We are camping this weekend but I brought my little featherweight machine with me and made this little doll quilt.  So this week was not a total loss.

I went to TN to get my other camper for the interior but I got 50 miles up the road and called the man to let him know what time I would be there and he told me he sold the camper last Saturday.  Soooo now I am in the process of scouting down another camper so I will have the stuff for the inside.  I could buy it piece by piece but that would take forever.  I also need to take one apart so I will know how to put this one back together.  After all this is my first (and probably my last) project like this.

I cut Betsy's floor into three pieces so I could pick it up and get it off the frame.  There was four layers that made up the floor. 
The top was a vinyl linoleum, the second layer was 3/4 inch plywood, the third layer was a 2X4 frame and insulation, and the fourth is some kind of foam board.  I pulled the foam board off one of the sections to make sure I get a record of how it was made so I can put it back together correctly.

The rats were living between the layers and had made them a home with the insulation.

This is all that was left of the insulation. This had to have been a huge rat.

It is Monday again, and I usually try to work on my camper on Mondays.  Today I took the wooden wall frame down.  John and Jeff helped me take the floor up. The bottom of the floor was covered in some kind of porous board.  I assume it was on there to soak up the moisture.  It is almost like wet paper.  When you touch it, it just crumbles in your hand.  I want to take it off the bottom and see how the floor was constructed before I trash it.  These are the boards after we got them off the frame.

We took the floor off in three pieces.  Two of them are stacked on the ground

 to the left and the other one is leaning on the tongue of the trailer.   The top is laid out on the ground behind the frame. We took it off in one long sheet.  Now I have to separate the pieces so I can store it till I can get the frame ready rebuild it.This is the top.  I tried to pull some trim off the top and the
walls were like paper, the whole thing just fell apart. 

This is another angle of the walls falling in. 

I have all the remains loaded on the trailer.  I have to unload the good parts in the boat shed.

I have to unload the unusable parts on the burn pile.

I need to make a place in the garage to hand my window frames so they don't get bent up.

I still need to get the flooring up and get it on the burn pile.

I need to rake the ground around the frame and get that all cleaned up.

I need to take the top apart and stack the pieces in the boat shed till I get ready to take the paint off all the tin and the window frames.

Then I am going to go buy another camper like this one that has been hit in the rear. I will take it all apart and save the parts of it that can be used to take the two campers and make one. 

My goal is to have it ready to travel to the Houston, TX quilt show which I believe is always in November.  So that gives me 14 months to get all this done.

 

Here are a few ideas for my finished product:

My daughter in law took rolls of brown paper, tore it in pieces, dipped it in polyurethane and put it on her walls in her den.  I thought she had lost her mind but it turned out to look like leather wallpaper. It turned out very pretty.  I went to a quilt retreat in Odenville in 2012 and 4 ladies from Maryland, we called them the Merry Maids of Maryland, came to retreat in a Mini van covered with quilt scraps glued to the sides with starch. It was so cool looking.  I THINK I AM GOING TO COVER THE INTERIOR WALLS IN THIS CAMPER IN SCRAPS OF FABRIC AND SECURE IT WITH THE POLYURETHANE.

I have found some old singer sewing machine cabinet drawers on ebay.  These drawers are a perfect size for the storage bags you buy at stitchers to store all your cross stitching threads in.  I want to make me some kind of frame for them to go in and use them for thread storage. 

My table in the camper will be constructed to fit right over my sew eazi table that houses my singer featherweight machine. 

 I think I am going to have me a quilt block painted on the back under the window like the quilt blocks you see painted on barns across the countryside.

I want to use my little camper to go to Paducah and other places around the country that have big quilt shows. 

Raise your hand if you want me to pick you up along the way!!!!!

I was asked if I was doing this because I was bored?  Bored I am not!  I have always loved the outdoors.  My vocation for 25 years was driving trucks.  I worked for UPS and then worked for Fed EX, and then drove over the road for a while.  When I retired I missed the going.  When I worked for UPS I delivered in Amory, MS and every morning when I went into town and every evening when I left town to come home, I watched the progress being made on the bridge being built across the Tenn Tom waterway.  They built the bridge just north of the old bridge and the new bridge was up in the air above the old one.  It was like you were down on the ground watching the new bridge just appearing before you day after day.  I was fascinated by that and enjoyed the whole process however I was a little afraid the first time I had to drive over the new bridge!!! After retiring and staying at home for the past few years, I get to thinking about all the things I have seen and when I drive to town and see new things being done since the last time I was in town, I feel so left out and I feel like I did not have my wig on and the world just run off and left me behind.   I get to feeling a little caged and I want to roam again.  So to answer the question, I am not bored.  This little camper thing is just a diversion to take my mind away from the hum drum of laundry, dishes, mopping, ironing, ...... you get the picture?

Who knows, I might have just found me some retirement income.  I have found that there is a huge demand for these refurbished beauties.  If I can pull this restoration project off, I might just make a little profit from it.  It will probably be like my quilts though.  When I make a quilt for someone, I don't want to give it to them. I get attached to them and want to keep them for myself. 

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I have picked up a new Hobby.  I will be down to sleeping only 1 hour in 24!!!!
Mike is getting ready to retire and for several years he has been asking me to get us a camper.
I told him he was 6' 4" and weighed ......  It would be like stuffing an elephant in a fiat.

This past spring he started taking me around to look at different used campers that he had found in places.  By early summer we had found a very nice used camper.  We have camped several times this summer and I really love the peaceful weekends on the lake.  He has one more year before he retires and I hope we can see most of the US before the money runs out!!!!

Well I have really got the bug!.  When he said he wanted to go camping I was dead set against it because my only two camping trips 40 years ago was enough for me.  Both trips turned into monsoons nearly washing us into the creek.  The last time we camped the boys were real small, it came an awful storm during the night, the squirrels ate all our food and the truck broke down in the walmart parking lot on the way home.  To make matters even worse there was a 110 degrees heat index. 

Two weeks ago I found this on craigslist.

 

 

 

She almost fell apart by the time we pulled her 30 miles home.  I think I have found out that she is a 1963 Utopia by Winnebago.  I am still researching the history of it but when I rescued her she had been terribly abused by deer hunters using her as a hunting cabin.  They have cut the a frame tongue off of her and added a straight tongue and her axle is broken. The water leaks over the past 50 years has damaged most of the wooden frame and all the edges of the flooring. 

 

I work on her one day a week and this is what she looks like today.

I am going to wrap her in brown shipping paper and then go inside and take a felt tip marker and draw me a blue print of the frame so I will know how to put her back together. 

 

I have found another old camper almost just like her that has been rear ended and the frame is damaged in the rear.  The interior is intact.  I have a grandson that is an expert welder so he is going to take the two frames and the axle and fix her right up. 

 

Wish me luck. This reminds me of working with my dad when we used to fix up old houses for the bank after they had been repossessed and the owners had in some cases tried to burn them down.