Teardrops n Tiny Travel Trailers

Glad to hear you are safe! Is there anything we can do to help! I know I sure would like to have had my td. wonder if we can make a TD basement.

Auntie M , so Glad to hear from you !!! How are you doing ???

Eagle , it gets a bit windy here too (especially in late Aug. - Sept. ) but we're protected by the hardwood forest ... save a tree falling on the house or Studio ...

Thanks, everyone!

Yeah, we came back to heavy smoke. I cool the bedrooms in my little 1949 house with little swamp coolers, but with the smoke we need to have all the windows closed. That limits the cooling potential, although with our 5-15% humidity, it still works a bit. At least we can sit in front of the fans. And when the breeze clears the smoke out, I go out and get some gardening done. Mostly I'm watering and weeding the three vegetable gardens (no, really, they are small, just divided up to fit on flat areas in my hilly yard), and raking up dry, burnable grass and weeds that are still a risk. I usually describe my landscaping as "natural" (some would call it a bit messy), with buffalo grass and gramma grass as a base out front, and some wildflowers. Since the kids were born the back yard has been just wild and unkept. (That is changing now that they are old enough to do chores.) But that means in a dry climate there is a lot of dry grass, not to mention pine needles and such. So the rakes are out today.

Speaking of difficult evacuations, we are a mountain community with two roads--one 2-lane up into the mountains above us (closed due to the fire), and one mostly 2-lane down to other communities. There is also a dirt road across Indian land, usually closed and padlocked, that links up with the lower road where it is 4-lane. The Indian road was opened for the evacuation 11 years ago, and again for this one. So 12,000 people, and pets, horses, and other stuff, evacuated down two roads, one road when the dirt road became blocked because of several small cars getting stuck in deep sand. It actually went really well, all things considered.




Okay, time to do some work. Type to you later.

Catherine

GPW wrote:Those Poor chickens !!! I'll bet they even have names too ...

Yep fried and waiting to be fried..................I'm sorry they may be pets.

Why did the chicken cross the road ? ... To prove to an armadillo that it could be done ...

GPW wrote:Why did the chicken cross the road ? ... To prove to an armadillo that it could be done ...

i am so glad i did not have a drink in my mouth!

pete42 said

GPW wrote:
Those Poor chickens !!! I'll bet they even have names too ...


Yep fried and waiting to be fried..................I'm sorry they may be pets.

Hens, Pete, not friers. These ladies provide food from spring through fall, not just for two Sunday dinners. The kids call them Clucky and Peck, but I think of them as "Large Eggs" and "Extra-Large Eggs."

Catherine

Love those yard eggs !!! Much tastier than what you get at the store ... no chemicals/ hormones either ...

Catherine+twins wrote:pete42 said

GPW wrote:
Those Poor chickens !!! I'll bet they even have names too ...


Yep fried and waiting to be fried..................I'm sorry they may be pets.

Hens, Pete, not friers. These ladies provide food from spring through fall, not just for two Sunday dinners. The kids call them Clucky and Peck, but I think of them as "Large Eggs" and "Extra-Large Eggs."

Catherine

as the man says "now that's funny" large and extra large.......

Between the spring high winds, the July evacuation, and summer and fall kids' events, my trailer build went nowhere for quite a while. But my step-dad went on his annual BIG TRIP again in February, so I moved into his garage--again-- and got some more done.

I scrapped last year's floor, which was cracking along the seam between the two sheets of plywood. This time I went minimalist. After this shot we put linoleum down.



Still have the same sides, so we cut out the windows and cut channels to put some wood in for attachment points.



Glued, spackled, and sanded.



Here's our factory floor, with both walls and dear daughter hard at work.



We're using exterior primer to lay down the skin. I never got a shot of him, but dear son did get in on the painting and laying of fabric, scolding DD and me when we rolled the skin down with wrinkles in it. He's a perfectionist! And considering that they are 10, there was surprisingly little people-painting.







Both walls are now skinned inside and out, one is still drying. We shouldn't have wind today, so I'll probably put that one out in the sun, and I'll try to remember to take a picture or two.. I haven't cut the windows out again, that will wait a while.

The kids are back in school again today, after two days off for school conferences, and two days for the weekend. I have three more days before my step-dad gets back and I have to be out of the garage. I'll be working on the roof pieces today.

Wish me luck!

Catherine

C, that’s looking Really NICE !!!!

that is really great! you are building some nice memories with the kids helping.

It is pretty cool that the kids are in on it. I guess they're young enough that you guys aren't 'uncool' yet...
Were they campers before you started ?
If not, camping in the the trailer they helped build ought to make it more enjoyable for them.

Not sure how I missed this thread up to now, but I gotta go back to something Glen said:

Love those yard eggs !!! Much tastier than what you get at the store ... no chemicals/ hormones either ...

I have two dogs so 'yard eggs' are something COMPLETELY different...

Looking good so far Catherine !

W2, Oh , you mean “shoe snakes “ I have a dog too ....


Really Super to have the kids involved , because they LEARN valuable life skills , unavailable to the little couch potato “gamers” / texters'... Growing up I helped my Dad do EVERYTHING around the house , now I can make Anything .... except hair grow ...

Today was wasted on a buying trip. An hour to get there, half an hour at HD, another hour running errands in the big city, and an hour home. That shot my free time, as I had to be at work at 3:45. I bought two sheets of 2" foam to start on the back wall, and one more sheet of 3/4" to finish the roof.

I had intended to have the shell finished and back at my house before my step-dad gets home on Friday, but it has become clear to me that one adult and two 10-yos are not going to be able to stand the walls up and get the roof on by ourselves. So I'm stashing my walls and roofing materials in DSD's greenhouse, parking the trailer outside, and planning to ask him and my uncle to help with a trailer-raising Sunday. Of course they will both give me a thousand reasons my design won't work, and probably offer much more complicated ideas of their own, which is why I was avoiding this until now. DSD has been poo-pooing my project since last summer, telling me it was never going to get done. And Dear Uncle is still holding a grudge because the camp trailer HIS father built in the 40s was left to rot away (after 40 years of hard use) on MY father's farm in Colorado. Sounds grim, doesn't it?



OTOH, both DSD and DU can be a lot of fun when they get stirred up, and they have both done their share of DIY projects. I just have to remind them of what they were like before they became GEEZERS! (I think my grandpa would have LOVED this camper project. He tent-camped before marriage, built a camp trailer when my mom and two uncles were small kids, took up backpacking in retirement, camped in a VW van with Grandma when she declared she was too old to sleep on the ground, and snowbirded in a 13-ft camper for a few more years before living in that camper for a year while building their retirement cabin near Durango, CO, in the 70s. Yup, Grandpa would TOTALLY understand my camper!)

DSD's next door neighbor stopped by yesterday to ask about my build. Maybe we can rope him in, too. Although that will be 3 retirees, 2 engineers and an physicist, against the twins and me.



Maybe I can get a couple of my co-workers to throw in, too. It could be computer geeks against science geezers!

I must be out of my mind! But we'll make it work!

Catherine