After a long couple of weekends, the trailer’s almost finished. Nothing but a few piddly details left - things that I’ll have to go get, like a light cover that I broke and a new propane hose, and those stores aren’t open today.

I didn’t exactly know what to expect when Marv talked me into buying the thing back. I knew it would be a shit-load of work, and also knew that I wasn’t qualified for most of it.

Once we got into it and started tearing things apart, it got even scarier. We had to reframe a whole side, and manufacture new parts for the front. But we did it. We took it from this:

To this:

In about three weeks.

It doesn’t look too impressive unless you see the interim steps, with the skin off and the bones all exposed, like here:

Sure, there are places that didn’t turn out quite right. The little corners where the siding met the new aluminum nosepiece at an angle gave us fits, so finally we went with expandable foam and liberal amounts of caulk. I do love me some expandable foam! It’s ugly in places and the siding doesn’t match, but that’s fine with me too. I leave it in the mountains for part of the year, and you don’t want to leave a shiny new trailer around; it attracts the human vermin.

Marv did three-quarters of the work, but I did my share. That new door there - Marv did the heavy lifting and knocked it in where it was sticking, but I did the rest. Small stuff and stupid stuff, I did. Things that required the heavier tools, Marv did, and his son did some welding on the tongue for us. Oh, and two small helpers; my son and Marv’s grandson, were in on the project too.

It’s still over there, as he’s going to work on the bearings tomorrow, but it’s done enough. It’s so nice to have it back, it’s like having my home back. I do live in the thing often enough during hunting season, and I’ve become very fond of it, and thought it was the end of it when I crunched it. Now, I just have to jump through the DMV’s hoops to get it reregistered as a salvage vehicle, and I’m free to go. With no more payments, and under budget. If I get another couple of years out of it, I’ll have more than got my money’s worth out of it, and I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t keep it longer.

After all, I know how to fix almost anything that can go wrong with it by now.