Reupholstering our bench seat cushions = no joke. But after five long weekends, we finally did it. 

Okay, the title is a little misleading and sarcastic and only partially true. BUT, I did successfully reupholster Elsie’s cushions with little to no sewing experience. Looking back, I probably should have started a little smaller. But seat cushions are like one big throw pillow, right?

**Note: Before I tackled it myself, I did get a quote from a local upholsterer in town. It was more than anything we’d spent on Elsie to-date. And we were on a budget, so…

It started on a Saturday. My mom and I went fabric shopping at JoAnn’s. I hadn’t spent much time at this store, but I gotta tell you: it was nice. They had a lot of fabrics to choose from and from new designers, too, like Nate Berkus. Sure, they had felt and fleece and grandma patterns. It’s a fabric store. But still, I was impressed.

After lots of looking we landed on a grayish brown faux leather material for the seat cushions. We considered doing it all in this material, but being me, I wanted something with a little more flair. Carson and I ended up picking the fabric for the back cushions a few days later, a pattern that kind of looks like jean material.

Next came the hard stuff.     

• Measuring the right amount of fabric. Thankfully I had some pretty skilled technicians over at Joann’s. I told them about the project and brought in one of the old cushions. After about 15 minutes of using the calculator and consulting with at least one other store representative, we landed on just the right amount of yardage: four yards of fabric per cushion (we had four) should do the top, bottom, sides, piping and zipper.

After we had the fabric, I was ready to knock these cushions out in a weekend. But hard stuff round II happened.

The process of cutting and measuring the fabric pieces took one full day. Much longer than I anticipated! Also: I hate cutting. 

• Cutting the fabric. It took me an entire day to cut just the right size of sides, tops, bottoms, etc. for all four cushions. First I de-assembled one of the old cushion covers. This was smart because I used it as a pattern for cutting my new fabric. While four yards was indeed enough fabric, it did not leave a lot of wiggle room. I had to use the calculator again and map out where to cut which pieces. Then I had to use the cutting mat and rotary cutter to slice out all four cushions worth of strips.

On Sunday, I thought: let’s sew this sucker together! This is where I’ll introduce my accomplice, Carson’s mom, Mary. She’d sewn a lot of stuff over the years, including a rain jacket (what?!) and helped me out tremendously. But mostly with the actual sewing. I had never done a zipper before and she suggested we start there. We figured out how the zipper foot worked on her new sewing machine and I put in the first half of the zipper no problem-o. With the other side we found issue no. 3.

Zippers

Getting the zippers in the blue fabric was a cinch compared to the vinyl.

Upholstery Zippers

Bought these bad boys at Joann's.

Zipper Sewing

I'm smiling here. But only to keep from crying. 

• Faux leather vinyl bunches up. Had we been smart, we would have started with the easier non-vinyl fabric. But this is me we’re talking about. We couldn’t get the other half of the zipper on straight because we were getting a lot of bunching. So, we ripped it out and tried again. Then again. And again. It was now the end of the weekend and I had yet to put in a full zipper. Mary said she’d look into it until we came back the following weekend. She solved it with tape and tissue paper. The bunching was happening because the vinyl was sticking to the machine. After we used the tape and/or tissue paper trick, we were able to move on. Note: Mary installed the first zipper (thank you!).

The next weekend I came back ready to knock it out for real. I sat down at the machine with Mary and put in the second zipper no problem. Next up, problem no. 4.

• Piping is not easy. We applied the piping to the side pieces. Turns out that you’ve got to sew pretty darn precisely to make it look good. And the vinyl was sticking again, it was slow going. Also, we were sewing with not a lot of wiggle room (I cut it without any excess!). It took an entire day to do about half the cushions. And there goes weekend no. 2.

Piping

Mary sews a pretty expert level piping here.

WIP

The piping was a work in progress for quite a long time.

Pied Piping

It's a good thing you can't see my full face here. I'm probably swearing. 

The third weekend I came back and did not work on the cushions. In one of my (many) sewing mistakes the previous weekend, I took piping out of what I thought was a incorrectly sewn piece. Then realized that I had actually de-assembled one whole side panel that was perfectly fine. UGH.

This brings us to weekend no. 4. I wasn’t happy, but I was determined. The piping was all set. Zippers in. All we had to do now was affix the sides to the tops and bottoms. And this brings us to problem no. 5.

• Blind sewing. First, it took us a long time to figure out how to attach these pieces together. We spent a lot of time thinking, holding, trying, and pinning. My tip for this part is PIN, PIN AWAY. We had to do a lot of pinning to make sure that everything lined up. Then came the part I really struggled with: blind sewing. Because of how these ultimately assembled, you had to sew by feel. Which means you had to hold everything taut under the machine and sew where you couldn’t see what was happening on the other side. I was terrible at blind sewing. So, Mary did almost all of it. She sewed. I pinned. It was kind of a match made in heaven. We had 1.5 weekend days of blind sewing.

