What I did on my vacation…..

Vacation this year meant 3 days removing unnecessary roof penetrations and patching their holes. This meant a whole lot of scraping. And cramped hands. I don't mean to complain too much, I did enjoy a few beers up there too!

Clearly, I bought this before I read the label! There are very few true professionals in this world. 

After patching the holes, the next step was scraping and cleaning each riveted roof seam and drip rail. I put many hours into ensuring there will be no leaks.

The black areas are patches over holes and seams. I have to wait 30 days until the asphalt cures before I can scrape the old cracked roof coating, lightly pressure wash, and then apply a new coating over the entire roof. I'll be using an aluminum colored fibrous  brush on coat.

I also completed the most of the wiring rough in this week. I know, I know, the 200A service panel is overkill. I plan on feeding 100A to sub panel elsewhere pretty quickly after parking this thing.  Low voltage stuff is something that I have a lot to learn about. I plan on stepping the power down from 120v to 12v with a transformer so that I can switch on all the old trailer's marking and tail lights as an exterior accent.

I'm going to make time soon to try a few different sample finishes. I have some wall sections that were removed for windows that I can try things out on. I don't plan on a polished mirror finish. I kind of like the idea of something between what I have and a polished look.

I built a little box to enclose my Viega water distribution manifold so that I can insulate it when all the plumbing is done. The lines that you see feed the trailer's needs with the exception of the water heater loop which will come along after moving the trailer to it's new location. The remaining discharges will feed things like the washer/dryer, hose bibs, and outdoor shower. 

To date, I have not contracted anything out. I will be doing that with spray foam insulation in the next month or so. That's a big check to write, so it's time to get back to making money! I'm grateful that the phone has been ringing for tree work. 

A Statement of Purpose.

So why do this? Why buy an old mobile home? Why improve it way beyond it's original intent? Why put all of your energy into a trailer house?

That's what she said.

Just kidding.

After buying our first home, a 1080 square foot 1928 wood frame in a small town, we worked very hard to customize and personify our dwelling while also improving it's efficiency. It has been a wonderful seven year adventure. When we look around at our work, we are proud of the distance we have come. We also want to be somewhere new seven years from now. We're only on this earth for a brief life, so we better experience whatever it is we desire.

We want to live on an unrestricted piece of land. We want, for ourselves and for our children, the freedom to live as we please.  We're no different than everyone else on this earth. Here in central Texas, land is not cheap. In order to purchase a piece of land to our liking, we would have to live in a tent. Not  that I'm judging tent dwellers, it just would not work for our family.

We had recently bought a funky old travel trailer and were enjoying the freedom and flexibility that it afforded us when the light bulb went off in our heads. What if we bought a bigger travel trailer and lived in it while we built a home? The idea sounded perfect to me, but not so for my wife. She was homeschooling our girls at the time and her mind drifted to the idea of rainy days with grumpy daughters while Daddy was away at work. Fair enough.  She thought about it for several months. So did I. It was gonna be really cramped in there with 2 kids.

What about a mobile home? Yuck. it just has a lousy feeling to it. Sorry mobile home dwellers, we're just too damn picky.

I was still looking at travel trailers and hoping that I could find one that felt big enough to us. My wife was halfway on board when I stumbled on to this trailer house. I drove the couple hours to check it out. I think my wife allowed me to go look at it feeling fairly certain that something major would be wrong with it and that I would come back empty handed. We had been through that scenario several times before.

Instead, I came back home with a vision. I envisioned this trailer house in my driveway, built out with cash before we sold our home. I envisioned the profit from our home sale becoming a handsome down payment on a piece of land. Land where my family's hobbies, ideas and interests can develop. And our basic needs are met in a mobile home packed with design features and customization at every corner. A perfect blend of 1961 vintage and 2014 modernism. A large screened porch with fire pit. A 3 story lookout tower.  Wood. Aluminum. Concrete. Steel. Freedom. Flexibility.

Roof Work

While the weather perked up for us, I took the opportunity to patch some holes in the roof.

Not every roof penetration was leaking, but I'm still going to re-patch every previous hole and seam. 

Hopefully by the end of the day I will be done with the patching and then I'll wait thirty days or so before I coat the entire roof with an aluminum colored fibrous coating. 

Side by side, the same brand of roof coating that is white is almost 25% more efficient. I really want to use the white one, but the aluminum coating just looks so much better. 

Build Momentum

 The last few months have been great. We have visited with much of our family, attended weddings, hosted parties, made changes at work, celebrated holidays, maintained our cars, and even found the time to earn a little extra money. This is daily life. Daily life is good. But it feels like I lost my momentum because of this here Christmas tree.

So I recycled it. 

 

 

 

Like most projects, I am behind schedule and over budget. Now, I have not made poor choices with my purchases. Everything so far has cost what it had to in order to get the level of quality that we desire. So I feel that I can't control the prices that are set by people that could care less about my budget. I will continue to find creative ways to achieve our goals without wasting money, and the rest is what it is. So that's the budget. As for the schedule, that is something I can control. As much as it hurt to re-evaluate my deadlines, I did. And I tried to be both ambitious and realistic.

 

Roughing in drainage plumbing is something that I have never done before. I have done quite a bit of plumbing, but I'd always had something to start with. Whether they were right or wrong, someone else had always made the difficult decisions. So I scratched my head over where to locate this toilet flange for over a week. The structural members running under this trailer did not make that an easy decision.

 

 

Once that decision was made, things began to come together pretty easily. So drainage and ventilation of the drainage plumbing is close to done. Supply plumbing should be relatively easy.

These trailers don't belong to me. That's why I stopped to take the picture. Spartan trailers and mobile homes are just not that common. And if I see them, they are usually dormant. These ones, however, were just moved to this site 8-10 miles from my home along a road that I travel almost every day. I can't wait to see someone out and about. Whoever you are, my name is Nathan and I will be stopping by! Spotting these trailers made me wonder what the owner's intent was. Not that they owe me or anybody an explanation, but I wonder. And it's at this moment that I realize that I have not stated my own intent on this forum . Up next: A Statement of Purpose.