Demoooo

The first couple weeks with Little Wayne have involved lots of demolition, complete with facemasks and 8^th grade science class goggles. Besides stripping out all the electrical, plumbing, and insulation, other things we removed from behind the walls include: wasp nests, mouse nests, dead mice, live mice, pellets and pellets of mouse poop, and brown recluse spiders.

After all that demo, we decided to switch gears for a couple days and…return to digging! We dug this 18” trench to house a water supply line and electrical hookup running from our basement out to LW. I tied into our main water supply line using ¾” PEX and a couple sharkbite fittings, which are very user-friendly by the way. Also installed a shut off valve to LW that we can access from the basement.

After doing some research on electrical, we found that RV’s typically run on DC current whereas your house runs on AC current. This is what most AC/DC songs are about. 

We briefly looked into a DC solar power set up but found it wouldn’t be cost effective for the project. Next step was to decide whether to wire for DC or AC and since I’m very green about this stuff, it was time to consult the Oracle of Angel Fire.

Because Wayne will be stationary in the yard and we won’t be using it for travel, Larry told us our best bet would be to run AC power from our house. We want LW to be able to function like a normal house—i.e. run A/C, fridge, microwave, lights etc at the same time, so we need about 60 Amps of load capacity. We were fortunate to have 2 open 30 Amp circuits on our panel in the house, so what Larry said to do was put in 2 junction boxes and run the cables underground, in PVC conduit, from the basement out to LW. Cassidy helped run the 8 gauge wire through sections of conduit which we joined together with PVC glue. Much easier as a team! Next step will be to install 2 30A breaker boxes in Little Wayne and run the electrical circuits off of those.

Next on the to-do list was replace the sections of rotted sub floor. Once we cut into the sub floor, we discovered a little more rot than we originally thought existed. So it was back to demo! Removing the floors was definitely a task. Pretty much all of the trailer floor screws—these things:

—were stripped, so unscrewing with the drill was not possible. I used the vice grips to get most of them out and the others I just cut out with a grinder. In the future I would not use a cheapo brand of power tool—The $30 IronTon only lasted 2 days, and was returned for a Milwaukee (which crushed it). Cass working hard into the evening: 

 Pile of demo!!! Gotta make a dump run...

Now Little Wayne truly is a blank canvas, and it’s time to start painting. Oh, we did that too—we spray-painted the steel frame with a coat of Rustoleum rust reformer to protect it in the future.

Old Things, New Things, and Bling Things

They say that when you're tackling home improvement projects that you should make a detailed budget and timeline for planning, and then add some percentage on top of of both of these numbers to get you're actual budget and timeline. Depending on who you're talking to, that percentage can range from five to twenty percent. However, after renovating the house and now starting Little Wayne, I've come to realize that this rule just doesn't work some things. And by some things, I mean old things. 

Old stuff, man. 

The story goes like this: It's Friday. I have three days off. I decide that this weekend I'm going to tackle the windows. I have three days. Three long, uninterrupted days where I wake up at 5am and work until 7pm. It'll be easy, I think. I'll have the windows off in a few hours, the glass ordered by 4pm (closing time for Nashville Glass), and the frames polished ready for the new glass installation on Saturday. Done. Who needs Sunday?

The DEVIL SCREW. I think we eventually just sawzawed the sucker out.
Sacrilege, I know, but it had to be done.

Well, here's how it actually went. I unscrewed my first two screws. Success! And then the third one got a little hairy. As did the four one and fifth one and the sixth one and--well you get the picture. And then all of a sudden it's later afternoon, and I've called my dad a half dozen times and done umpteen google searches on how to remove stripped screws, and in total I've removed maybe five. Five! There are ten to fifteen screws per window and I'm removing ten windows. You can do the math. 

I bought a new screwdriver, I tried WD40, we even went to Harbor Freight and bought a screw extractor (worthless, by the way). I also made a trip to Home Depot and bought a pair of Vice Grips. The Vice Grips were successful of a handful of screws, but required a solid five to ten minutes of struggling to get there.