Now it was getting to the end of the third weekend. We’d sewed all the pieces together. All we had to do now was put the new cushion covers on the old foam. Problem no. 6.

• Stuff sticks to foam. Getting these covers on was tight! And hard. Mary had learned a trick from a friend in town: use a plastic dry cleaning bag to cover the foam so that it slides on easy. And…it worked! Amazing.

Costello was pretty bored during the whole thing. 

These cushions were looking pretty darn good. Not perfect, but honestly you’d have thought a quasi-professional did these. The next weekend I came back and we did it all again on the blue fabric. The vinyl fabric was the toughest because it was so unforgiving. I’m not sure I’d choose that fabric again. Also, because that vinyl was so hard, Mary ended up going back and fixing a lot during her work week. MARY = SEWING GODDESS. The following weekend I sewed together the pillow covers (with zipper!) which seemed so easy compared to what we just did that I’m not even going to explain it.

So, after five weekends of sewing we did it! What do you think? Any tips for the next go around? 

Pretty professional-grade stuff, right? The patterned pillows are the Nate Berkus fabric I was telling you about. 

Me enjoying the hard-earned fruits of my labor. WE DID IT.

When it comes to plumbing, I’m a complete dolt, a non-functioning illiterate. The water turns on. The water turns off. The water goes away. I take no pride in this ineptitude, and yet the ugly fact remains: if there’s a leak, I’m calling the plumber. (Note: His name is Jerry Vaughan. He lives in Broken Bow, Nebraska. Great references. Perfect Yelp rating. Great Angie’s List reviews. Can’t go wrong.).

Or at least that’s how it used to be, before the prospect of living in a trailer full time triggered some primitive survival mechanism and forced me out of my general uselessness. I can do without certain comforts, but a hot shower is something I need at least every now and then to feel awake and civilized. 

Plumbing is hard work. Excuse me while I nap in this awkward position.

Elsie was born in 1968, which means that all of the original water lines were made of copper, same as the propane lines. In and of itself, that’s not a problem. Copper is an expensive metal, and for decades most professionals considered it the best choice for plumbing systems. Had the lines been intact and running where they were supposed to, we might have considered keeping them. 

After a few hours spent tracing both the water and propane lines to inspect for leaks and other issues, we hit a conundrum. Some of the lines run in between the interior and exterior of the trailer, through pockets that can’t be easily accessed. Tracing these lines often meant shaking one end and feeling for the pulse on the other. For too long we scratched our heads at one particular juncture: we shook the propane line but felt the waterlines move instead. It didn’t make any sense. It made so little sense, in fact, that the most common sense answer didn’t even cross our minds.

Craigslist Ray thought it was smart to connect the water line to the propane line with this rubber tubing. Craigslist Ray has funny ideas.

Hose Clamps

Then we found it: a convergence of the two lines, the water line slightly bigger than the propane line, clamped together. For reasons I cannot figure out but which make me think Craigslist Ray might have been even less qualified to wear a tool belt than me, the propane line was running directly into the water line. Clearly, despite what Ray had told us, he hadn’t been using either system in a very long time. That, or he enjoys a good propane shower every now and then.

Ultimately, we started over. We stripped out the old copper lines (though we kept them for other DIY projects) and replaced them with PEX, or crosslinked polyethelene, a flexible and corrosion-resistant material more in vogue with plumbers today.

Our new PEX lines installed with hose clamps.

We were doing everything right, until we did it all wrong. We purchased the PEX piping and all of the appropriate fittings, replaced all the lines and fittings and connected them using hose clamps and a bit of pipe dope. Once we hooked up the hose and turned it on, however, nearly every single one of the joints was leaking beneath the hose clamp. So we shut off the water. Tightened every clamp. Turned the water back on and……more leaks. The tightening had slowed them down, but the lines still dribbled at every juncture. Two days down, all of the clamps tightened and replaced, and still we didn’t have a dry system.

Our new PEX lines installed with our new crimp rings and crimping tool. A drop of water hasn't leaked through since we installed them. 

Eventually, we returned to Menards, where the service representative introduced us to crimp rings and the crimping tool. Instead of hose clamps, the crimping tool uses a solid metal ring and crimps it tightly over the PEX line. We purchased a package of crimp rings and the crimping tool (for a hefty $75) and reattached all the lines. And this time….it worked! The water filled up the tank and ran silently through the lines. Completely dry. The tool wasn’t cheap, but it worked perfectly, and we could now enjoy showers and fresh water whenever we pleased. 

At first, the avocado green didn't seem so bad. I even remember a time when I thought "that's probably one thing we actually won't change in the trailer." After coating the walls and cabinets in bistro white, however, the green sink led to the first of many "aesthetics arguments" that Jerry, Carson and myself would have over the course of the renovation. 

