Tuesday 10 May 2016

Me vs The Tiny Trailer Reno - Part 1

As a person with no patience for fiddly shit (which includes removing doors to paint them, and measuring of any sort), I'm currently struggling with my recent decision buy and refinish a 1983 Bigfoot trailer.

To be fair, the trailer is in incredible condition for it's age, but it does need some love.

The fake wood panelling is, well, awful, and it has some water damage that needs attention. The cushions, while in reasonable condition, are better suited to a love shack from the 80's than a trailer I want to live in for any period of time. I'm pretty sure the dust coming off of them predates the dinosaurs. And the ivy decoupage wallpaper border is nothing short of a nightmare to get off the walls.

But it works, so that's great. I don't have to fix anything before it's usable, which is a good thing because I'm shitty at fixing things, I don't want to fix things, and if I do find myself in a position to fix a thing, it will probably be done very slowly.

So this will be an ongoing project, but I wanted to share the beginnings...

This is the trailer. It's cute and tiny. My poor 6'2 ft tall husband should probably invest in a tent.
Happily there are no holes, and the colour isn't visually offensive. I'm not painting the outside.



The walls with the water damage were wrinkled and came off in your hands. Given that I have a two year old that would definitely fuck around with anything that came off in his hands, that shit had to go. Luckily the guy who we got it from redid the floor and left me some of the vinyl stick on floor boards.
You can see at the top of the
fake wood walls where the
ivy used to be
They stick, so now they are stick on wall boards. The rest will get painted soon. You know, soon like eventually, and I'm probably going to try to paint around things because I'm pretty sure that if I take the screws out to get the cupboard doors off, they will never go back on again.

I've also done my best to get the terrible ivy wallpaper off. I've done a medium job at it, but I'm sick to death of pulling it off and inhaling old wallpaper dust. Hopefully the paint will cover what's left if it tolerably enough because some of that shit appears to have been welded to the walls and short of it being burned off, I'm pretty sure it's going to outlive me.

So much ugly fabric in
one place
The cushions are getting recovered, because so help me, they are ugly as fuck. The fabric is also splitting and probably contains enough source material to clone a colony of dust mites.

The new and better
fabric
The difficulty here is that recovering cushions requires time, patience, measuring skills, and a sewing machine. I have none of these. This should go terribly.

So that's where I am so far. I'll post more as I go along. It'll be interesting.







2 comments:

  1. Oh my gosh! This is exactly like the trailer I had growing up and my dad passed down to me 10 years ago! but it had a hard life when it was my brother's for a couple years and ended up having too much damage in the roof to fix, so I cried when my hubby ripped it apart to turn into a quad trailer :-( the cushions are surprisingly easy to recover, I kept some of them and my girls use them for sleepovers and my dogs use one on my window bench. I kept the fake leather and the zipper and sewed them onto the new fabric cover.

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  2. You're skills with a sewing machine far surpass mine. They are great little trailers. I look forward to giving this one a new life

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