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.