Jerry thought that painting the sink would create a blemish in our kitchen and did not trust the tub & tile paint I picked up on a whim in in the Grand Island Menards. He also had a point: the sink was perfectly functional. Why risk it?

A: Aesthetics. 

Jerry had experience with epoxy paint and warned that the finish would be hard to achieve with a roller. If it were him, he said, he'd be using a spray on version so it wouldn't pool or settle. But after Jerry thought on it for a night and relieved himself of any responsibility, he gave me the go-ahead. 

Thank goodness Rust-Oleum's Tub & Tile paint is nothing short of magic. I watched the YouTube video the company put online and read a ton of reviews before I started. It all confirmed what I now know: follow that YouTube video and you can't go wrong. This paint really goes on easy. It's thick, too, which means you do NOT have to worry about lines. The other great thing is that this paint does not "pool". Instead, it kind of gels together when it dries. We applied three coats with a thick nap roller.

The very successful trial run of this sink gave me confidence to try it on the bathroom walls. This was a much tougher sell; one I had to convince Carson of over weeks of deliberation. I spent 30 minutes in Menards deciding on a bathroom faucet, I argued. It made no sense now to say "oh well" with the bathroom walls after that.

I meticulously taped off all the edges and applied three coats with a foam roller. There was a slight melt down this time around. After the first successful coat, I switched rollers because I'd sliced the foam roller on some metal edging. I didn't want it to leave uneven marks. When I did that, however, some of the "fuzzies" on the new roller came off onto the wall. I tried to get them out and roll over it vigorously. But it only made it worse. I shed a few tears thinking I'd ruined it all. I was also very delirious from the fumes. This stuff is pungent. Being the hypochondriac that I am, I told Carson I was sure the fumes would at the very least give me a brain tumor later in life or something of the like. 

Carson, calmed me down, told me to roll it one more time. And he was right. Go buy Rust-Oleum Tub & Tile paint today. It's incredibly sturdy, looks great, seals wonderfully. I have since even considered painting the tub in our apartment with it and we don't even own this place. At $30/box  you can't go wrong.

Now let's talk about our second aesthetics argument: the concrete countertops.  While there was nothing technically wrong with our white and gold speckled countertops, they weren't necessarily appealing either. I spent a lot of Google time looking at potential solutions. The blog Vintage Revivals and Mandi's tutorial on how she refinished her countertops with concrete in The Nugget sold me.

Jerry was skeptical (again). He thought the product might crack over time. He was also worried it'd be uneven. And, yes, the countertop was perfectly functional. But as Carson has noted, we wanted that industrial kind of vibe. Concrete is a must for that look. Here's the steps and advice I'd give you on making this work.

1. Ask for help. Finding the product was the first challenge. Follow Mandi's advice and look for Henry Feather Finish at The Home Depot. But ask a rep to help you locate it. It took us 20 minutes with an associate or two. 
2. Follow instructions, kind of. Even though the product says to NOT add more water after you've initially mixed it, we did. And the world didn't end. This stuff has a short time window (10 min., maybe) before it gums up. You've got to move quickly to spread it right away after you've mixed it. But if you need more time, like us, you can add some water.
3. Use a trowel and bondo tool. We used a trowel to evenly spread the cement mixture in the larger areas. When we had tight spaces around the oven and sink we used a Bondo spreader Jerry had from doing car body repair. It worked great.
4. Sand, sand, sand. We ended up doing about three coats/layers total, and while we did hand sand in between coats, we did most of the sanding work at the very end. Turns our my spaghetti arms are not cut out for hours of sanding. We broke down and used an electric hand sander. That was a good and bad decision. Bad: it left some imperfect marks on our counter top. Good: we actually like that it isn't perfect. 
5. Cheng concrete sealer. This stuff was kind of pricey (IMO), but so worth it. It's food grade. It seals the heck out of things. And works pretty easily. We applied the solution mixed with water (watch and follow the YouTube video) to the countertops about six times. We are very pleased with the seal and results. We used the 500ml bottle.

Both of these projects were very intimidating and could have gone horribly awry in hindsight. But YouTube videos from both Rust-Oleum and Cheng got us through it. Let's give their marketing departments a round of applause, people. 

Let’s talk about aesthetic, a word your dad has never used and your uncle has never used correctly (I think you mean "prosthetic," Uncle Pete!); the province of the effete and the cowardly; the concern of draft dodgers and socialists; the whimsy of millennial bloggers and…something about Oscar Wilde? When it came to our dear Elsie, of course we wanted her to work. Functioning brakes are fairly important. Hey-hey electricity, right? Sealed water lines? Sure. Drainage system? Fine, whatever.

Anyway, we wanted Elsie to look fly as hell, you know? Because when you’re living with another full-sized human being in a 16-foot trailer, trim color and faucet design are of paramount importance. Early on, most of the decisions Mel and I made regarding Elsie were pretty straightforward. Paint color could have been a sticking point, but we both prefer a bright, clean look, so white – bistro white, obviously, not that du jour bullshit – seemed like the obvious option. So far, so good.

