Put The Floor Tiles In

Alright so after finally finishing up the wood restoration, it's time to install our new floor.  We decided to go with Vinyl Composite Tiles (harlequine white and lemon yellow), just like "mobiltec" did in his youtube videos "restoring the deville".  Turns out these tile are somewhat eco friendly too. They're made by Armstrong with recycled content and no VOCs, the tile adhesive we used was VOC free as well  ;-)

Spreeding tile adhesive it took
about 3hrs to dry clear and tacky

Laying the tiles, with much help from the you
tube videos by redneckresponder on "laying
vinyl tiles"  his tutorial videos were a huge help
to us, you've got to check them out if you're
planning to lay these type of floor tiles.



Finised product! after they set a few days we'll polish them up and make the
floor look real purdy ;-)  Amazing how the new floor really seems to
open up the whole space inside the trailer.

Interior Wood Restoration Finished!

Alright so one correction from the previous post, we decided that the amber colored shellac (even just one coat) made the new birch wood panels too dark.  So... on new birch we did one coat of half amber and half clear, followed by three coats of clear shellac, and on the exhisting original wood we sanded and put 4 coats of clear shellac on.  A lot of work but is's looking pretty good; not perfect still some staining and imperfectins seen in the old wood but all in all we're pretty happy with how it looks.  As a side note... I did touch up paint over a couple spots on the original wood that was water damaged. I use a little acrylic pain to color match to the birch- shh don't tell, you tcan't even see it ;-)   I'll try and post more photos of the final product soon (hopefully with better photo quality too).

All the cupboards and drawers out/off our driveway became
a serious work zone

Finally Getting Back to Trailer Work

Time to start up on interior restoration:  

Wood Refinishing First

So after reading up on several other people's refinishing suggestions from the yuku vintage trailer discussion group I decided to go with Shellac on the interior wood refinishing.


Here is our sample test piece on a scrap piece of birch paneling.  We experimented with sanding the bare wood prior to shellacing and not sanding, experimented with the amber tinted shellac and the clear coat shellac and with sanding between coats or not.

Top right side is one coat of amber shellac with 3 coats of clear shellac (best color match)

Final decision was.... (Drumroll)....

     On bare new birch:  Light sand first, then one coat of amber shellace, with three coats of clear shellac on top, sanding with fine grit sand paper and wiping away all the dust in between each coat (this combination seemed to give the best color match to the original panels and it gave the smoothest glossiest finish)

    On the existing original birch: lightly sand it with fine paper and then apply 4 coats of clear shellac - sanding and wiping it clean between coats- this gave the closest color match.  We found that applying any of the amber shellac on top of the original finish made it become just slightly too dark.

Amber and Clear Shellac applied to samples of original paneling

Here we go removing all the cupboard doors and removing all the fixtures getting ready to sand it all. 

Headed North

To Big foot country we go

Look how pretty She looks!

There she is,  the Dream Inn - new paint job looking nice, that is our budget truck along side.  Wouldn't you know as we headed out the driveway ready for our 6 hour drive north we realized the running lights were no longer working! No time to stop and fix the problem now just gotta keep on truckin.  We'll fix them later. (luckily we didn't get stopped along the way)

And here she rests in our new mountian town car-port

Our new home- the beautiful Mount Shasta

Here's the Dream Inn experiencing  her first snow storm ;-)

Next - Never Ending Aluminum Polishing!

After getting the paint job wrapped up we had to put her all back together.  We spent countless hours polishing the gutter rails, the windows and any other aluminum parts, her eis a photo of the products we were using to polish.

Polishing Steps:

1. Goof Off if needed to get any crud off, then Chrome and Wire cleaner (spray it on- it works great to get all the old corrosion off)

2. Rust Disolver if needed on things like the wheel rims ect

3. Murphys Oil Soap scrub (put some muscle in it) with a fine steel wool

4. last rub on and off the  Mothers mag & aluminum polish with a soft cloth for the sparkly shine finish ;-)

                       Wow we really put our time in here!

Look at how shiny that chrome finish is now!

Applied all new putty tape  and sealant to the seams then put up our shiny revived gutter rails, putty taped all the windows and lights, put in our polished parts- so gratifying!  We got all the lights working for the long haul ahead.

 Its down to the wire here putting it all back together.  Moving up north in one day!  

Notice Salty dog hard at work supervising.  We cleaned each jelousie glass panel with CLR and they look like new! We put new gaskets and seals in the windows.  Got the front window rock guard all cleaned up and  installed.  (just missing one hub cap- so we're on the look out for a matching half moon hub)

Final Paint Job

Ok, so we've got some serious backtracking to do once again... After getting married in July we busted our tails to finish the exterior of the trailer and  then we got her on the road for our big move up to a Mount Shasta California.  So here are more pictures of us finishing up the paint job after our wedding.

Masking off for our silver Z-stripe

Ready to spray the silver Z-stripe, we got so lucky with the weather,
no wind, and just enough coastal fog to keep the temperatures down

Final paint job product! She turned our beautiful! Now it's time to put her
all back together, we put the storage doors back on in this photo