The Floor

The floor had some damage under the bathroom area and around the front door. It was solid everywhere else so we got away with just removing the floor and replacing with new wood. It wasn't very easy of course because it still involved a lot of careful and detailed work, but at least we didn't have to remove any major panels!

Starting to remove the floor and the insulation - as you can see the chassis looked great.

Bloater put a ladder deck over the hole so he could work. He had to 'dig' the rotten floor out from under the skin to make sure he had a clean hole to put the new flooring in.

You can see here the chassis and the 'banana wrap' at the bottom. The grey water tank had to be taken out to do the job properly - we sanded and painted the chassis with rust inhibitor.

Here is the damage by the front door -

All taken out and the aluminium taken up to get to the underneath chassis and parts.

THE NEW FLOOR!

New wood and new insulation

Unfortunately we don't have any pics of us chipping away the original grey floor tiles. We would have loved to keep the tiles but they were brittle, broken and chipped and had to go. It took me days and days of chipping away with a chisel and hammer and my hand really hurt for a long time afterwards! In fact I am sure one of my fingers will never be the same again....but that's another story! Once the new wood was in and everything was ready to go we emptied everything else out and started with the filling of unnecessary holes and painting!

When the trailer arrived with us its main theme was a dull grey and dark brown - not two colours that go naturally well together huh? We obviously wanted to make it a light bright space and we knew that our ultimate theme for the trailer was going to be retro with a modern twist and a tasteful hawaiian theme so we chose a pale creamy yellow for the walls and a bamboo vinyl for the floor. I'm sorry (again) that we don't have any 'during' pics - but here is the result!

In the beginning there was a big grey elephant.....

Hi! Thanks for visiting our blog!

Firstly let me introduce us - my name is Lisa and my husband is Bloater (better know as Big Boy Bloater to anyone that knows him in his professional guise as a blues musician). We have no children, one blind cat (named Lemon after Blind Lemon Jefferson!) and we both have an unhealthy obsession with Americana, we both love Blues, R&B, Rock & Roll, Soul and Gospel and this love of music has dictated everything in our lives!

Please note this is not a technical blog - this is just how we did it, based on trial and error, research, some smartness and some stupidity! We cannot be held responsible for anyone copying anything we did or using our advice for their own trailer!

So our Airstream journey all started in August 2007. I had been on sabbatical from work for some time and was having a long hard think about what I wanted to do with my future. Bloater and I had always lusted after an Airstream and this particular morning I had a couple of Airstream books with me in the garden whilst I had my morning coffee in the August sunshine. It came to me like a bolt from the blue - why not buy an Airstream, import it to the UK, restore/refurb it and sell it on, then repeat the process and if we do well maybe make a small business out of it? As I start writing this blog these plans have changed for many reasons (which no doubt will be mentioned later) but we have bought and sold a 1969 Caravel in the meantime and are now getting close to completing the refurb of our Globetrotter so it seems a good time to start with the Blog reportage! My reason for doing a Blog is because we have used the internet so much for help and inspiration and I hope we can do the same for others! There are big gaps in the timeframe, mainly because life and work got in the way (oh yeah, and the '69 Caravel!) but I will try and be as complete as possible and hope my memory holds up!

August 2007

I started straight away looking on the internet/Airstream forums etc for the perfect Airstream. Rather stupidly in retrospect we decided we wanted to do one pretty much from the ground up to get our learning curve in full swing! We knew we wanted something that needed gutting inside (we wanted to do it to our own spec), but hopefully one that had a solid chassis and a good skin. We also knew we needed a single axle (research showed us this kept costs down) and a trailer under 21' to be able to use it in the UK and Europe without problems. After very little searching (maybe 2 weeks - boy we were lucky!) we found this little gem in Maine.

We contacted the owner and he was more than happy to sell to a UK buyer (which basically meant the poor guy had to hold on to the trailer for an unspecified amount of time while we sorted out shipping) so we transferred the $$'s and we owned our first Airstream! Shipping was a pain - we had no idea where to begin so we just had to make phone call after phone call to try and find out how to get it to Port - at one point we were even considering flying to the US and taking it to port ourselves, it was seriously getting that complicated. I won't go into the problems we had with shipping the Globetrotter because the company we used in the UK claimed to be experts and ended up costing us lots more than they should have thanks to their incompetence and the idiots they sub-contracted in the USA. (Suffice to say we did NOT use them for the Caravel which needed to be brought from California to Atlanta for shipping, we used DAS shipping for this and they were fantastic - cannot recommend them enough if you find yourself needing to ship anything from the US to the UK. They may quote a little more initially but believe me they saved us lots of time and in the end lots of cash because they did what they said they would and when they said they would. Enough said). We bought the Globetrotter in August and it was finally delivered a couple of days before Christmas (I told you they were incompetent!).

December 2007

Here it is - just arrived and parked outside our house! This is Bloater and our friend Tony figuring out how to get the dolly wheel on!

Because it arrived only a couple of days before Christmas we didn't get stuck in until January 08. During shipping it lost a couple of components, the skylight at the front and one of the back panels. The fully comprehensive insurance we thought we had taken out with our cruddy shipping Co basically didn't quite cover this.....but they could get the bits for us at a cost of almost £500 ($750-$800) - now there's a surprise! Here are some pics of the trailer as it arrived with us - inside and out!



From now I will post for parts - i.e. removing the floor....polishing etc....