Standing in the most beautiful workshop I'd ever set foot in at nearly midnight, a famous sculptor once said to me:     "Time means nothing to me."  

Horrified, I could only think of how I exemplify the exact opposite of this mentality.  My whole schtick in life is finding the intersection where the least amount of effort will produce the most amount of effect.  In this way I make my living impersonating a "real" artist, and nobody is usually the wiser. Sometimes, however, when an aesthetic is compelling enough and simply cannot be cheated, it's time to put my nose to the grindstone and pay the toll that beauty requires.

The problem with replacing the shower pan in the Airstream is that it sits in an eccentric radius curved corner and there is just no simple way to build one and no aftermarket product available.  A mortared and tiled pan just seemed like the wrong thing for a floor that would be bouncing  down the highway,  so after much consternation I came to the dismaying conclusion that wood was what I wanted to go with.

After planing down some de-nailed scrap boards and some left over cedar from the kayak shop,  I built a couple jigs and fired up the table saw for 6 LONG hours,  resulting in what can only be described as a testament to being somewhere on the autistic spectrum.   When I was finally done at midnight I'd created a 72 inch circle of perfect staves,  all of them tapering evenly from 1 1/4 inch square to just 1/16th inch square.   I chose a fairly aggressive drain pitch of 1/2 inch per foot because I have my doubts that the trailer will always be sitting level when I bathe.

Even with all that work in, I was skeptical that I could get all of the now warping and twisting pieces actually glued together,  but with the help of a friend, a big rock and 6 hours,  we were able to finally get the circle complete.    Two days later I trimmed it to the final shape,  sanded it down, and flooded the entire thing with four thick layers of epoxy.    Not the easiest thing I've ever made,  but sometimes you just have to take the hard way.

I've been a little stressed out the last couple weeks trying to find wood for the countertops.  You'd think it wouldn't be so hard to find sixteen used 2x6's, but after searching high and low, I just couldn't find enough of the same size boards to make it happen.   Driving to Cart'M recycling on Sunday afternoon I decided to give it one final shot before I just gave up and bought some wood.  Sadly, the wood racks were mostly barren,  and so I'd pretty much surrendered to the idea of buying wood on Monday morning when a silver truck loaded to the axels with old 2x4's and 2x6s pulled in next to me.   

The owner saw me eyeing his load and before I could say anything he offered,  "I'll drive it all straight to your house if you want it?"  It took me a minute to process and reply,   "Hell yeah I want it!"   Fifteen minutes later we unloaded over 100 2x4's,  and he told me there was more where that came from.   An hour later we were stacking another load, and an hour after that yet another.   The source of our good fortune was an epic garage clean out which included all of this wood which originated from an old cottage his father had dismantled and painstakingly de-nailed,  over 30 years ago!!

I'll admit, stacking a cottage of wood on a Sunday afternoon wasn't exactly what I was hoping for,  but how can you turn down something like that?   So, with swimming and blackberry pie making both summarily cancelled, my long suffering girlfriend was put to work at 4pm planing board,  after which we made the one seriously messy glue lam with a gallon of titebond II and every long clamp in the shop.   

People might think I use salvage wood to save money, but the truth is working with scrap always takes longer and ends up costing more.   So it must be better for the environment right?  Maybe, if you don't have to drive it too far to get it sawn and sanded.  The real reason I love salvage is because every project is a mini-adventure, a treasure hunt, an opportunity to overcome challenges and meet new people.   These are the experiences that we miss when we go to the store and trade a buck for a product,  and at the end of the day, after a hot shower, chewing on ribs in front of a roaring fire built from the off-cuts of the days milling,  it's the stories we've collected and the places they lead us that make our lives meaningful.   

The next step is to slice this giant block into 1 1/4" slices on a sawmill, and plane it down to 1" countertops.  Then I need to figure out what to do with the rest of this wood! 

