Exhibit A:
But sometimes when you start fixing things, at first they just look worse.
See here, where we pulled out the bunk bed. Pretty..
Then we pulled the paneling off the back wall. It was all pretty soft. Richard did most of it with a pry bar in the time it took me to set up my camera.
This is where the majority of the water damage was. Some of the framing came right out with the siding, if that tells you how structurally unsound it was.
Next using a prybar and a hammer, we took out the bench.
Mmm, boy, just look at that floor. It was all kinds of wiggly.
And please note the wasps nests that were in the wall behind the bench.
They are industrious little devils.
Then Richard took out the paneling on the side walls, just back to the first seam, about 4 feet. He wanted to make sure there wasn't any water damage that we didn't know about.
And it mostly looks pretty good. We'll only need to replace a few boards on the left side, and just the corners on the right. We're still figuring out the best way to do that.
Lastly we dealt with the floor.
Lots of it came up really easy. The wood had basically turned to mulch at this point
I crumbled that wood with my own hands!
Once we had pulled up what we could with the pry bars, Richard used a rotary saw set to 1/2" and cut through the floor right at the point where the front of the bench sat. Then we pulled all that flooring and wood out too.
It wasn't as bad underneath as we thought it was going to be. Richard is a very Better-Safe-Than-Sorry guy, whereas I am more of a Better-Lazy-Than-Having-To-Do-Any-Extra-Work, kind of a girl, but we did it his way. And now we know what we're dealing with. We can pull out the damaged wood and replace it with new using something more secure than 40 year old staples.
It was just about dark outside at this point, so we covered the old girl with a tarp. I considered buying one of those fancy pop up canopies, but they are about $150.00. So we bought a big tarp and some nifty little bungee cords and rope to hold it down for $53.52. And if some day we don't need the tarp to cover the trailer anymore, we can use it to line the back of our pickup and make another mobile swimming pool. That is spending wisely.
