My New Project Chapter Three: It's always more Work than Expected

Sitting in my driveway is a shiny little humpback hobbit hole of a camp trailer.   Who would have guessed a month ago that by the end of August I would have transformed a rolling heartbreak into a totally functional mobile bedroom.  Not me.    With a nearly deranged level of task commitment, I manage to salvage something my wife called, one winter past redemption.  Once I had cut and installed new sides made of 3/4 inch plywood, I figured I had things licked.  Ha.  The hatch was to rotten to save or even use as a pattern.  I had to come up with a curved pattern for the shape of this trunk lid and plan a design that would be strong but lighter than the old one.

I made the ribs of 3/4 inch plywood scraps left from creating the sides and I was even able to use the curved cut.  My jigsaw died while cutting the the sides, so I had to turn to my cordless reciprocating saw to make the several cuts needed to make four plywood ribs.   I used stock 2x2 fir for the crosspieces on the lid then added a layer of hardboard and then riveted the aluminum skin back in place.  I was surprised that the hatch fit as well as it did though it was far from perfect.  It sits a little crooked, but it fits and should keep out the rain.  The whole project is more utilitarian than fancy.

 I managed to layer several coats of Spar Urethane over the epoxy resin I treated the plywood with and waited days for it to cure in our cool wet weather.  Most of the aluminum trim is being reused, backup with silicone.  The cutouts for the doors were used to make new doors, though only one was installed.    

Right now the camper looks a little cockeyed since one door has been replaced and one door is original.  It too will get replaced but not in the frenzy of August.   

A month ago, I wrote about experiencing a different kind of August, in fact that's what I called the blog post.  I was anticipating an August when I would not be looking forward to and starting school in some form or another.  I wondered what would I do.  This is it!  Part of it.  No it's not finished and no, it not showroom quality but as my brother used to say, "going by on the road at sixty miles an hour, who's going to notice?"

My new Project: Chapter Two -- It's Probably Worse than you Thought

I wasn't far into this adventure before I realized that it might have been easier to start from scratch.  But, In for a penny in for a pound, so we carry on.  The plywood sides of the teardrop were rotten so those had to be removed and i figured I could do that without removing the roof.  Good idea but probably more work than it was worth because I had to prop up the roof and remove the aluminum skin.  that showed a lot of rot in the hardboard inner skin so most of that had to go too.

The partitions had to be removed and added to the pile of rotten things to be replaced.  Soon, I realized that the oak flooring had absorbed water, swelled, and was adding weight to the trailer.  It still looked nice but it wouldn't show under the mattress any way so it had to go too.  Suddenly I had more trash and less trailer.



The sides were just barely stable enough to be a pattern for the new 3/4 inch plywood sides.  Then those sides were patterns for the hardboard lining.  These were glue together and the inside painted.   Luckily I had the warm dry garage to do that while I dismantled the trailer in the boat shed.  Great activity for a rainy August.  The side of the trailer also received strips of 1x1 fir to attached the partitions and shelves  (When completed the trailer will have plywood bulkheads separating the galley trunk and the bunk).

I was excited that the fiberglass fenders were in good shape, but the taillights would need replacing.  The ceiling fan, I tested and found it operable.  I then confronted the reality that the rear hatch was to rotten to save, so I peeled off the aluminum skin and discarded the waterlogged and rotten trunk lid frame and puzzled on how to build a new, lighter one.

The exciting part was that I was reaching the point of putting things together rather than taking them apart!   Could it be?

After lots of cleaning and scrapping and removing screws nuts and staples, I was able to apply a layer of epoxy resin to what was left of the trailer wood structure and begin to do the same to the new plywood parts.  I figured the best way to prevent the rot that got the trailer the first time is seal the plywood with epoxy resin like I was building a boat.  This is when damp, cool weather was not my friend.  The resin is a slow cure during a soggy August.
In spite of the weather, one day I attached the new sides of the trailer connected the ribs that supported the roof and the reborn trailer began to show it's new life.

The hatch was a different story!



Stay Tuned For More!

My New Project: Chapter 1 -- Idle Hands are Tools of the Devil

As I navigate this new kind of August and find myself with more time at the lake than ever, I have room for a new project. I have my writing work, but  I'm a real believer in the benefit of working with your hands as well as your brain.  Somehow this all collided with the ideas of finding a small camp trailer to drag around Alaska for book promotion and the like.  Of course it didn't take much time on Craigslist to find that what I was looking for was hard to find, in bad shape, or expensive.  When a local prospect for a teardrop trailer feel through I fell back on chance and opportunity, "Just keep your eyes open and something will come up."  

