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.