So finally that evening, after I'd wasted an entire day doing nothing but getting myself frustrated, I went to Home Depot and bought a Dremel. (Remember that whole breaking-the-budget thing??) The next morning, you'd think I'd wake up and use it right? Well, I didn't. I actually waited until that afternoon after an entire morning of trying all if the things I'd tried before because we were already so over-budget, and I really wanted to return the thing. I gave in that afternoon. Using the Dremel, I cut a deep slit into the top of each screw and used a flathead to try and pry the things out. I say try because it didn't work. For a while. It took until the next morning (this would be the "unnecessary Sunday") when we finally found a sharp flathead hidden in the socket set. THANK GOSH. By ten that morning, I had removed all of the windows, and they were ready for polishing.

The point is: old things are tricky. Old, rusted, stripped screws don't unscrew like one purchased yesterday at the Depot. Old windows that have weathered and bent and been sealed shut many times over don't just pop off when you want them to. Old things are beautiful. They have history and character and years of stories to tell, but there's a price to pay for all of that. They're full of secrets and surprises. Dad complained over and over about this while working on the house, and I certainly understand. We love Little Wayne. We would never have bought a modern camper for this purpose and even if we buy one for traveling, we doubt it will have been made in the past two decades, but honestly? I've never been more excited for PEX piping.

{I won't bore you with the polishing story, but it's something very similar only involving bolts and nuts and the floppy head of the polisher flying off ten thousand times. It took me every afternoon this week and all of Friday to get the frames even somewhat polished. (The actual polishing took maybe thirty minutes.) After all of the frustration I'd endured with little tangible reward, I also started polishing a piece of Wayne's aluminum skin because I just really needed to see something shiny, dammit. See below}

Todd had a similarly frustrating week when he tried to replace a few bits of rotten floor. I spent a couple hours helping him here and there, but I kind of suck with the pry bar. I can handle the cat's paw though! Anyway,  I'll let him give you the details. It basically involves thinking we could cut out the plywood, but deciding to replace both layers and the 1x4's holding them to the frame.

 P.S. You know that those 1x4's are held to the frame with? Just take a guess....

How do you keep an active weimaraner entertained while you're busy working? Run him and then this...

Little Wayne Season 1, Episode 1

Disclaimer: The fun, entertaining writing in this blog will be provided by my wonderful, talented, soon-to-be best-selling author wife. I’ll mainly be posting the numerous pictures I take along the way—especially of Cassidy doing epic stuff—and some more technical details so that we can reference them for future projects.

As Cass said, we had been looking for travel trailers for some time because, let’s face it, we need a new project! We looked at several in town that were in ROUGH shape. Like, the aluminum skins were rusted out, people had stashed their junk in them for years, they had water damage throughout… One was out on a farm and the tires had sunk a foot into the ground and as we opened the door to go in the owner yelled to us in an amazing accent, “Y’all look out fer snakes!!”

Cassidy found Little Wayne on eBay and we quickly agreed it was perfect. Priced cheap and appeared to be in great shape. We emailed Actual Wayne with a few questions about its condition and he was above and beyond helpful in getting back to us with answers. So, after winning the auction by placing a strategic bid with the clock winding down, now all we had to was… complete like 8 major things in just a couple weeks’ time:

1.     Unsuccessfully move the pumpkin plant—Self explanatory. Not sure where I went wrong but I definitely should have consulted with my sister Kate beforehand. 

2.     Excavation—I was pretty excited to rent this ride-on Skid Steer. We had originally thought about excavating a 10x15x2 foot deep section of yard by shovel but dang I’m glad the Troms and Howard talked some sense into us. Was able to knock it out in several hours. Was warned by my wife to be very careful and I was. The only collateral damage sustained was clipping the circular saw power cord when I was cutting out tree roots…we have since invested in a Sawzall.

 

3.     Gravel—Arranged a dump truck delivery of 5 cubic yards of gravel base to cover the driveway. In the end we could have used a bit more.. and I did buy another 60ish bags for leveling and drainage behind the retaining wall. The skid steer moved the 5 yards in about one hour. Which is in stark contrast to the couple days it took us first time we spread gravel using only shovels...

4.    Retaining Wall—Looked at several options and went with the cheapest. Lowe’s delivered 2 pallets of concrete stack stone right to the driveway and off I went. Leveling each individual block on the first layer was a challenge for sure, but from there it was smooth sailing. Between layers I used PL500 concrete adhesive (no mortar needed).