THE IDEAL

Sure enough I spotted a teardrop trailer  

in a local backyard. 

 

THE REAL

In a couple of days, I had negotiated a deal and that sad little teardrop was in my yard, and I no longer lacked for a project. This little trailer had potential but was going to need a major rebuild.  Madelyn looked askance, but I think she figured I needed a low cost - high labor project to help me sweat out the no-school-this-August demons.   I kept seeing cartoon thought bubbles over her head, "Idle hands are tools of the devil".

I set to work tearing into the trailer and seeing what could be saved.  The trailer frame is solid and it has good tires.  The sides, which are a single sheet of 3/4 plywood with hardboard glued on the inside, are rotten  -- I mean put your hand through it rotten.  Some of the wood frames in the roof were water damaged and the rear hatch cover was waterlogged, wouldn't latch and probably in need of replacement.   Most of the aluminum was useable.

What I a hole I had dug for myself.

Some research online told me this was probably a Kit Kamper, built from plans available from Kit Manufacturing since the late 1940's.  Some of these trailers were built by the company, some were sold as kits, and some were constructed by individuals using Kit company plans.   Since then lots of different little trailers or 'teardrops' have been marketed.  Originally these trailer were basically covered place to sleep with a galley set up in the trunk under the rear hatch.   The one I found was a basic one with only some lighting, a vent fan, and some shelves in the galley trunk which is fine by me.   Simple is good.  

I have a pole shed to work in and rainy weather to encourage me onto this labor.  We'll soon see if this is a prevention of "idle hands" or a product of it.  Stay tuned!

If you Google, 'teardrop trailers'  you find lots of interesting reading and ideas.

The Ups and Downs of Self Supervision

AS a part of my "Different Kind of August" I gave myself the assignment of a weekly blog entry.   This morning, I'm regretting that decision.  It's Monday and another post is due.  I could recycle, using something I wrote some time in the past.  That worked in college when I had an essay due and my mind was blank, just grab something from last year and retype it.  That's to cheap,  I won't let myself do it on only the second week of August.  Save that for November.
So, here I am like a seventh grader with an essay due tomorrow and the blank screen before me.  Nobody wants to hear that the fall rains have started and that the fireweed has topped out.  We can talk about slugs,  the great invaders that are doing their best to eat my whole garden.  No, can't go negative.

Yesterday,  I bailed six inches of water out of the rowboat and rowed down to the island after dinner.  That time of night I hoping to spot bears but no luck.  The red salmon in the lake are showing the colors that give them their name, turning bright red with green heads.  As they charge the mouth of the creek on the east end of the lake the look like redcoats running from the minutemen at Concord.  The water tends to be calm on these wet days when the cloud hand low overhead and the lake is free of the fair-weather folks who only venture out when the weather is sunny and warm.  That leaves the place to those who tend to enjoy moving out on the water regardless of the weather.  Although we are pretty wet this week, the air and the lake are warmer than usually, and I find myself overdressed when I go out to collect my daily bounty of slugs.  Yes, slugs.

For those of you who don't know, slugs are small vegetable pests that will consumer entire plants and look life snails without shells?  Does that make them Homeless?   Anyway  they are the most revolting thing living on our property that I know of and the best way we know to deal with them is to pick them by hand and drop them into a cup of salt.   This leaves our hands wet and slimy after a bit of picking, usually with rain running down our backs.  I asked Madelyn, "How hungry would you have to be to eat slugs?"   "I would starve," she snarled, "They are too disgusting."    OKAY!
But, it is an ill wind that blows no good.  Slugs have given me something to write about this Monday morning in the rain.
One final word.  Those of us who work at home also live at work.   And those who work for themselves have no one else to blame.  

"A picaresque coming-of-age tale with an often appealing hero."

I think KIRKUS REVIEW understood were I wanted to go with this book. Here's what they said about Secondhand Summer.  

When his father dies suddenly, an adolescent boy faces more than one kind of loss as he navigates the perilous path between childhood and maturity in a new city in Walker’s debut novel.