But a few months into our renovation, we began to encounter scenarios that forced us to more concretely define our personal aesthetics. Mel has always described her style as simply "eclectic," but when pushed to further refine that idea, she says, “I like a mix of vintage, modern and industrial.” I can dig it. But there’s something I find comforting about the cabin vibe, too, lots of exposed natural wood, a little outdoorsy. I also dig that vibe where you only own three pairs of pants, and that vibe where your mom just sighs when you ask her to sew your Goodwill flannel back together. I’m making a statement, Mom! I digress. Anyway, renovating the kitchen – a major focal point in our trailer – gave us our first real opportunity to fuse our different styles.

With all white walls, and our textured white ceiling, we were already well on our way towards achieving the modern portion of Mel’s grand vision. In the coming weeks, we planned on installing concrete countertops, as well, so industrial was on the way [more on that in a future DIY post]. For the backsplash, we considered multiple options: tin tile, corrugated steel, penny tile, subway tile, etc. But so far, there wasn’t much in Elsie in the way of my cabin ideal, no exposed wood—purposely exposed, anyway. Online, I’d seen several cool reclaimed wood backsplashes, and after some deliberation over color and whether or not it could withstand trailer life, Mel and Jerry gave it the greenlight. All we had to do now was figure out how to make it!

We wanted to piece it together like a jigsaw puzzle, using different sizes and types of wood to give it a more random, informal feel. So, in pursuit of that random feel, we planned out every tiny detail to a T. [Note: For more on scheduling your spontaneity, visit www.HillaryClinton.com.] Because finding a large variety of 3/16-inch planks at Lowe’s proved difficult, we ended up with mostly cedar and pine, hardly the most colorful wood varieties. So in addition to mapping out the different plank sizes, we would have to map out stain colors, too.

To make the final product easier to envision, and to avoid any costly mistakes along the way, we first made a replica to scale of the backsplash in my parents’ garage. We outlined the area using the old plastic backsplash pieces as our guide. We traced the pattern on a sheet of cardboard (actually, an old political advertisement—Vote Domina!), and laid down boards of various sizes, making sure never to place two boards of the same size beside each other.

In addition to providing former Nebraska U.S. Senate candidate Dave Domina free advertising, we mapped out a replica of the backsplash to make the project easier to visualize. 

Once we’d mapped the whole thing, we pulled out the box of stains Jerry had apparently been collecting since The Precambrian Era and chose our colors. While the mahogany shades were interesting, they were just too red. Instead, we chose a shady green (Mel thinks it's blue, a serious point of contention between us), tungsten oil and some darker pine shades. We labeled each board with the matching stain color, making sure they were evenly distributed and again, avoiding the abutment of similar-colored boards.

We then trimmed the excess from the planks, stained them using Jerry’s old socks [CAUTION: FLAMMABLE] and - okay - some of my old boxers, and prepared to reinstall the puzzle in Elsie.

To secure the boards vertically we spread several beads of wood glue on the back of each board, and then nailed them to the wall using the pneumatic nailer. Fitting the bottom row of boards behind the pre-existing metal trim pieces proved somewhat difficult, and working around the oven hood was a real pain in the ass, but a few hours later we’d fit the last piece into place, and it looked – if I’m allowed to say so – pretty damn good. The next morning, we wiped away any remaining sawdust and stain residue, and coated the whole backsplash with a low-gloss polyurethane to keep it water resistant.

Then I made Mel coat it three more times. You know, just to be safe.

God never gives you more than you can handle, they say.

We weren’t looking to wallpaper our ceiling. I mean, who would? But as fate would have it, wallpapering the ceiling was perhaps the classiest choice we could have made for Elsie.

Elsie’s ceiling was a Frankenstein patchwork of bolts and seams and glue stitches once Jerry and Carson were done with it. We had a lot of ideas about how to cover the scars at first. Tin tiles, pennies, wood, paint. Then one winter day in Lowe’s (yes, that Lowe’s) I stumbled upon a white, texturized wallpaper and I was sold.

The wallpaper was relatively inexpensive at $20/roll. It had a sort of an old-timey feel, and it was thick enough to cover Frankenstein -- err Elsie’s -- face without adding a lot of bulk. We bought two rolls. And then two more rolls two weeks later. And then a few more that following month because we actually don’t know how to calculate square footage and we’re bad at guessing (Note: I once guessed a 747 airplane weighed just 600+ lbs in a game of Wits and Wagers). In total we spent $100 on our wallpaper ceiling and still to this day we’ll catch Jerry looking at it, a smirk on his face, happy that we’d finally made a decision on our own that turned out okay.

