We Did It!

The Shasta after our restoration. We’ll paint her in the spring to recreate the original gold and white finish.

Our goal since we bought our Shasta last year was to have her repaired and weatherproofed so that we could sleep in her over this past Labor Day weekend, when our family has a huge camping reunion. Since we had a deadline, this summer we’ve spent ten hour days nearly every weekend, including lots of Fridays and Mondays, trying to finish in time. We didn’t update the blog as we were working as we’d planned, because we quickly found that when we weren’t working on the Shasta, we were trying to stop thinking about working on the Shasta!

But we’re happy to report that we succeeded in finishing on time – we spent the past week sleeping in the Shasta, which was extremely satisfying after all the work we did on her. She’s not completely finished – we didn’t have time to paint the exterior, because as you’ll see we had some difficulties we hadn’t expected while we were doing the repairs. But we’re confident she’ll pass inspection, and her interior looks wonderful! We’ll finish our restorations in the spring – we won’t have an opportunity to do the paint job until then.

We no longer have a sagging waterlogged roof and rotten boards – we removed and replaced about 30 pieces of the wooden frame, after finding, once we got the skin off, that the damage was worse than we’d hoped. We’ve got the original style lights back on her. The spare tire is mounted on the back, and we replaced the hubcaps and painted the rims. We put new aluminum screens in all the windows, replaced the central roof vent, and resealed the entire trailer. We even found her a beautiful pair of wings!

Once we organize all of our documentation, we’ll post regular updates picking up where we left off a couple of months ago when we’d just removed the windows. Even with the internet to help us – not to mention the wonderful friends and family members that helped us when the internet failed – a lot of the repairs were accomplished through trial and error. We want to include all the tips and tricks we used to accomplish the restoration – so if you’re working on a similar project and have a question we might be able to help with, leave a comment. This was a very hard job, and we are pretty proud that we accomplished everything that we did. We’d like to thank everyone at the farm who spent time helping us with this project. We couldn’t have done it without you.

Look for lots more pictures and details to come!