Working together for the greater good of...oh, fuck it.

Danny named this blog "The Couple in a Camper: Adventures in Love and Freedom".....I'm starting to think it should be called "TCIAC: LESSONS about Love and Freedom".

Today we started putting down laminate wood flooring...and I have officially been dismissed from duty. Anyone who knows me, is thinking "Amelia? Dismissed??" But, don't fret, I've already come to terms with this; it's for the best. Danny and I seem to have very different approaches to physical labor. Frankly, I am a perfectionist with trust issues and feel the intrinsic need to micromanage, while pushing every one of Danny's buttons simultaneously. Danny is a perfectly capable fellow and has sworn a solemn oath that he has read and re-read the directions and is insisting that it is time for me to retire from laying flooring. Well, fine then. Since he seems to be more willing to get dirty and inevitably smash his fingers than I, who can argue?

As I sit on the porch, I am looking at this as the ultimate test of my trust and patience. Guess it's time to take the dog for a long walk....

Well, it has been a couple of crazy weeks…. Lots of driving, packing, painting, unpacking, yard sales, go go going!! This is the first time I have opened my computer in almost 2 weeks, which is actually a long time for me! In our last post, Danny detailed the adventure of going to pick up our new home, so I will fill you in on the the few days after we went to Ormond Beach.

Once we got it back to my mother’s yard we had a cleaning party. My father, step-father and Danny took over the outside, while my mother and I were supposed to tackle the inside. I say supposed to because my mother thought that Danny and I would just be happy bleaching the living hell out of everything and then redoing the flooring, but I had other plans. I had a no holds barred attitude about ripping everything out. EVERYTHING! She went to the bed room to clean out the closet and pull out the mattress while I went nutso in the living area.

First thing everyone should know is that most trailer interiors are just glued and stapled together. As soon as I realized this, I went crazy with the mean (meaner, maybe) end of a hammer, ripping out the dinette set. There are only two of us, and frankly we aren’t planning on having a bunch of house guests so the dinette/sleeper system was a huge waste of space. Because the dinette bench was stapled to the floor, I inadvertently pulled up a chunk of linoleum flooring, revealing (to my absolute horror) rotten wood!!! EAK! 

Well, what did I really expect from an eighteen year old vessel; at least it wasn’t the ceiling. With the new discovery of floor rot, Danny and I went about tearing up all of the flooring to see how much damage there really was. The damage was limited to areas around the storage access hatches. In newer trailers the storage areas are sealed off from the interior, probably just for this reason. Thankfully, what would have been a stressful few days of re-flooring only took a morning thanks to my contractor step-father, Jose. One run to Lowes and a few hours later we were standing on solid ground. In all honesty, I had never been overly fond of my step-father, but he really came through for us and I will always be thankful

The next morning we were on our way home… (Will write about our adventure home in a future post)

Once we got back to Tallahassee, we painted the walls and got closet organizers hung up so we could smoothly move from the apartment to the trailer. We have to wait till next week to put in the new flooring because we had to be out of the apartment ASAP, so we figured that once everything has found a home in the trailer we will be able to lay the laminate wood flooring as a weekend project.

We are officially out of the apartment and in the trailer now. I like to think of myself as a moving aficionado as I have moved more than my fair share during my collegiate years, but this time I thought I might just break down and throw everything away. Reducing the amount of stuff was the hardest part. We no longer have a need for most furniture and decorations. And the random things that hide away in closets and storage bins had to be mercilessly cut from our lives. Danny said more than once that he will never own that much stuff again, I whole heartedly agree! But it is over! And now we get to put all our energy into organizing and getting stuff ready for the road.  

Camper Week

     Hi, it's me Danny! It has been a crazy week! We got our camper, and it has been non-stop since then. I guess I will start this off, as there is a lot to cover.

     Well as many of you know we bought a camper sight unseen. Our truck finally came back from the shop, so this week we drove the four hours down to go pick it up. We ended up staying with Amelia's mom since she lives only a half hour away from where it is.

     We got up early Monday morning to go to the tax office to get the tag and registration for the camper. It went surprisingly smooth, so fast that Amelia wanted to go back and sleep before we actually went to pick it up, but we both knew it was going to be a long day. We drove with her mother to Ormond Beach to the house where the camper was at.

     When we arrived the lady whom we had bought it from was not home, so we waited for about fifteen minutes for her to arrive, we could see our new home in her back yard, but we could not yet access it. When she finally came home she let us into her yard to begin getting it road ready, and her chihuahuas were less than enthused about our presence there.

     The trailer looked pretty good for a nearly twenty year old machine that had been sitting for two years. The only issues we found at first were a few broken odds and ends with the cabinets and doors, a non functioning AC unit and fridge, and a busted front window. There was also a piece of plywood screwed down right by the front door, but we shall elaborate on that later.

      The guy who had been living in it was an obvious smoker, as there were burns on everything! I can only imagine alcohol or something else must have played a roll in it, because I can't imagine somebody dropping so many cigarettes otherwise, as there were burns on: the carpet; the couch cushions; the tables; the bathroom floor; ac vents; you name it. I honestly can't even imagine somebody just throwing their lit butts wherever when they were done with them doing more damage than this. On top of all this he had apparently not been dumping or flushing out his black water tank, simply draining it bit by bit into an old gas can and I assume pouring it somewhere. This, and his waste water must have simply been emptying into this poor woman's yard, as when we went to first check it the valve was already open.

     So we spent several hours getting it ready, taking it off the jacks, emptying it out, when I go to hook it up to my truck and realize something is amiss. The brake connector for the trailer lights was a seven pin round connection, but the connector coming from my truck was only four. I called a local RV store to ask about this dilemma, and they told me I would have to rewire my truck, and that they would have to get a service technician to call me back with an estimate. Being a DIY kind of guy I started researching it on my phone and realized I could get the parts to do this myself at a local auto parts shop, and within an hour we had the part, had eaten burritos, and I was underneath my truck installing it.

     As I was in the process of putting the part in myself I finally get a call back from the RV store for an estimate, and the guy on the phone tells me it could be anywhere from 175-500 dollars. I tell him that is a lot of money, and ask if it is something I could possibly do myself. He says probably not, and I tell him "Well, in the time it took you to get back to me I did it myself for thirty bucks and had time to eat a burrito, eat my shit" and hung up. By the way that shop was http://www.giantrecreationworld.com/ Of Ormond Beach, just so we're on record for saying they are scum.

     Anyway with all that finally done we were able to hook up our new home and ride off into the sunset. We told the lady about our blog, and I hope she gets a chance to read it and enjoys being part of our story. Also I hope she knows she sold us a camper with water damage, but that is for our next post, which I will let Amelia tell you more about.