Mary, it turns out, is a dark wizard of wallpaper (see Marc Maron, our travel podcast companion). She did this crazy checkerboard room in the basement of her Broken Bow ranch home, and a plethora of other patterns around the house. She even had a plastic storage bin labeled “wallpaper stuff” with paste and brushes already in it.

Wallpaper, brushes to smooth out the paper, PASTE, a table, sponge + water (to wipe off excess paste), instructions or your own wallpaper dark wizard, and beer. 

Measuring is one of the first and most important steps.

We always measured the length and then added a few extra inches just to be safe.

We used the square to help us cut straight lines. I'm no good at eyeballing it. 

After measuring comes cutting. We had long strips in a tiny trailer. So I stood in the closet a lot during this part. 

Fake smiles always help with the cutting process; especially if you're freezing. 

Mary and I took turns holding vs. cutting. 

Our first strip was up!

Carson was in charge of the brushing. He was good at it, too. Especially after a few sips of Highlife.

Mary explains her five step process.

The five step process takes a little bit to explain.

Mary demonstrates her patented brushing technique.

With all the pasting and brushing, sometimes things get messy. Unofficial step #6: be sure to clean up after you've got the paper up.

Nobody likes selfies, really. But after a few beers and a lot of wallpaper, it kind of sounds okay. 

Mary had 5 rules to wallpapering:

1.     Start with a nice easy strip. We chose to follow a joint along our ceiling and work horizontally, not vertically. If we’d wallpapered from front to back and not side to side, we would have had longer strips to work with but less control.

2.     Measure and cut. Great news is you don’t have to do a lot of measuring or be precise because you can cut off the excess paper once it’s up. We would usually hold the roll up, roll it out, make a crease about where we’d want to stop/cut, and then add a few inches. Tip: Go long. You can’t add paper, but you can always cut the excess off.

3.     Put the paste on the paper. Our wallpaper instructions suggested we did not need paste, but could simply add water to the pre-pasted backing. Note: YOU ALWAYS NEED PASTE. Paste is your friend. Don’t skip the paste. And don’t skimp on paste. And let the paste activate a little bit. Our advice: dab a whole bunch on your paste brush, spread it evenly and thickly across the back of the paper, let it sit a little bit and keep it “wet” by folding in half/thirds. Then take a few sips of Michelob Ultra while you wait for the “activation.”

4.     Position & Brush. This takes teamwork, but after the glue is activated (aka two sips in on your Michelob Ultra) you’ve got to line the glued paper up, flatten it out working your way from one side to the other, and brush. This may take a few tries and some realigning, but you want to avoid repositioning it too much because you’ll actually stretch the paper out. If you’re doing a ceiling, like us, I suggest using at least three people: One to line the paper up. Another to stand in the middle and support the paper while you line up it up. And another at the opposite end ready to match everything up as the first two work toward you. Then brush, brush, brush. Bubbles = amateur.

5.     Find your match. Once you’ve got a perfectly placed strip up, you have to start over by taking the roll to your starting point and finding your “match.” I.e. you’ve got to to make the pattern line up side by side, which means you are likely going to waste some wallpaper making that happen. Sometimes you get lucky and where you cut is close to your match. Other times you’ll end up wasting a whole lot to find it. This is precisely why we didn’t originally (or ever, really) purchase enough paper to get the job done in one shot. We always needed more than we thought.

One last pro-tip: if you’re going to wallpaper in sub 30-degree weather, drink something stronger than Michelob Ultra. We wallpapered in the dead of January, and even though we plugged in the old space heater and Wallhugger to keep us warm, it was freezing. I’d recommend a Hot Toddy. Or Fireball shots. Other strong, cold-weather appropriate drink ideas are welcome. I have a feeling we’ll need it again someday.

Elsie settles in for a long, cold winter. Inside, Carson and Mel huddle around the spacer heater, dreading the work ahead.

By the time we cracked the lid on our first gallon of primer, now four weeks into Elsie’s renovation, it was questionable whether either one of us could have passed even the most forgiving psychiatric assessment [see video below for re-enactment]. We’d spent the last several weekends stripping contact paper from every square inch of the trailer, heat gun in one hand, paint scraper in the other [see: Elsie & The Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Contact Paper]. We’d burnt the tips of our fingers, singed the hair on our forearms, melted our own shoes to the floor. We’d cracked our shins on the trailer steps, ground our knees into loose screws and gravel, smashed our heads into the overhead lights with comical (depending on who you ask) regularity. We stopped showering—a wasted effort. The few times we risked it, we found ourselves covered in sweat and sawdust and construction glue all over again within the hour. I admit it: we let ourselves go.