In 1965, 12-year-old Sam “Humpy” Barger lives with his family in the tiny fishing village of Ninilchik, Alaska, helping his father mend and set nets, attending his small, eighth-grade class, and taking the first shy steps toward having a girlfriend. Then his world gets turned upside down: his strong, capable father has a heart attack and dies, forcing Sam’s mom to move him, his brother, and his sister to Anchorage so that she can find work. Reeling from the sudden loss, Sam confronts the challenges in his life with honesty, integrity, and curiosity, as well as sadness and anxiety. Along the way, however, he makes new friends and tests the limits of his daring. Walker’s first-person narrative is engaging and vivid as he describes Sam’s earnest progress toward discovering who he is. The author skillfully evokes the world of adolescent boys, full of gross-out jokes, territorial challenges, and a few true friends. Sam’s adventures are gripping, yet realistic, such as when he almost, but not quite, gets caught by the police while stealing comic books, and each escapade teaches him something about himself. Occasionally, readers may feel Walker reaches a bit too far for an unlikely metaphor, as when Sam describes a Corvette passing his friend as “a burgundy ghost passing across the mirror of his soul.” Also, although the narrative does treat racism with some sensitivity, a gratuitous gay joke goes disturbingly unremarked. In general, though, the book is absorbing as it describes the painfully awkward moment before kids become “teenagers with cars and adults with power.” As it follows Sam through the changes and choices, the plot builds to an exciting conclusion that includes violence, redemption, and the first faltering steps toward a new life.

A picaresque coming-of-age tale with an often appealing hero.

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/dan-walker/secondhand-summer/

A different kind of August

A few days ago, I was sitting with old friend on my dock catching up on each others’ lives.  He told of a common friend who was suffering from the stress of overwork. He looked at me and said, “I don’t get it. It’s just a job. They can get along without me, you, anybody. Even the most important work is not more important than your life. You only get one.” Maybe because I am grieving the loss of my sister, maybe because that little mite has been already nibbling at my brain and my heart, those words struck hard on me as if TO me, and I remembered what I said back in June when my sister passed. It came to me strong and clear. “ Never waste a day.”

As July grinds out its last hours into August, we are all reminded that when it comes to the short Alaskan summer, we must truly never waste a day during this warm and bountiful time. August for me, feels like September in the lower latitudes.  Here on the southern coast we can expect only a couple of warm days and the rest are apt to be wet.  In the old days, this wet could continue through September into the dark and bleak October - - but let’s not go there.  August feels like September because schools are starting, state fairs are opening, and the lush green of our Alaska summer has begun to wilt. The fireweed has gone to seed or soon will, the pushki will bloom and die, and cottonwoods are shedding their leaves — a phenomenon I have already witnessed this week.  

For as many years as I can remember, the first of August has heralded the coming of the school year.  For the twenty years I spent as student, August was a warning that the school doors would soon open and the entire focus of my days would change.   Usually, I looked forward to that, always eager for something new.  The novelty of summer was gone and now school was ahead like an unopened box from the mail order house. 

When I started teaching, August meant the beginning of a mental shift from dad, farmer, boatsman, fisher, and builder to Teacher. My body was still in summer life but my mind was on school. I loved that. I loved that I loved teaching and enjoyed the planning and scheming that teaching required. Madelyn would always recognize when I made the shift, often before I did. She would watch me grow quiet and distracted while working through the casual routine of summer life, whether child and house tending or B&B minding, Dan was going through the change to becoming Mr. Walker. 

When I retired from the public school, I took a college teaching job, and again in August my mind began the transition, not only to teaching but new and different teaching in a place very different.  When I made the switch from the classroom to mentoring and the school improvement coaching, I wasn’t teaching but I was still in that ‘school’s coming gear-up mode’ and come the end of July, my obligations and mindset once more switched to schools and teaching. But this year is different. 

August is mine. Only once that I can remember, since I was six years old, have I been free of the August mind shift. In 1991, we took a year off when the kids were young and romped around the southwest. That is the only time until now that I wasn’t looking forward to school starting. This year, pivotal for so many reasons, I looked up and August was before me. The shift began, the calendar appeared, education emails began to land in the in-box. For the first time, I didn’t answer the call. The appeal was not in me, the endorphins that create excitement and anticipation didn’t flow.  I was not drawn as I was year after year.  Sometimes I needed a change but I was always filled with anticipation for the new year, new students, new projects, new challenges. Not this year, this year the anticipation came in the form of a gut-ball of dread that burdened me like I was wearing a weight belt.