5.    Backfill behind Retaining Wall—Without the help of the skid steer I relied on shovel and very dysfunctional wheelbarrow, and this took a longggg time. I began to refer to myself as Joe Dirt because of all the digging projects undertaken thus far, but little did I know we weren’t done yet…!

6.    The sewer—You always think projects will go quicker than they do. As Mr. Trom says, renovating a house is like eating an elephant, and you have to just focus on one thing at a time. The travel trailer would be more like eating a buffalo--mmm bison burgers--but the idea is the same. With the sewer, we thought, we just had to locate the line—probably a couple feet down—split it open, attach a couple fittings and call it a day. Easy enough… I’ll preface by saying this HAD to get done before we got Little Wayne, because digging under the trailer wasn’t going to happen.

Most rational people reading this would say, why didn’t you just hire someone to do these kind of awful jobs? And the answer is, we’re on a budget folks! Trying to turn a profit here. “We want to make bank, bro.” Below are some pictures to document our 60 hour sewer line adventure (As Cass said it took approx 15 hours just to FIND the line). On a technical note, we learned that Ferncos, the fittings that connect your old clay sewer pipe to a new PVC pipe, come in all sorts of sizes. We bought the ones that said 6” clay to 4” PVC, which was exactly what we needed. However, 6” clay was actually 7 5/8” diameter. Still don’t know why…not exactly going to provide a leak free seal. But that was what we discovered at the end of that second night just prior to bathing in the garden hose. Sidenote: we bathed in the garden hose. I am very lucky to have a wife who is cool and laid back enough to be OK with this situation.

Continuing Cass’ story, we got up the next morning, Cass went to work, and the daylight made it easier to diagnose what was going on. In addition to the Fernco fittings being the wrong size, there were roots growing along the bottom of the old clay pipe which would prevent even the right size Fernco from fitting snugly (I put my phone underneath the pipe and took video to find this out). I have since sanitized the phone. What took so long from there? This was like 6 am, and we still didn’t finish for another 15 hours…? Well, the working conditions consisted of: Being 5 feet underground, not much light was getting down there, and it was 99 degrees and humid. I think we drank about 75 big size gatorades over those 3 days. In order to get the roots off the bottom of the pipe I used the sawzall and had to blindly saw at the root a little bit at a time being very careful not to cut the pipe. Then I discovered one side of the pipe was cracked, so I had to dig out another 2 feet over to that side beyond the joint to get a clean cut. Then I showered again in the garden hose and went to Home Depot and got new Ferncos. Brought them home, and… they were the wrong size. So I went to Kenny Pipe & Supply and explained what I needed and finally came home with the right size fittings! These were labeled 6” PVC to 4” PVC and had an actual opening of 6 3/8” that you tighten down. It was pretty glorious to finally get the adventure wrapped up. We used our neighbor John’s riding mower to move trash cans full of dirt from behind the fence to fill in the supermassive black sewer hole. With access to the house plumbing again, we took long showers and then hit the road in the am to Missouri.

Huge thanks to the Troms for helping us in a pinch to haul Little Wayne 8 hours from central MO back to Nashville! And thanks to Roger and Mary for hosting us and putting up with Lyle and Gypsy, and of course to Wayne himself for his generosity and awesome personality.

Next installment—Little Wayne checks in to rehab / detox commences.

The "Crappy" Stuff: Trailer Preparation

Allow me to set the scene. It's 10pm on a Thursday night, in the steamy back half of August, and Todd and are crouched around a hole in our work clothes with our hands using an ordinary kitchen mixing bowl (in a darling color, I might add) to shovel sewage tinted mud out of a four and a half deep foot hole in the ground. Behind us, the utility spotlight starts to tip. I grab it and use the mud in my hands to steady the base. Todd crawls into the hole. It's barely large enough to fit his body, and as he uses the hand trowel to scrape around the broken sewage pipe, he uses he side of the hole to lift his legs nearly above his head.

In the dark, I search for the grinder and plug it in.