During the rare years that a very high tide happens to coincide with a wet storm, the bay overfills with water and I can be found in a skin-on-frame kayak towing logs, very very slowly, toward one of three boat ramps.   Eventually I'll get one onto a trailer, and then sometime a year or so after that I'll find a way to con my buddy Mark into bringing the portable sawmill down so we can cut it into boards.  It's neither an efficient nor economical way to make lumber,  but it's still one of my favorite things to do.

Most of the good wood washed away in the '07 flood,  and a lot of what does show up is nabbed by guys with power boats,  but I still pull a decent log now and then,  or at least, what I think is a decent log.   In this case the nice fat, 8 foot fir log I was excited about turned out to be spruce,  with little rot pockets, and tension that caused every board to spring into a bit of a curve.  Dissappointed, I mentally marked it "construction lumber" and set it aside.  

It took a bit of thinking to figure out the bed for the trailer,  because the perimeter is relatively unsupported I had to make sure to land the legs onto major frame members.   A minimalist design lent itself the the most possible storage beneath and the least amount of weight in the trailer.   Now ideally a bedframe should have a little give, but not sag,  and this is where my friends the strong, lightweight, and slightly curved, Sitka spruce boards finally found a home.   I milled them to full dimensions for strength and to keep the aesthetic just a little "meatier" that store bought dimensions.  

A simple frame built from wood I have a personal connection is all I need to feel content for today,  and typing this from a BED after three months of sleeping on the floor, now that's a real bonus!

A grisly scene on the roof the last couple of days cutting out the old air conditioner,  the existing roof vents, and sadly the unbelievably awesome original retractable TV antenna.  This process was not made easier by the blazing heat nor the generous layer of elastomeric roofing coating the previous owners had slathered with abandon onto the roof.

I needed a clean flat-ish surface to mount some very big photovoltaic panels onto, and there just isn't enough real estate for all that other stuff up there.   After cutting through a live 120V wire with a jig saw (oops!)  I decided a skillsaw set very shallow and a grinder with a cut off wheel were the right tools for the job.  Never having done this sort of work before, I'll admit to hours of baking myself to death on the roof in the direct sun while I endlessly climbed up and down the ladder to get more tools.    At the end of two days of frustration and cursing,  there was nothing left to remove, and me and my lovely assistant Georgiana built cover plates for the interior, painted them, and riveted them onto the underside of the roof,  but cover plates weren't the only thing we added.....

With all the light that pours into the big windows in the front of an Argosy,  the back of the coach seems just a little bit dim,  and while others seem to be fond of skylights,  I decided to take a different tack and opted for a marine hatch instead.  The way I see it, if you're going to tackle the job of putting a hole in your roof,  you might as well be able to climb through it now and again, especially considering how hard it is to get onto the roof an airstream without either falling off or scratching the paint.   Also, lets just face it, hatches are awesome.

I've seen some amazing custom stainless steel and glass hatches online, but these are all custom fab jobs and at custom fab prices,  so peasant airstream hatch shoppers are pretty much limited to lewmar and bomar hatches.  I chose a lewmar medium profile hatch,  and set it into some nice clear fir that I milled myself a few years ago.  The process of putting it in went something like this:

Build a wooden curb to bridge the gap between the upper and lower layers of aluminum. 

Cut an aluminum flashing sheet to sit atop that.  Paint or finish both pieces. 

Cut a hole in the roof that the curb will just fit into, while trying not to cut through any major structural members or electrical runs.   This is harder than it looks with the major electrical running down the length of the roof.
  
Use the cutout from the aluminum flashing to mark the hole on the underside inside of the roof.   Carefully cut that hole out.

Shape the curb until it fits perfectly with the curve of the underside roof,  and as much as the hatch can handle it, shape the top side too. 

Put butyl tape on the bottom of the flashing perimeter, already pre-drilled for rivets at 1 1/4 inch spacing.