Dear Diary: It’s been days since I’ve felt the sunshine on my face. I fear I’ve begun to lose sight of what it is we came for. Mel refuses to leave her corner. She’s been there for days – or is it weeks? - scraping the same spot. There is no contact paper left, but she scrapes on. What is it she is scraping for now? I do not know how much longer we can hold on…

Despite our plunge into lunacy, we pushed forward. Outside, snow piled up on the Vaughan homestead. We closed the windows in the trailer, cranked my dad’s old space heater as high as it would allow. Like an old radiator, you could hear it ting and pop as it warmed up. My brothers had returned for the holidays, and they were trying their best to feign enthusiasm for our project. Though we’d made a huge amount of headway since we first towed Elsie home, she still wasn’t much to look at. Just a pile of scrap metal on wheels, gutted interior. They’d probably seen three or four similar trailers abandoned in shelterbelts and parked in salvage yards along the highway as they drove to Broken Bow from the airport.

Carson assless-ly applies the first coat of primer.

Once the walls had been freed of the tyranny of the faux-wood grain contact paper, we began the priming process. Because the original 1968 FAN design called for contact paper, little priority had been given to the aesthetics of the wood underneath. After we applied the first white coat, it became clear just how porous the paneling really was. The paint threw into relief every tiny pock and soft spot, leaving large swaths of wall-space looking like they’d barely been touched by the roller. So, we added a second coat: to the walls, the cabinets, the bench seats, the doors—all of it. And then again, this time with my oldest brother’s help (thanks Andy, but we found a few spots you missed!), and finally a fourth time until the walls couldn’t soak up any more primer and those pocks and pores (mostly) disappeared. Each coat took three to four hours, much longer than it would have taken us to paint a much larger room of a more standard shape—not that we were oblivious to the plethora of maddening nooks and crannies. Our battle with the contact paper had taught us many things, one of which was Franklin A. Newcomer’s flair for sadistic design. More than once, we found ourselves taping a brush or paint roller to the end of a broom handle to overcome these trouble spots.

With each new coat of primer came a gradual lifting of our spirits. Just yesterday, it seemed, we had opened the door to Elsie for the first time and stared into the abyss. The contact paper. The evergreen curtains hanging like forgotten Christmas greenery over the windows. The seat cushions wrapped in drab olive upholstery. When we first bought Elsie, she resembled something unspeakable, only smaller. But now, the curtains were gone, the upholstery was gone, the sun beamed in through the windows, and the walls - whiter by the hour - seemed to emit a light themselves. Later, we added the finish coat, a shade called “Bistro White.” Damn if I didn’t feel like coffee. Suddenly, we were standing in a new trailer. We could breathe again. What once felt suffocating now felt – if not spacious – exceptionally clean and cool and relaxed. For a second, we could picture a home in it.

We call this shot "Jerry's Paradise." Give him a trouble light and a pair of vice grips and he'll stay occupied for weeks.

I’ve never been good at buying used, which is a problem because I do it almost exclusively. I get nervous inspecting the item in front of the seller, as if I’m the one trying to impress them. Back in college, I spent a summer living with my brother in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. His apartment lacked AC, and his other roommate had converted the living room into an impromptu halfway house for unvaccinated street cats with too many toes, so we spent the majority of our time hopping from one park to the next. If I wanted to keep up, I thought, I’d need a bike.

So I found a cool vintage frame on Craigslist, silver with drop handlebars, and agreed to the meet the seller at the McDonald's on the corner of Parkside and Ocean Avenue. I’m sure I made a sharp and sophisticated joke about Yellowcard, a great band that we all remember. It must have been a weekend; the intersection was flooded with traffic and people on foot, and I remember walking past the man several times before noticing the bike parked beside him. This is where I always fail. The minute I see the used item and the seller standing next to it, anticipating the quick exchange of money, I freak. My palms get sweaty. My heart rate spikes. I feel like I’m committing some tacit transgression, something I should be ashamed of. I rarely look them in the eye. I laugh when they say things that aren’t even close to jokes. I crumble.

He told me the bike was $200. We had agreed on $150. It was clearly too small. The brakes sounded like my food processor. Rust snowed down from the chain when I rotated the pedals. It was a terrible bike. It was the worst bike.

“It’s perfect,” I told him. “Thanks so much for meeting me here. It’s exactly what I needed.”

So I’m not great at buying used. Last October, when I met Craigslist Ray in Stuart, Iowa, all those same feelings came rushing back. Online, Ray had told us all of the plumbing was in great shape. Later, we found out all of the water lines had cracked. Online, Ray had told us all of the electrics were in working order. Later, we found out the main overhead lighting system was down and the taillights were broken. As you know from previous posts, what I drove home with was not exactly what I came for.

The one area of disrepair that Ray had been upfront about was a small hole in the corner of the ceiling. He showed the hole to me again in person. He said it probably wouldn’t take much work to fix it. I laughed so quickly I cut him off, then said something stupid like, “Heck! No big deal! Everything else looks like it’s in perfect shape!” What I had meant to say – what I was thinking – was that I had no idea if that hole in the corner was of serious concern, and that either way, I did not have the skills to fix it.

