Happy Holidays

We finally had a good chunk of time to finish most of the work on the Airstream and now to be able to get on with the rest of our summer. To catch you up, Tom had been looking for an Airstream for years to fix up. He found this 1962 Globe Trotter in March. The plan is to leave it in the yard (forever) as a pool decoration/cabana/guest house. Here’s how things have turned out so far:

Tom has the extrerior pretty shiny now and the shelter should get it through rainy weather.

These are the interior views. Amazingly, it does have a stove, oven, refrigerator, commode, sinks and a shower (none of which we have hooked up yet.)

Tom still has to decide what to do about the floor and walls so textiles were an important part of changing the interior for now. Clockwise from the upper left: “beach boys”, “las senoritas”, “the outdoorsey type”, and the bench fabrics which miraculously made the others talk with each other. By the way both benches pull out to 2-person sleepers.

It’s been quite a trip without actually going anywhere. Here’s what things looked like a few months ago:

And now:

It’s been a while since we updated the progress on the Airstream… After working on cleaning up the exterior, Tom decided he’d rather not have to do it again after every rainy season. So up goes a shelter. It’s l-a-r-g-e. Today’s challenge was to raise a 20 foot piece of 2×12 engineered lumber 10 feet in the air, get it level, and then bolt it to the posts which are sunk 3 feet into the ground. After considering lots of approaches, the easiest, requiring the least muscle power, was the good old ratcheting strap.

After thinking getting this one piece of wood attached would take the better part of the day, 30 minutes and it was time to move on to other things..

Meanwhile, we got some fabric shopping done for the curtains and the pull-out sleeper sofas. I think it’s going to look nice when it’s all done.

The weather was nice enough this week that Tom took a break from the buffing and polishing to relax. That airstream is getting pretty shiny…

Tom’s been making speedy progress getting Arthur Airstream all shiny again.

Tom’s been making great progress on his Airstream. What he’s been doing is removing the oxidation that’s built up over the years. Believe it or not, he’s hasn’t started the polishing phase yet.

Tom’s been doing his research, waited for the parts and pieces to be delivered, and started what is going to be the long process of cleaning Arthur. First, he has to remove 46 years of oxidation on the aluminum skin. (The polishing comes later.) After half an hour, the difference is already pretty striking.

Beginning what is going to be a multi-day affair, Arthur began his journey from the driveway to the back yard. We had to rip down the fence between the house and garage and move the air conditioner compressor. This left us with a total clearance of about 1” on the left side and 3″ on the right. Needless to say we took it very, very slowly. After about 4 hours we managed to move it twenty feet to the back of the living room, or a little over one-third of the way there. (It’s amazing how steep a 2-3 degree grade can seem when you’re trying to keep 3300 pounds of trailer from racing down it!)

After searching for eight years, Tom finally found his Airstream trailer. It’s a 1963 Globe Trotter. At 19 feet long, it has sleeping space for four, heater, fridge, range and oven, hot water, two sinks, a shower and toilet.  At the moment, nothing beyond the beds is working, but we’ll get to it. Not planning on going caravanning, we’re going to find a way to wiggle it into the backyard to its permanent position next to the pool. It should make a nice cabana/guest house/whatever. It’s most attractive feature, of course, is that legendary mid-century space-age silver bullet aluminum skin. Hopefully we’ll be able to get it back to a mirror-like finish.

Tom bought Arthur from a really nice guy from Berkeley (yea Craigslist), who had bought it from its original owner, a pilot from Arizona named Arthur.

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