I added a few low voltage LED's to the old marking lights. 

At night, the single emitter mounted inside the old housings adds a nice touch to the trailer. Now I need to find a very specific license plate: 1961 Texas Trailer. Finder's fee paid!

Summertime......

It's worth mentioning that we have begun the search for a place to park this heap.  It would be great to find our paradise in  the next few months. It would be even greater if we could find a bank that would give us a loan on raw land. We've got a day set aside to go sit down with a few banks and see what we can work out. I'm feeling like I am approaching the hump with this project. Sure, there is tons of work left to do, but the major tasks are behind us in large part, and it's motivating to look back a little ways and celebrate our accomplishments. 

This is the channel where the line set for the Mini-Split air conditioner will go. I toyed with the idea of using a 2-zone system in order to feed air from both ends of the long and narrow structure. I don't know why I was surprised to find out that it would cost twice as much and take up twice as much space.  I decided instead to place the single zone unit in the center of the structure nearest the common living space. The bedroom doors will be open the vast majority of the time anyhow, and we'll just need to use some fans to keep the air circulating.  

As the cabinets are being made by my buddy Steve, I've made it a priority to get the partition wall that they will back up to erected.  This meant that I had to slap a few planks up on the ceiling in order to have something to attach the wall to. This is the wall mocked up, and I should be able to complete the job tomorrow. 

I dug this out of an old shed at my Dad's place.  It was mine when I was a kid, and I plan to restore it to it's former hell raising condition. I figure that it's a good summer project to do with my daughters and all the free time I've got! 

This is where I consider my next steps.  

So, It's been a while. I've been busy, folks! After all the roof patching and tar work, I had to wait a minimum of 30 days before coating the roof. I had a hard time choosing a product because all white roof coatings are better than all silver roof coatings. In many cases, 30% more efficient at reflecting heat. But who wants a white roof on a silver trailer? I had to bend my logical mind and chose this silver coating. It was a messy job, and a real challenge to not drip this muck down the side of the trailer. 

Originally I had planned to cover the ceiling first, so I got busy making furring strips that you can see sandwiched around the roof rafters. After thinking a little further down the line, I decided that the odds of needing to access the underside of the roof are greater than needing to access the inside of the walls. So I started ripping 15/32 plywood into 6" strips for wallboard. We plan on whitewashing much of it. 

Naturally, as soon as I was getting something accomplished, my table saw motor went out. I took it to a  repair shop after my troubleshooting accomplished nothing.  It was totaled, so I bought a new motor that's worth 3x what I paid for my table saw on craigslist! I figured it was still better than buying another used saw that may have it's own problems. 

This is naturally the next post. I made a really dumb mistake. 

Fortunately, I had good gloves on and had just switched the motor off. So I stopped the blade's momentum with my finger while leaning over the table to pick something up. Don't do that.  Most table saw injuries don't end this well, so I am grateful that I still have a finger.  The injury does make simple work a lot harder though. 

I completed a wall just to be sure that this is how we want to proceed. We're liking it, so I took the time to sit down and re-align my priorities for the next few months. I find that I feel a lot better about progress when there is something to cross out as completed. 

These are the new goals and deadlines. Under this sheet of paper, there are several other deadlines that were not met! It keeps me pushing though…...

Will she float?

Insulation on the underside of the trailer. No more air infiltration!

I asked for 1.5" of closed cell foam, and in many areas I got up to 3".  I guess it has something to do with the application technique, but I like to think that it has something to do with the dozen doughnuts I brought the applicators. 

I bet this bad boy would float a lot further than your average trailer house!

Getting to this point is a big milestone for us. Covering the ceiling comes next in conjunction with overhead lighting. I'll then be able to erect interior partition walls and cover the exterior walls. How long will that take? Your guess is as good as mine. 

Trim is now complete on the exterior. It's nothing fancy, and I think that the color of the cedar will really blend well with the aluminum once it grays a little. 

It's late in the evening here the night before the spray rig shows up to insulate. I had to clear out the workspace for the applicator, which was a good thing for me to do anyway.  I had accumulated quite an arsenal of tools and materials inside the trailer. 

The bummer is that all of that stuff had so go somewhere else. So for the time being, my garage is now a dump. 

This is the trailer that contains the spray equipment. They arrived this morning and it's a real challenge for me to let the applicators work without me looking over their shoulder. Until now, I've never had anyone work for me. I feel self conscious! I don't know what to do while they are here, but I'm not comfortable leaving either! They are about half way done with the job at this moment. I'm starting to twitch and blink erratically!  I am going in the yard to dig a hole straight down until they leave. 

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.