But Jerry (dad/foreman/optometrist/former Scoutmaster) did. During one of our first weekends back in Broken Bow, we tackled that hole head on. After poking around a bit with various tools, it was clear the whole area had rotted due to water damage. Tearing back the ceiling paper confirmed as much. To fix it, we cut out the rotted area between two joists using a reciprocating saw. Upon closer inspection, part of the joist was nearly rotted through as well, so we cut that out and reinforced it with a fresh 2x4. Then, to fill the square gap in the ceiling we just had removed, we cut a piece of 3/16th inch plywood exactly that size, and used the pneumatic nailer – in addition to a good thread of construction glue – to fix it back in place. To see that fresh plywood pressed tight against the ceiling, completely sealed with glue on all sides, was a catharsis I would come to feel time and again in completing Elsie’s renovation.

Of course, very few of Elsie’s repairs were so simple as to warrant only a single paragraph. In the weeks to come, as we stripped away the old contact paper on the ceiling in order to replace it with new material (more on that in a separate post), we found further water damage, more rotting, another hole, and then another and another. As you might expect, most of the water damage occurred around ceiling vents or joints in the frame, anywhere that might allow rain or melting snow to pool up. We tackled each one in the same way until, finally, we had worked our way back from the far back corner to the front door. At least half of the ceiling had been patched and replaced, a checkerboard of the old and the new, but more importantly all of it was now structurally sound. And in the process, we answered the question of what lies beneath. Answer: rotted ceiling joists and yellow insulation littered with the carcasses of bugs long dead.

In total, the process took a few days to complete, though the work was on-again, off-again. We'd patch a hole, congratulate ourselves on a job well done, and then each of us would spot a different area that likely needed the same treatment. We'd sit on that belief for an hour, a day, afraid to acknowledge the extra work ahead. Finally, one of us would confront what we had found. Then Jerry would shake his head, measure the area and wander back to the shed to cut more plywood. He and I would lift the panel to the ceiling, take turns nailing and gluing and sometimes screwing it into place, and wait until someone pointed out the next issue. Without fail, there has always been a next issue.

It was the calm before the storm. On November 8, 2014, the wind ceased and the autumn sun spilled over the buttes and prairies surrounding the Vaughan outpost. Elsie was parked in front of the Quonset. Demolition day had arrived.

We wanted to document the renovation process from a clean slate, so we did a little staging to rid Elsie of Craigslist Ray’s décor. This involved taking down begrimed velvet curtains, framed photos of classic hotrods, and an old 80’s sound system bolted to the upper cabinets.

Next up: the dis-assembling. We ripped out the vinyl wall divider and cushions, unhinged cabinet doors and drawers, unscrewed curtain rods and pulled out anything stuck to the walls, floors, or doors that didn’t belong. Phase one of the tear-down took longer than expected, because most screws in the trailer were of the clutch head variety, and at the time we only had one clutch head screwdriver (they are fairly obscure and hard to find). Clutch head screws, according to VintageTrailerSupply.com, are:

Photo Credit: John Watt

“Odd bow-tie shaped screw slots on your window or door hardware. They were used in the auto industry from the 1940s through the 1960s and a few of them worked their way into travel trailer manufacturing as late as the 1970s. To remove those old screws, you're best off using a screwdriver bit of the same shape and size.”  

 Jerry reminded me several times that I needed to hold the screwdriver level and press firmly to avoid stripping any screws (Back off, I'm a novice!). We wanted to reuse the old screws to save on the expense of replacing them all, which provided Mary (aka Carson's mom) and I a moment to prove our worth. We carefully labeled all the hardware in plastic baggies, taped them to their matching doors and drawers, and created our first trailer storage Tupperware.

Carson and Jerry tackled the heavier-duty parts of the teardown. They removed the old Dometic propane/electric refrigerator and tore out the propane furnace system below it. While the propane fridge did technically work, it was heavy and unreliable; we intended to replace it with a newer model. With the furnace, it was a very outdated system that a) clearly hadn’t been used for over 20 years and b) seemed too daunting and unnecessary to replace if we could use an electric space heater at most of our campgrounds anyway.

They also answered a question that had been looming since we first bought Elsie: "What's going on beneath that duct tape in the corner of the ceiling?" The ceiling work in Elsie is a story in itself - and one deserving of separate post we’ll write later - but this was the first visible hole we saw and Carson and Jerry were hell bent on patching it. They used a reciprocating saw to cut out the rotted wood, patched it with 3/16” plywood, and used the pneumatic nailer and wood glue to secure it.