Set flashing atop wooden curb/spacer,  squirt a big bead of 5200 onto the inside perimeter where the hatch will sit and bed the hatch down in it.

Pilot and set appropriate fasteners,  I used #12  1 1/4 stainless screws.

Drill through flashing, putty, and roof and set olympic rivets around the perimeter,  trim and grind rivets with insanely expensive rivet head grinder.

Seal the edge of the flashing with self leveling caulk.

Go to the underside and screw the metal to the curb.

2 days and about $500 later,  Voila!  Hatch!  

With the interior ripped out and structural repairs finished, it was time to gussy this old bessy up with a fresh coat of paint and some new flooring.  I've read about people making American Clay stick to raw aluminum, and given my proclivities toward plaster thats' certainly the direction I'd go if I wasn't certain that the process of chemical stripping an entire trailer of it's interior vinyl wouldn't have me in chemo within a year.  Also, I'm just a little bit lazy, so paint won out.  Off-white makes small spaces seem big, reflects a lot of light, and goes with everything, which is important, because I don't exactly know what the interior is going to look like yet.  The top hit on a quick search on my smartphone yielded the notion that "white dove" was a good color for art gallery walls,  and because other people on the internet seem to be getting Benjamin Moore 'Aura' paint to stick to the vinyl clad aluminum inside old Airstreams,  I was off to the Benjamin Moore store to get a gallon of White Dove, and a gallon of the fiercest primer I could apply without scuba diving equipment.   Not exactly "green"  but this is vinyl we're talking about and I had misgivings about anything non-toxic actually being able to "bite" into the surface.

G and Henry and I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed the walls with TSP and hot water,  yielding a creepily sticky texture to the vinyl.  As a person inclined toward risk taking, I slapped the primer up anyways and rolled on the white dove.  A week out everything seems to still be sticking.

Next up was floors.  Even with the couple hundred pounds it adds to trailer, I knew I wanted real wood,  both to create a flat stable surface to build off of, and because I have a moral aversion to laminate flooring.   For this I headed down to see my buddy Ben Deumling of Zena Forest Products who owns a sustainably harvested forest outside of Salem, OR.   If I can't cut it down and make it myself, Ben is my go-to guy, and there was certainly no way I was going to mill and dry tongue and groove flooring,  so I picked up some really nice fir from Ben for a decent price,  albeit in a less than ideal vehicle.  Somebody buy me a 1 ton Dodge Sprinter for Christmas!  Please?

Laying the floor was easy with a borrowed flooring stapler although scribing into the round corners takes a bit of time.  I played Russian Roulette with the unknown moisture contents of the subfloor and flooring and lost.  I got a bit of swelling but nothing terrible.  Next time, moisture meter.  It's the only way to be sure. 

For a top coat I rolled on a gallon of Vermont Natural Coatings Poly-Whey in three layers with a light sand with 220 between them.   This is a neat product that uses polymers derived from a whey, a byproduct of the cheese industry, which surprisingly, is a pollutant if not treated properly.   The finished surface looks great and will make building up from here a lot easier!

First things first,  before I could dive into the thrill of transforming the trailer,  I had to evict the resident interior, but not without a pang of remorse.   As dated as the original digs were, they had played host to generations of owners, at least one of whom lived in it full time.  Sure, things were rough around the edges but overall I was impressed by just how well everything had held up over the course of 38 years.   Tearing all this apart I developed a respect for Airstream construction,  which is surprisingly solid for how thinly it's built.   One thing is for sure, my interior won't be this lightweight.   All in all,  I'm glad I did tear it down to the bones though.  There were concealed electrical, plumbing, and structural issues that needed to be addressed before moving forward.    The worst for sure was cutting out and replacing the rotted rear left corner of the floor because the original construction essentially traps the wood between the frame and the walls.   There were a few other questionable spots but given just how unpleasant that was, I decided to drench them in penetrating epoxy and hope for the best!