The work begins....

So time to catch you up on what's been happening to the Caravan of Wrighteousness. We've had the caravan at Spanner Wielders' work for about 2 months now and given our rapidly approaching deadline you'd imagine we'd been zipping through the work right?..... Wrong.

I seem to be taking the lead in this project... and by taking the lead I mean, I seem to be the only one doing any real work - when Squiggle Butt allows it of course - which isn't very often. So its progressing, but much slower then required if its to make a début at Easter. Plus, given my complete noviceness (it's a word, I just used it in a sentence!), I sometimes get overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the task of returning our crapshack to any form of glory. And when I'm overwhelmed I hold planning meetings - I even proposed creating an agenda - that's right I am really that nerdy. Spanner Wielder vetoed this suggestion and we got down to some planning. Planning is what I do best when I lack direction - I still feel an agenda would have been beneficial.

We both agreed that we would do the caravan in section's ie front section, middle section and the rear section. Mainly because if we start ripping into the whole caravan it probably will fall in on our heads. So we've started on the front section...

Here's the before pic

And now you can see what we've done:


We've removed most of the rotten plywood. Our plan is to take as many photos of the internal wall structure as possible to ensure we replicate it correctly. Below is the right hand wall at the front. Please ignore all the junky cars you will see through the caravan windows... Spanner Wielder has an addiction, I'm desperately trying to break him from it, but its been 9 years and no luck!!

 This is the left hand wall, completely stripped back, all of the framework on this side needs replacing.

And here's the front, after removing the bulk head we discovered that most of the timber, including the ply cladding, is in good nick so it stays. This should save us from dipping into our small stock pile of timber.

Originally the curves of the caravan we're pretty intimidating, after all we aren't carpenters, and we're working with pretty basic tools. Spanner Wielder has basically every tool you'll need to work on a car, but they don't necessarily do double carpentry duty.

Below is a photo showing how they frame the curves....

 Its just a piece of of mdf... There's nothing scary about that at all!!

I started to pull the sheeting of the roof.... but i managed to give one little tug, before getting really squimish imagining giant spiders falling into my hair, making nests, laying eggs, baby spiders hatching..... eeek.. So I got Spanner Wielder to do it!! The joys of having a guy around!

But you can see from the photo that all the dismantling is causing the roof to sag... We're going to have to brace it soon. The skylight in the middle weighs a tonne, and is leaky. Our thought at the moment is to replace it with a skylight from a house... I've started trolling eBay and gumtree, but they're pretty expensive.

Next blog post will be tutorial-ish. A step by step guide on how to remove a caravan floor - and a bit about what not to do!

Shot of realism required... stat

So now we get down to the knitty gritty.... the cash that will fund this project. Which if my very technical, mathematical calculations are correct, its zilch, nada, zip....

That's right, we're truly crazy, and are going to try to rebuild this caravan without investing much cash. I mean there are things we know we'll need to buy; like silicone for example. Because what's the point of owning a caravan if you still get wet when it rains? Also the main reason we have to do such a complete rebuild is because of the leaks... everything is rotten or rotting. We really don't want to be doing this all again in a couple of years time *sigh*

So how on earth do we think we'll be able to turn our caravan into the Caravan of Wrightousness without any coin? By scrounging, re purposing and using stuff we already had...


We've already got the floor

and lights

They're both from Spanner Wielder's original showroom.

We went to Mum's and scrounged up some timber and also managed to score a kitchen bench.

We're planning on using styrofoam for insulation

                                         
Do you have any?.... or know of a clever place to get some?.....

We're also hoping for some great opp shop finds that we can re purpose, like coffee tables into seating, wardrobes into, well wardrobes.

We know that eventually we'll have to shell out some dough for things like electrical wiring, a 3 way fridge and a gas stove.

But, the plan at this point is to just make it usable, a primitive version of the vision we have of the Caravan of Wrighteousness. Because Spanner Weilder's crazy and thinks we can have it habitable by freakin Easter. That's right, he wants to go camping for Easter, and I REFUSE to sleep in a tent with Squiggle Butt.... It's not like the porta cot will just fit right in... plus she hates it.


So there you go our completely unrealistic budget and just as unrealistic time frame... Is there such a thing as a realism shot?

The Wrights behind the Caravan of Wrighteousness

Thought it might be about time to share a bit more about us, and the project that is The Caravan of Wrighteousness.

This is Spanner Wielder, I love this photo, he really is that easy going, laid back and spunky - and never takes a bad photo bleh. Spanner Wielder is a mechanic by trade and owns his own business, Quest Exhaust & Mechanical (bit of a shameless plug), so he's really over qualified for all the trailer repairs. Like the suspension, brakes, wheel bearings etc... have I impressed you with my mechanical knowledge? Is he qualified for all the carpentry? Lets put it this way, a few years ago he made me a shoe cupboard for my birthday - it's one of the best gifts I've ever been given. However, I went to move it one day and a leg fell off. Spanner Wielder assures me he knows how to repair it so it wont happen again, but he never has. It happened over three years ago. Make up your own minds...

