Wow, so who knew that we would totally fail at keeping the blog updated? We apologize for not being better. Hopefully as we move forward, we will be better. Even if this is not updated, we have been very busy getting Ike ready for his rebuild. We are taking lots of pictures of everything we take apart so we can share our fun. We are finally making some great progress and are looking forward to the fun of rebuilding the camper.
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| Ike's many colors |
Late last year we took out the disgusting carpet and dismantled the interior, then came winter and very little got done because of the weather. We managed to get the windows out without breaking them and then prepared to remove the aluminum skins. It took almost 4 months to get the skins off. In the process we figured out that Ike was painted 5 different colors over his lifetime... coral, black, green, aqua, and blue. Poor thing, but just imagine all of those colors in the screws that you have to try to remove. Not to mention the previous owners were in love with caulking and rubber roofing goop. They must have used at least a case of caulking around the windows and along the seams. We had to take a knife point and pick out the paint and caulking in every screw on the skins. Many hours of tedious work, but we got the skins off at the end of June.
The wood frame behind the skins is awful. The rot is bad in the known spots- windows, around the door, vent and corners. We are not really sure how it stayed together driving it home. From here things moved a little faster, we were able to get the roof off and drop the walls. We are left with just the floor on the frame as of early September. Sadly, we really cannot reuse much from the framing. We kept the walls so that we can use them as a template to rebuild.
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| Getting the skins off, one piece at a time |
As we enter the rebuild stage, we are very hopeful that we will get a lot done this winter. Not the glamorous stuff, but the list is long. Some of the stuff we plan to this winter includes: scrubbing the aluminum window frames, repairing screens and missing glass in the windows, rebuilding the kitchen, rebuilding the door and screen door, scrubbing/ repainting the refrigerator, putting new laminate on the kitchen table, packing bearings and rebuilding the wall frames. We are hoping to get some of this "fun" stuff done now so that next spring we can focus on the rebuild and putting Ike back together.
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| Front corner rot |
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| Back corner rot |
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| All skins off, roof left |
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| Removing the rusted nails from the skin |
As we tore apart Ike, we had to decide to keep and reuse or do new. Most of interior will be new, but we plan to rebuild trying to maintain the 1955 lines using modern 2013 materials. We found a great flooring company that allows you to design your own floor. Super excited since only about 8 square feet of floor can actually matter for design. The rest of the floor is under cabinets, beds, or tables. It will allow us to bring in some fun colors and shapes. We also found a really cool new design for the formica counters and tabletop. It has a great retro feel, but is new.
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