Adventure Awaits...

When we left off, we were about to remove some of the skin, aluminum siding. Regardless of what you see on YouTube, you need to remove exterior panels to properly repair frame and paneling damage to a travel trailer. Its time consuming, but not hard to do. (you will have nightmares about staples and rusty screws, for sure, but not hard work.) We got the J-rail off and started to pull staples. Turns out, they weren't attached to the frame, well because, there wasn't any frame. The lower front curbside wings had completely rotted away, the skin was attached to itself and the J-rail.

This is Thor, he has been checking on every step of the process. he loves his trailer and will not let us mess her up. 

At this moment, just like you reading this, we said, "What have we done?!" We immediately saw what looked to be a complete waste of money. We bought this trailer to spend a year or two in it camping and testing out RV adventuring; here it is disintegrating before our eyes. Before going to far off the deep end let's see what else she is hiding.

As you can see the front panel was rotted pretty good as well. We tried just to replace the frame structure, but the sheet paneling was to rotted to provide any strength so we pulled that out and rebuilt it. 

Heya decided to join the team, because you can't have enough supervisors on a job.

We got the new panel built and its about here things took a drastic turn. Taking a break from the panel build, we went back to Thelma and did a little more investigating. Just with what we had opened up so far we can see both side walls need paneling replaced, neither of the front Skirt board had survived in tack. The walls had pulled away form the trailer leaving a 3/4 to 1" gap along the floor. A previous owner resolved that issue by pumping tubes of Caulk and silicone in the gap. Now caulk is wonderful stuff, but not sure it was intended to keep a 3500 lbs trailer together running the interstate at 65mph. Just a guess though.

Kinda hard to tell but the bright white spot and the gray bubble just below are about an inch thick line of caulk that runs from the front to the wheel well. This was on both sides. All the screws had rusted out as well. 

We stopped and went to look at new trailers and investigated how much it would cost to haul this one to a salvage yard/dump. It felt like it was worth the loss to not deal with this. Timing of things plays an important role in life's decisions. With most of the country shut down due to Covid-19, we didn't have anywhere to go. A new trailer while not financially out of reach would have a huge impact on the traveling budget for the next few years, and we haven't even tested RVing to see if we really liked it. We already know we like to remodel. So....  Why not?

Thelma even warned us the very first time we met.

 

Adventure Awaits....  You just don't always know what it has in store for you.