Back in October, as you might remember, I screwed up royally and wrecked my hunting trailer on the side of the mountain. I put off turning it in to the insurance, as I had a feeling that they’d total it and I wanted to use it for the rest of the season.

And total it, they did. I bought it back, intending to rebuild it, and it’s been sitting around waiting on me to start.

Well, tonight, I started. Marvin’s the one driving me to do this project. It’s a little too much for me to do on my own, but he insisted on helping me. I’m not going to let him do the work all by himself, but it’s definitely going to be more of a me-helping-him situation than the other way around.

Tonight I brought it by his place, and he took the awning off. His in-laws wanted it, and I was quite happy to give it to them. Then we checked out the inside, took off some fittings that will be in the way, and did some planning and measuring. This week will be all about looking for parts suppliers on the internet.

I thought I’d be able to get by with keeping the door, since I was able to hammer it back into good enough shape to close and latch, at least. But a closer looks tells me that there’s no way, and I remembered a dry-rotted piece of wood falling out from the bottom of it the day I got it back into camp. So the door’s going to have to go, and will probably be the most expensive part.

The nose piece wasn’t designed very well to begin with. Having the propane under a plastic enclosure right next to my bed is not only inconvenient, it’s unsafe. It’s a major pain in the ass to crawl up under there to change tanks or replace hoses, as that cover doesn’t open fully, and a leak doesn’t bear thinking about. So we’re going to pull off the battery bracket, pull the tanks out and weld their bracket to the nose of the trailer like normal people, spin the batteries 90 degrees, and put them behind the tanks. Then that cover will get thrown out and we’ll frame off the front of the trailer and side it like the rest. Since I don’t want to do a major remodeling of the bed on the other side of that wall, we’ll just end up with another compartment there, a long skinny one.

The next step, though, is to wait for some scheduled good weather and a long weekend, and tear the front and the side down to the bones. Then we’ll be able to see that we’re looking at. I was very lucky that both of those windows survived unscathed, so we’ll just take them out and reinstall them. I predict an awful lot of learning in my future.

When we’re done, it won’t be pretty, but it’ll work, and that’s all I’m asking of it. Besides, the uglier a trailer is, the less you worry about it if you leave it up in camp all season, only coming up to hunt on the weekends. Very convenient, that.