Day 2

Lots of junk to remove at the beginning.

After ending day one without touching a paintbrush, I decided that I needed to adjust my goals. I would focus only on the rear bedroom of the trailer. It seemed that once I started with the unscrewing of hardware, there was no end to it. The airstream seemed to get more messy and when I looked around it seemed like I was creating more work to be done. My hope was that I could actually see progress and that would give me more motivation. It worked... for a day. I carefully cleaned, sanded, and painted primer on the walls, ceiling, and overhead storage while carefully avoiding the floor, light fixtures, and lower bunks.

Day 3

The next day Michael came to town and I had some progress to show. He took at one look at the back room and decided that EVERYTHING needed to come out. We spent a lot of day 3 in discussion about the layout of the bunks and the work consisted of removing the lower bunks, the overheard storage, and the floor.

That was when we we hit our first major stumbling block - A portion of the rear floor was rotted through. In the world of Airstreams - this is major. The floor is sandwiched between the frame and to replace it required either chiseling out the old floor or lifting up the frame to replace it. We were pretty bummed out, but decided to keep working. We found that the floor near the toilet was damp. As we pulled up the rest of the flooring, we discovered that a previous owner had already removed and replaced the front half of the trailer floor. Instead of rotted oxboard, it was treated plywood! YAY! After careful inspection by Michael's dad, we decided that the rotted section was small and under a non-weight bearing portion of the bunk. We could just patch that portion and move on.

That was our plan. It was now time to break for Thanksgiving. We were tempted to get back to painting after our holiday, but the temperature had dropped below 50 degrees and we were afraid the primer would gel up while we were working, so we called it quits.

“Your Subfloor looks... nice...”

— Anonymous Mette Sibling

Thanksgiving passed. The cold weather set in. Christmas passed. We were quickly approaching New Year's. We had given a tour to our siblings to which they replied "your sub-floor is nice." or something to that manor. I have to admit that the Airstream was not looking impressive bare and full of trash. We decided that before the New Year set in, we would try to get at least a couple of hours of work in. Since our propane tanks are empty, we brought in an electric space heater and set to work.

Michael and his dad started to remove the toilet. This got moved up on the priority list once we found the damp floor. Michael says that there was not enough bleach in the world to make this a pleasant job.

Day 5

Tile. That nasty floor must be covered.

We would love to repaint the whole bathroom, including the shower and sink - but under our time constraints, we were hoping to just close the door often and let it be. Of course the toilet leak required that we address the floor at least. We found some nice white subway tile and purchased 7 of them. Yes - 7 whole tiles. I know then men have this down. For a 33 year old musician, Michael has probably re-tiled almost 10 bathrooms in his life. His dad for sure exceeds his experience.

New years eve, they set at it: