Demo days 1-100

Originally the plan was to pull up the carpet in the bathroom, take out the dead mice, and roll with it.  However, the more we pulled things apart, the more we realized that a whole colony of mice had taken up residency and then used the walls as a mass grave.  We needed to take it completely apart...

It was still 1977 inside!

After two days of demo!

We also began to realize that the original interior made everything seem dark and small.  There were several renovated Airstreams that we had seen online that had fewer walls and overall just a lot less stuff inside.  Those were the ones we liked and felt like we could live in.  So we started ripping out everything we could!

The rear endcap was about to come out

The more we ripped out, the more dead mice we found.  And that slight smell of mouse droppings?  It never quite went away, no matter how much we cleaned.  So we kept removing more and more and more..

The front endcap taken out

This may have been the most stressful part of the renovation.  It was the end of March, we had a set date of May 8th to leave Maine, and there was water pouring into the interior every time it rained.  We still had to seal all of the holes, insulate and put the walls back up before anything else could happen.






 Thankfully, Lee has a great friend, Nick, who came and helped us replace flooring, put endcaps back in, and gave us a jump start on getting panels back up.  He has also let us borrow tools, which has reduced the overall cost of renovating and kept us from adding to the pile of things we just can't fit into our new home.













While gutting the whole trailer added several week of work onto this project, I'm so glad we did it.  There is no smell of mouse or mouse remnants, and we have high quality insulation in the whole trailer.  We also were able to inspect the frame and were happy to see that 90% of it is in awesome shape.  The sections that have rusted we treated with rust remover and painted.  Only one section needs some additional support welded in, which is pretty impressive for a 39 year old trailer.