited my fuzzy seal shipment, I moved onto other important tasks, such as taking down mirrors, and painting the refrigerator grates.  Again, resorting to Rust-oleum spray paints, I purchased the white appliance paint to refinish the grates.  I dropped the ball on “before” and “after” photos, they would have been good.  The grates were almost 100% rust.  A pile of rusty debris lay on the bottom of the refrigerator. Again, using my steel wool pads and vinegar solution, I scrubbed as much of the rust off as I could.  I had also purchased a metal etching primer (Rust-oleum) which I applied in two coats to the grates.  This whole process went really well, and the fridge looks nice and clean!

I repeated the etching primer process with the water heater vent cover on the exterior.  For some reason, no one ever cared to paint it from glossy white to aluminium to match the rest of the Airstream… Crazy, right?!

[heirstream]

Now that we're stable, and Mick was off on his month long trip to the East Coast, it was business time. My first task was to pull off the crusty, yellowed plastic trim pieces that line the vinyl wall panels in the bedroom.  Then I washed the walls with several solutions, first Simple Green, then Goo Gone, and after sanding the walls with a palm sander with 120 grit sandpaper, a vinegar solution was applied.  All in a futile attempt to rid the walls of the amber stickiness.  Nothing seemed to do the trick, so I thought if I applied the first coat of primer, maybe it would somehow, magically, seal it in.  Since the endcaps in 70s Airstreams are fiberglass, I wasn't sure if the paint would adhere to the surface.  I purchased Krylon’s Plastic Primer, which comes in a spray can.  This did not go well. 

Tiny flecks of white paint fell like snow all over the bedroom.  Fearing what the blizzard would become, I halted this process immediately.  I switched over to a more traditional painting method.

As I was instructed from one of the many remodeling blogs I had been reading, I applied a very thin coat of Bullseye 1-2-3 primer (low VOC) to the entire bedroom area.  The stickiness prevailed! I replaced some rivets, and began to mud in all of the former rivet holes with spackle that were no longer necessary. I applied a second coat of primer to the fiberglass endcap.  At least the endcap looks beautiful now, with no stickiness.

[heirstream]

I would equate it to asking someone to be your maid-of-honor…it’s a commitment, but not as serious as asking someone to marry you.  Nervous and excited, we asked Tom and Joel to be our yard mates.  We had exhausted the novelty of having the Airstream parked on the street in front of their house, with constant interruptions of passers by. It was time to get serious and start tearing this thing apart.  We worked out an agreement, both work-trade for fixing up an additional room in their garage, and a small amount of rent.  It ended up being the perfect solution, we help each other out, and they are both wonderful people.

A few things needed to happen before we could back her in along their fence in the driveway.  Mick and Tom had to tear out a fence and a large gate that separated the front yard from the back.  Mick woke up early and they tackled the fence while I buttoned up the Airstream for her move.

Once the area was clear, we laid some plywood down in attempt to level it out and get the tires up off of the ground. We ended up overshooting, and the tires remain on the ground after all.  Overall, it went pretty smoothly.