This is Squiggle Butt; cute right? She's our April fool baby, born 8 weeks before her due date last year. She keeps me INCREDIBLY busy. Her qualifications... nil. In fact (and don't shoot, lynch or stone me as a bad mum for saying this) she's pretty much a giant hindrance to project Caravan of Wrighteousness. The reason being because, if it's not our bed or my arms, she's not sleeping there. So I can only work on the caravan when she is awake and happy. Don't know what your experience with babies is, but in mine they are not awake and happy for very long. Eventually we'll have to move the caravan home, just so I can get more done.

And this is me.... I'm not in front of the camera very often. Am I qualified... I like to demolish, and I enjoyed MDT in high school, but I fell in with the bad MDT crowd which lead to me copying sentences out of a wood working book in front of a teachers office. So I didn't learn a great deal. I'm mostly excited about what comes next, after the caravan is leak proof, and has a floor and walls.... design. I've already started going Pinterest nutty on the Caravan of Wrighteousness board... You can follow the board by clicking the link on the side of the page.

So that's us.. in the next post I'll let you all in on our timeline and budget.

Crash and burn or flames of glory

As you've read there has been a massive amount of anxiety around towing the Caravan of Wrighteousness home... Mainly because I had images of catastrophic caravan disintegration. Rubble spread all over the highway, cars damaged by chunks of flying debris...

You know ending up with something that looks like this.....

 Or this....

(OK so the first has clearly been set up, and the second I mayyy have enhanced slightly. In my defense I couldn't find an image that came even close to the scenes of chaos I was imagining)

The day we decided to haul the Caravan of Wrighteousness home was a bit dodgy; patches of rain, gusty winds, you know.. a typical Tassie day. We were gonna go, then not, then gonna, then not, until finally Spanner Wielder pulled the trigger. We went, umming and ahhing about the weather all the way there. All elements for disaster where present!

And then it was all rather boring. Spanner Wielder backed up to the carvan, linked up and pulled it up the driveway.The only real drama was that the trailer lights didn't want to work. But as the name suggests, Spanner Wielder is pretty handy and we were on the road in no time.

And the weather even cleared up!!! It was the SLOWEST I think we've ever driven between Burnie and Devonport, and I've never checked the side mirrors so often as a passenger, but........

WE MADE IT!!!! The Caravan of Wrighteousness is now patiently waiting outside Spanner Wielders workshop ready for us to dive in!!!

Brace yourself; giant spiders & bug carcasses

This is going to be a pretty photo heavy post.... after all, until now, you've just had to take my word that the caravan of Wrighteouness is currently a crap shack on wheels dilapidated mess.

Heres a couple of external shots for your viewing pleasure.

As I said earlier cleaning out the caravan was grotty - the carpet was repulsive, there were bug and giant spider carcasses everywhere..... unpleasant.

This was the inside of the carvan before

And after.....

While I got down and dirty cleaning out the caravan, Spanner Wielder started preping the caravan for the big move.

The tyres on the caravan were stuffed, and to be honest so were the rims, but we didn't have any spare HT rims just sitting around (anyone have a set they want to get rid of???!!) so we just put better tyres on.

See...

Spanner Wielder likes spiders (yes he's all kinds of weird), but even he wasn't a fan of the giant spider that jumped out of the rim as he was ripping the old tyre off. Anyways the rims were so rusty that they had to be coated in silcon in order to inflate the tyres..... Backyard mechanics at its best!!! Does make me slightly more nervous, I've heard that rims and tyres are important, I assume crappy rims raises the potential of catastrophe!

He then got to work bracing the internals of the caravan.... When we used the caravan as our moving trailer we pretty much gutted everyting out of it. Did you know that caravans are built from the inside out? This means that all the cupboards, beds etc are structural... we found this out the hard way. Hence the hard core bracing in the hopes that the walls of the carvan wouldn't just flop open starfish style...

Spanner Wielder's bracing will be put to the test tomorrow.... Fingers crossed!!

Self doubt monsters = blogging jitters

I started this blog with such great excitement.... and then rapidly got overwhelmed.... Little self doubt monsters crawled into my brain and got to work creating paranoid, crazy little scenarios. Arghhhhhhhhh. But have recently employed pest control and am hoping to be (slightly) less nutty now, and to blog, despite all that real life stuff that gets in the way - like 20 crap filled nappies a day, a squiggle butt who just wants up, and a husband who just wants to spend time with me. I know, I know, its truly a hard life - though I honestly believe I would be happier if squiggle butt cut back to one crap a day...

I started this blog with a purpose, well a couple of purposes...

1. I like to document EVERYTHING. That means every. little. teeny. tiny. thing. I have box after box of "memories". Letters that I got from friends in high school - kept them all. My diary from when I was 10 - still have it, even though I would die from embarrassment if I were to read it now. Not being overly dramatic... death of embarrassment can happen. Anyways I thought a blog would be a great way to document the caravans' transformation from crap shack to CARAVAN OF WRIGHTEOUNESS (remember Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure - that's the music I hear in my head as I type caravan of wrighteousness in caps - love it)

2. Because I could find very little info on how to refurbish a caravan when I looked on line... so hopefully our trials and errors can help someone turn their pile of crap into an oasis.

Stay tuned... next post is all about transporting our wreckage caravan of wrighteousness  home. I'll even include some pics... just to prove I'm not exaggerating about our caravans dumpy dilapidated state.