"Okay," he says, and then the roaring of the grinder on the clay pipe drowns out the sounds of neighborhood stereo systems and our own voices. The grinder stops. We wave our arms through the cloud of dust, trying to see the progress, but in the stark illumination of the spotlight, we can't see anything but the edges of the ground. We wait. When the dust finally clears he tries again. And then again. Until the edges of the clay pipe are clean and exposed. I hand him the rubber Ferncos and the PVC we glued earlier in the evening. I hold my breath.

Almost everyone we know is downtown. They're drinking beer and watching a band we love play a free outdoor concert, but it's okay, I think because after two days of digging, two long hot summer days of shoveling just to find the sewer pipe, we're almost there. The shower is so close, I can feel it.

After a few more minutes, Todd gets the Fernco and PVC attached. While he works, I convince him not to run the line tonight. "Just cap it," I say. It's after ten at night and I've got to be up for work tomorrow. I haven't washed my hair in three days. He reluctantly agrees and begins to tighten the fittings.

I've been helping Todd dig since getting home at 4pm that afternoon. We are covered in sweat and mud and best of all, sewage. That's right. When you cut a sewage line, you get to watch as the 100 years of rear end remnants come slowly creeping out, and when you're more than four feet underground with no place for that sewage to go, it goes right where you think it does. On you.

 Finally, Todd gets the line set. I can see the excitement on his face. I'm already rinsing the tools in water hose, dreaming about a hot shower. Not a single spot on my body is clean. My white shirt turned brown long before. From across the yard Todd yells at me to try flushing the toilet.

I can hardly contain my excitement. I do instructed and then run back outside.

But what I see isn't what I expect. Todd yells and again the sound drowns out the car stereos.

It's leaking.

Flash forward to the present. It's been two weeks now since that long and literally crappy day. We showered that night in the water hose (thank goodness for privacy fences), and then by 10pm the next night, Todd had successfully run a new set of Ferncos with the PVC. By 11pm that Friday, we had the hole recovered with dirt and gravel. I mean, all's well that ends well right?

But let me back up again because what exactly were we doing trying to tie into the sewage line anyway? That hardly screams pleasure.

At the end of July, after we decided that we definitely wanted a Spartan trailer, we happened across an adorable Spartanette listed on Ebay with no reserve and a starting bid of $700. We had already checked out a Spartanette just outside of town for an incredibly cheap price, but the frame of the trailer was rusty and the size was too large to fit comfortable in our yard. The Ebay trailer we found was listed at 24 feet (it's actually a full 30), and for a 60 year old trailer, it looked pretty dang solid. We waited until the morning the auction was ending and placed our bid. We won!

But here's the tricky part. We live in the city with an average size yard surrounded by a seven foot privacy fence. Getting the trailer into our yard meant taking out part of the fence. Once we agreed on trailer placement in the yard, we realized that we would also would have to do some leveling. We wanted to put the trailer in the already establish parking spot along the fence, but we needed to take down ten more feet of yard in order for it to fit comfortably.

So while I was on a girls trip in Greece (eating Gyros, bathing in the Aegean, sailing to magical coves with crystal blue water), Todd was working his buns off leveling the yard and building a new retaining wall. Hey man, at least I agreed to let him rent the powered digger. Hehe. I'll let Todd give you the details about the excavation and wall building, and I'll spare you anymore Greece details (wine, wine, wine, cheese).

Then the last weekend in August, after we finally finished the three-day sewer line adventure, we met my parents in Missouri to pick up Wayne. (If you're wondering if my parents are still the kindest, most generous and patient people on the face of the Earth, you're answer is this: YES. Yes, they are.) For some strange reason, they continue to offer to help us, and like the greedy-needy people we are, we continue to accept. But we certainly appreciate it!

After a short visit with family friends in Springfield (thanks again, Roger and Mary!), we drove to Marshfield to visit up Wayne from, well, Wayne. I won't give you the full rundown on the gentleman from whom we bought the trailer, but I will tell you that he was absolutely fabulous. He was the sweetest, funniest man, and it was after meeting him that we officially decided to name the trailer after him. "Little Wayne," was Todd's suggestion, and I really couldn't turn down the idea of naming our 50's family camper so similarly to a notorious 00's rapper because, well, irony, people.

Next up: The journey home and Todd's perspective.