What have we gotten ourselves into?
While gutting the interior of our Airstream, we knew this would be a lengthy process, but we were ready and excited for it. We could have kept the walls up and trusted that everything between the walls and the shell were in decent condition. We knew that wasn’t the route we needed to go though. We wanted to see what was behind those walls and start from scratch. It wasn’t until we took the walls down that we stood there and said “what have we gotten ourselves into?”. We went from a fairly open, ‘clean’ looking interior with the walls up… to a total mess! It felt like we had gone backwards in the process. Throughout this entire renovation there were many times it felt like we were moving one step forward and two steps back, but somehow we still ended up moving forward. I will say that I would never attempt to do something like this alone. Andy is an electrical and mechanical engineer. He can build just about anything, 3D prints in our home, flies airplanes (one of which is an experimental that he does all the maintenance work himself), built most of the computers in our home, does not EVER sit and watch tv or rest… he’s always tinkering on something. I love this about him. So, even though we stood there with all the walls out wondering what we’ve gotten ourselves into, I never doubted that we would eventually build this thing back up the way we wanted it. You don’t realize all that goes into a project like this until you start taking more of it apart. At that point, it’s too late. You can’t leave it in that condition. You have to re-build it.
Taking the walls down was a puzzle. We had to disassemble many other parts and framing in order to get the walls down. We also had to figure out which walls were on top of the other walls and take those down in order. Once you start taking rivets out, you have to be prepared for the walls to start coming down. The long metal pieces will bend and dent in a heartbeat if you are not careful. We marked all the walls with blue tape and wrote their position on there. The very long pieces needed to be rolled and then tied so they didn’t unravel. Once the walls were down, we had to deal with the old pink insulation. This was another point where we could have kept all the insulation up and just peeked behind it for any leaks, to find the wiring, and to make sure all was good. I was not comfortable with that. I wanted to get rid of all the old and bring in new. Plus, we did find some interesting things on the wiring and in the insulation, along with leaks that needed to be addressed. So, down came the pink fluff.