After a great trip to Alaska (June/July) we got back to work on the trailer from mid-August to mid-October. Not as much progress as we would have liked but progress none the less.

Flooring

Last summer we sandblasted and painted the frame. We also put in a new plywood floor but didn't get it bolted to the frame. That was the first task this year. Each carriage bolt was countersunk so the floor could be flush. I then used body filler (like bondo) to fill the countersinks. There were a lot of carriage bolts too.

Denise picked out nice lenolium flooring. I didn't feel comfortable cutting up an expensive piece of lenolium without knowing what I was doing, so we jobbed it out. Most flooring has dimples, like a golf ball, which makes them very hard to clean. The flooring Denise picked is a heavy duty commercial flooring which doesn't have dimples. And it is a pretty blue.

It doesn't show well in pictures, it's much prettier than can be seen in a photo. It does look retro but mainly we liked it, any retro theme is secondary.

Besides finishing the floor we pulled the windows to work on over the winter and started stripped paint. We found the original color of the trailer under some of the windows. It was a very pretty blue color. I mean the blue on the left, the "blue" on the right is the newer house paint disaster. Inbetween the two was a green paint job which was well done, but not as pretty as the original blue. You can see the green where the bracket sat.

We checked on painting the trailer once it's done and found the cost to be $3000-4000 dollars, at least for a nice auto quality paint job. This seems unreasonable, and we don't feel competent to do it ourselves. Thus we'll probably strip it and leave it polished aluminum. Not mirror finished, but polished and waxed.

So we started stipping with the thought of polishing. We figured the stipper wouldn't get along well with the foam insulation so decided to stip what we could before tackling the interior walls. I finally got the rigid foam insulation (had to special order 3/4") and found it isn't harmed by the stipper. We did get a start on stipping, although there's still a lot to do.

I also found and purchased 1/8" birch plywood for the interior walls and ceiling. Only one panel shows no dammage so we plan to just replace them all.