Airstream Remodel Episode 5: The Rain Starts Coming and It Won’t Stop Coming
After nearly 3 months of work on Pauline (Jared works 6 days a week on the renovation, and I join him every Saturday), we were starting to feel pretty exhausted. Yes, we felt like we had made progress, but there was still so much to be done, and our hope for moving in at the beginning of January was fading. However, finally replacing the subfloor had filled us with renewed energy to keep moving forward!
Have I mentioned that we have amazing friends? Jacob came over again, and he and Jared ran all the wiring for our electrical systems. To be honest, this whole process was way over my head, and I couldn’t explain it if I tried. If you’d like a tutorial, comment below and maybe I’ll be able to convince Jared to make a guest post!
While they were working on the wiring, Trent and I taped out the floor plan. When we started working on this, I just thought it would be a fun way to start visualizing the space, but it ended up being SOOO important to finalizing the floor plan.
First, we realized that the space we had intended to be the laundry closet wouldn’t be deep enough to house the washer/dryer, so we had to move it, which meant we had to change the path we ran for the electrical. This would have been nearly impossible if the walls were already up, but since Jared and Jacob were at that very moment running the wiring, it ended up being an easy fix. We had also underestimated how much space we would need in the bathroom. With our original plan, you wouldn’t have been able to shut the door while you were standing at the sink, so we bumped the wall for the bathroom out a few inches. Unfortunately, that meant that the hallway became almost impassable, so we narrowed the countertop/cabinets on the opposite side to compensate. All of these changes may seem pretty small, but by figuring it out now, we are saving ourselves a lot of time, and probably a bit of money, when we finally get to building out the interior.
My feeble attempt at drawing in what it will look like. Listen…I really tried.
The view from the bedroom - the sofa will go in the area under the big front window
If you want to see the full tour, check out this vlog!
After sealing the seams in the new subfloor with caulk, we were feeling pretty good about taking a few days off to visit my family in Alabama for Thanksgiving. We knew that Pauline wasn’t fully sealed up yet, but she was getting so close! Little did we know, it would rain TEN INCHES during the three days we were gone.
The day we returned from Thanksgiving was probably our lowest day of the renovation so far. With the rain still falling, we stepped inside to find water literally DRIPPING OFF THE WALLS. Since the wheel wells weren’t sealed up yet, the humidity inside was just as high as it was outside, so the walls were sweating. Remember how we struggled with that gasket on the front window when we reinstalled it? Well, water was steadily seeping through the cracks, pooling on the window sill and running down onto our brand new subfloor. Everywhere we turned, there seemed to be more water, and it JUST. KEPT. RAINING.
I’ll be honest, I felt pretty hopeless at this moment. I cried, I even screamed a little from the frustration. The new subfloor was wet and I was already imagining having to undo the last two weeks of work and replace the subfloor AGAIN. After about half an hour of processing what was happening and a whole lot of praying, we started trying to do damage control.
The first problem we had to solve was the water pouring in through the front window. I grabbed the caulk gun and our trusty Lexel Caulk (it sticks to wet surfaces!) and we started emptying it into the cracks around the window. Jared caulked, and I dipped my gloved hand into mineral spirits and used it to push the caulk into every nook and cranny and create a smooth, thick layer over all the rivets and seams. As I pushed the caulk into certain spots, water would gush out from the crevice where it had been collecting. About an hour and a full tube of caulk later and we couldn’t find a single drop of moisture coming through the windows.
Now that we had stopped more water from getting in, we had to dry out what had already gotten inside. The silver lining of Jared’s parents being flooded during Hurricane Harvey was that they had two carpet fans and two big dehumidifiers on hand. We stuffed towels into every remaining opening to seal up Pauline, then turned on both the fans and humidifiers full blast, focusing on the area in the front where most of the water had gotten in. Jared had already cut an access panel in the subfloor near the front window for running the trailer wires. We positioned one fan blowing under the subfloor and into the bellypan to dry it from below.
One victory from this whole event was discovering that we seem to have successfully sealed up the back of the trailer. You may remember from when we pulled out the original subfloor that one of the areas with the most water damage was right under the back window. Jared had cut another access panel in that area and we were able to confirm that above and below the subfloor was dry as a bone!
It’s been about two weeks now since that day. The subfloor dried out fully, so the repair work I feared ended up being unnecessary. By the grace of God, none of the areas that leaked were near our wool insulation, so none of that had to be replaced. We just had to glue back up a few of the polyiso boards. It’s rained again since then, and we haven’t found a single leak in the front window. While it’s not the way I would have preferred to check Pauline for leaks (I was imagining a more controlled situation, maybe me using a hose while Jared checked from the inside), I do feel blessed that we discovered and fixed these problems BEFORE we put in walls.
With that drama behind us, we did finally seal up the wheel wells. We had purchased some wheel well covers online that claimed to fit vintage airstreams from Pauline’s era. Unfortunately, they were a bit small and left a 1-3” gap between the cover and the shell. Jared made a c channel to curve along this gap. We riveted it to the shell from the outside, then Jared reached up inside the cover to put bolts through and secure the other side.
Next up: Walls!!
Materials
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