Our first demolition weekend foreshadowed a few things to come over the next 8 months:

1. Our ceiling hole was actually the first in a series of holes and disappointing revelations; Elsie was not as structurally solid as we had hoped.
2. That contact paper was EVERYWHERE…it was going to ruin our lives.
3. Jerry was definitely going to play the Dark Knight in this trailer remodel. “He’s the hero Elsie deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we’ll hunt him. Because he can take it. Because he’s not our hero. He’s a silent guardian, a watchful protector. A dark knight.”
4. It was going to look a whole hell of a lot worse before it got any better. (This saying is now officially trademarked by Jerry A. Vaughan)  

Some things even the greatest scientific minds will never understand: how infinity works, the hit FOX series Lost, the fate of the Roanoke Island colony, where D.B. Cooper landed, what Cameron Crow was thinking about—specifically—when he directed Aloha (working theory: ∞). Mel and I now respectively submit the following to this growing list of life’s greatest mysteries: adhesive contact paper, specifically of the woodgrain variety.

Faux-Woodgrain Contact Paper

When we first bought the Elsie, every square inch of the interior—every tiny, impossible-to-reach nook and cranny—was covered in a thin skin of faux woodgrain contact paper. In what should probably serve as the preface to all of our Camper DIY updates, we should have listened to my dad. The faux woodgrain looked as cheap as it sounds, and it made the whole interior feel like some trashy old trai…nevermind. The point is that we’d long been set on white walls. The question was whether to paint directly over the contact paper—as my dad suggested, and then suggested several times again—or to somehow strip the contact paper from the walls. 

Some psychologists subscribe to the idea, called Terror Management Theory (TMT), that our entire character make-up is essentially a lie we tell ourselves to deny our own mortality. Chaos—including but not limited to the faux woodgrain catastrophe we found ourselves mired in—reminds us that our lives are out of control. In my own heroic attempt to avoid chaos, and thus my impending doom, I made the first of many questionable decisions in our trailer renovation: the contact paper had to go. But how?

We tried all the liquid strippers recommended by the hardware stores, but none of them worked. We scored it, we scrubbed it, we grunted and cussed at it—still nothing. After breaking for lunch, my dad walked out of the garage looking like an extra in Mad Max, torch in one hand, a rusty propane tank in the other, gas line drooping in between. You need to know this: he looked pretty fu**ing cool. Anyway, when a man holding a propane torch asks you to follow him to the shed, you follow him to the shed.

Elsie’s bathroom door was lying unhinged on the concrete. He opened the valve on the propane tank, then carefully lit the torch. He lowered the flame toward the door, holding it 6-10 inches away from the surface. The contact paper turned brown and then bubbled up. I grabbed a dull paint scraper and followed safely behind the moving flame. The contact paper shaved cleanly away from the wood beneath, leaving a flat, paperless surface. (Note: a blade too sharp will cut into the wood, preventing the slide necessary to move across the surface.)

Though the propane torch made for quick work on the trailer’s two full-size doors, which could easily be moved outside the trailer, we obviously couldn’t bring the post-apocalyptic weapon inside. So we downgraded to a small heatgun, which we used on the rest of the interior. By the time the last scratch of contact paper was stripped from the wall, Mel and I had spent at least 18 hours on the job (split over several days). We grew delirious, trapped inside a 16-foot trailer with a heatgun and two paint scrapers. Sometimes we hit a groove. After a long run with the scraper—the contact paper peeling smoothly behind the rays of the heatgun—Mel would lean forward and say something cocky and absurd. “That’s what we in the industry call a sustained vertical run.” Sometimes we laughed. Most of the time we sighed. More than once we said, “Shit, don’t hold the gun too close.”

Let this be a lesson to all of you considering contact paper for your next project. If you choose to use it, some day, some one will hate you for your decision.

Something bigger than 12 feet (two people and a 70lb. dog need some space) but smaller than 20 feet so we could pull it without a truck. No leaks. Negligible hail damage and a fairly good exterior. In-tact windows. A fixer upper, sure, but a trailer in need of a She’s All That makeover, not a Nip/Tuck kind of thing.

When I saw Elsie’s Craigslist ad last August, I just kind of knew she was the one. The FAN layout in 1968 was real feng shui; the kitchen faced you as you walked in, which was opposite of most trailers we'd looked at. The closet, bathroom, and dining areas flanked the ends of the trailer giving us some good space in the middle to move around. And she was the right age. Trailers made in the 80s are plentiful (Coleman really honed the market), but they aren't really vintage camper trailers quite yet and it's hard to find much pre-1970s that isn't in total disrepair.

That, and Ray answered all of our questions.

After we towed it back to Broken Bow and gutted Elsie in September, we made a mental checklist of things that we wanted to keep and others that we wanted neuralyzed from our minds completely ala MIB style.

In the keep category: wall sconces, scalloped edging on the overhead cabinets, vintage green formica table, and the general layout of things would likely stay.

In the “wipe this from my memory” category: old car photos mounted to the cabinet doors, 80s sound system, hunter green velvet curtains, the extra bench seating opposite the kitchen, contact paper and high traffic carpet (ew).

In the midst of all that avocado green, faux wood, 80s décor, and way too f**king many spice racks, two things brought us solace: it would all soon be gone and Mary (Carson’s mom) was making Texas sheet cake.