These boxes make perfect templates. The are stiff but easily cut and very close to the footprint of the cabinets they hold. Et voila! Templates.

But these templates are still square and the Airstream is most decidedly not. Also, the degree of arc changes with the location of the curve on the inside of the trailer, so I can make a template in one location for one side of a cabinet but, say eighteen inches away, where  the other side of the cabinet will be,  is not the same.

Hey, nobody said this was trivial! But if you use a trusty compass and my handy instructions it’s a lot easier!

I used a Staedtler compass, the nice one not the cheesy plastic ones that the kids use in school.  I wrote about it earlier and that link has a great picture of the one I use.

Fitting the cabinets…..

1. Fit the bottom first. There may be an arc you need to cut against the bottom of the cabinet so that the whole piece will fit nicely against the side. Cut that first.  That can be very simple and may not even require a cardboard template.  Just be careful if you trace the arc directly on the Ikea base, you don’t want to make a mistake!  ***Note: Also, the fiberboard can shatter when cut with a jigsaw.  I used painters tape, the blue stuff that is not very sticky, to protect the melamine surface. Works like a charm and it has the additional perk of letting you write on the blue tape and not have to clean pencil off the nice white melamine
2. Attach your floor pieces. Once the base is cut, secure it to the floor where you have marked its final position. This is critical because the arc of the trailer changes! If you fit the sides a few inches on either side you may have cabinets with gaps! For this work, I actually screw down the base just to be certain. We decided we wanted the cabinets basically on the floor, so ours sit on furring strips just a scant 1/2″ off the floor to give the doors clearance. Screwing in my furring strip cabinet base system before fitting the arcs on the cabinet also helped me see where I needed to place the cabinets.
3. Then, Fit your first side panel. Use the compass to fit against the curve then heavy shears to cut the cardboard. Trim little bits at a time. The compass will help with this because it’s much more accurate when open to a small angle. I’ve got a picture above showing the fitting of a plastic panel, its identical for the cardboard templates. Keep fitting and cutting until your side panel template fits neatly against the base and the trailer wall arc. Then tape it in place with your painters tape.
4. Now fit the other side. Do this before you cut the melamine on the first side! And tape it in place.
5. Test by  measuring. Once both sides are cut, measure the distance between the sides, as fitted at several elevations up and down the inside of the cabinet! This is your test that you cut the cardboard straight and that your cabinet will be true! DON’T SKIP THIS STEP. You could end up with cabinets that will collapse because they are out of square. once I know that this is correct, I trace the interior line in pencil against the trailer wall. Now I know where the final placement will be. I use the interior as my guide because the cardboard is thinner than the melamine so I don’t know where the outside line will be.
6. Transfer and Check your Ikea pieces. Using your blue painters tape, trace the cut line on the cabinet. Double, triple, and quadruple check that you are cutting on the right side!!!! I am speaking out of experience here!  Those panels look exactly the same! I actually mark them with arrows indicated which edges go towards the wall of the trailer and which side is out vs. in. I bought a couple extra cabinet because of this one! lol.
7. Cut. I use a jig saw, but you use whatever works for you.
8. Fit and Sand. Now fit the sides of the cabinet inside the trailer, you may find that there is sanding to do here to get a nice edge. We use a belt sander and leave on the blue tape.
9. Add the top. Once the sides fit you can fit the top pretty much the same way. Depending on how high your cabinet is, the top may only need an inch or so removed.  However for the tall cabinets in our trailer, we did not use a top at all! Instead we fitted a sturdy, birch plywood shelf fairly high up and that, along with the attachment to the trailer, that we did with Stainless Steel “L” brackets from McMaster-Carr serves to support the cabinet’s shape.

This process worked extremely well for us. All the Ikea cabinets in our trailer were installed like this.  Now, more than two years later they are holding up perfectly and whenever I see some new gizzies that Ikea has for fun inside cabinet fittings, I can play with them in my trailer!

I love my Ikea Globetrotter!

Before our beautiful new Ikea kitchen

But then I pulled the refrigerator, that had died, and the oven, that had died and took a good look. Ick.  I might have been able to do something with the cabinets but honestly, why? I wanted more counter space, storage and modern conveniences. I wanted all the cool widgets and thingamabobs that I have in my home Ikea kitchen.  I just wanted all this in my vintage trailer. So I yanked ‘em.  (Before anybody gets mad at me,  I offered my old cabinets to the local Airstream community for karmic points only, no vintage parts were dumped before their time. Hey, we have old Land Rovers and Jaguars we know how this works.)

However, this along with an amazing Ebay find precipitated a major attack of ship-fitters disease (and this is a Land Rover based explanation which makes it even better).  Anyone know what that is?  It’s a bit like pulling on a single piece of yarn and unraveling a sweater factory. But I digress.

What did I find on eBay? A perfect bathroom from a 1965 Airstream Globetrotter.

JACKPOT!

Why jackpot? Because my trailer has a full tub? And that is just FREAKING INSANE in a 19 foot trailer. In 1965 Airstream came to their collective senses and put a reasonable sized bathroom in the rear of this petite trailer without changing the dimensions.  In other words, if I could get the single-piece-8-foot-wide-noodle-wiggly-molded-fiberglass bathroom from the wilds of Kentucky to Northern California it would be a simple process to install the bathroom.  Now, lets just say that shipping a bathroom across the country during that summer when gas prices were going through the roof was painfully expensive. It was also an adventure that culminated as Chris and I rescued the bathroom intact out of the San Jose Yellow Freight yard trash bin because they thought it was, and I quote, “crap”.

But I digress.

Using this new bathroom gave me about two whole extra feet of counter space. Yippee!!!

Here is the old floorplan with the ginormus bathroom followed by the new floorplan with the bathroom cut back to a respectable size for a small trailer. I mean really, a full bath? C’mon!

As was 1964 Globetrotter layout

And this is what we are most delighted with now. I went from about 36 inches of counter top to nearly 6 feet since I also made covers for both the sink and the oven and created a full-length cubby under the countertop and above the sink cabinet (this is my floating counter) for storage of the crap that you usually have on top.  I totally rock.

The final plan after the remodel

The next set of posts will walk through the details of how we laid out and installed the kitchen cabinets.