I had to say, no.  I had to tell myself over and over, “It’s just a job.  Never waste a day!  You can’t give anything when you don’t have it to give anymore.”  So I move on into August without school, August without planning for school, meeting for school, getting ready for school, crazy, wearing-no-pants school dreams disrupting my sleep.  I am filled with a new excitement, a fresh anticipation, a different kind of August. 

Your Tiny House is My Travel Trailer

When I was in college, about one hundred fifty years ago, One of my buddies bought a burned out trailer house and rebuilt it with a pot belly woodstove and the cedar wood paneling.  He sided the outside with rough cut cedar and it looked like a long skinny little house, but it was a cheap and efficient way for him, his wife, and little girl to have a home of their own.  It was just a trailer house but I thought it was a pretty cool looking trailer house, better than the standard aluminum siding and plastic paneling kind.  I have seen other people do this kind of custom trailer house project and some of the manufactured homes they make these days have a similar look with wooden siding and pitched roofs with trim and windows that avoid that RV industrial look. 

Thirty-some years later I’m watching TV and watch a show about “tiny Houses” that people are building on trailers.  These are not quaint cottages these a little travel trailer sized places.  The idea is that with efficient design a person can build a compact portable house with wheels.  These houses are cleverly designed so that tables fold down from walls and stairs double as bookshelves.   Many are designed with sleeping lofts.   Gee, I though looks kinda familiar.

Why do people act like this is a new invention?  Boat, cabin and trailer house builders have been designing small efficient spaces for centuries, and typical Americans, “tiny house” designers think they are inventing, tables that convert to beds and bathrooms that fit in a closet.   Even a rustic shepherd’s wagon is a study in compact living.

            “Who wants a bedroom you can’t standup in?”

            “Lots of people!”

            “Yeah, until they don’t.  Why not just buy a Airstream. These guys made a business of compact living.”

            “That’s a trailer house!”

            Yeah, so are those tiny houses.  There are just custom and expensive.”

            “No, they are unique."

            “OK, Unique trailer houses.  A house built on a trailer is still a trailer house.”

            “No, these are smaller than your seventy–foot double wide.”

            “You’re right.  More like a travel trailer with cedar shingles. In fact, I saw an old travel trailer on Craigslist for just begging for an upgrade like this.”

The reader has probably figured by now that I think this whole “tiny house” fad is pretty silly, especially in Alaska.  Don’t get me wrong, I believe it a noble thing to downsize and live with less.  We did that on our second house.  It is half the size of the old one.   And most people today build too much house if you ask me.  But a structure too small for two people get undressed in at the same time is good only for camping and even that not for long.  If you ask me to spend fifty or sixty thousand dollars on a custom cottage on wheels is frivolous and unnecessary.  Many of sourdoughs who got here before the oil boom and others who came after have experienced all the “tiny houses” we can stand.  My first winter in Alaska, we had eight of us in 400 square feet plus a sleeping loft.   Such conditions make cozy a four letter word.  Drive the streets of any old parts of the old towns of Alaska and see old houses smaller than the average master suite.  Notice they have all been added on to with wings, and wannigans so people have room to breath.  Such small, intimate spaces are incubators for cabin fever.  Then people only lived in little places because it was what they could afford to build and heat not because it was hip. 

             

Being hip is another big problem with the new “tiny house” craze.  It’s forcing places like Anchorage to look at their building ordinances and codes.  It seems people what to move these hipster shacks into regular neighborhoods, where small homes without foundations are not allowed. 

            “What! You want to bring trailer houses into my cul-de-sac?”

            “They aren’t trailer houses, they are different.”

            “How?”

            “. . . . . . (long empty pause). . . .”

            According to the ADN article, (Go read this piece from the Sunday paper and see if it doesn’t smack of elitism;  Want to Park a Tiny House in Anchorage? ) people with tiny houses might want better views, or to locate in the backyard of a bigger house.  In other words they want to change to city codes around Alaska, so they can put their ‘tiny houses” wherever they want because these casitas are cooler than trailer houses.  That’s the bottom line and the really silly part of this argument.  

           “No, you can’t park your cute little Sheep wagon wannabe on a lot in my neighborhood because you will lower my property value and in five years you will add a wannigan then an extension.  I’m seeing “tiny house, big shed.”

If you want to live in a travel trailer, mobile home, manufactured home, RV, fifth wheel, tow-behind, or even a “tiny house” that’s fine with me, but don’t think a bay window and gambrel roof make it anything more than a trailer house.