Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Shasta :: Daisy May

I started reading Sisters on the Fly (without finishing The Renaissance Soul, to be honest - I promise to get back to it!) - a kind of hodge podge memoir/advice book about "glamping". While glamping is never mentioned in the book, there's a bit of advice about how to find your camper, even less advice about how to remedy any problems with said camper, several examples of how "sisters" have decorated their campers, and several vignettes of adventures these "sisters" have shared.
Very early in the book the rule is stated: every camper needs a name.
The reasoning being that once the name is in place, the decorating comes easily.

Well, that's silly.
Campers don't need names, right?

Well, I knew I already wanted to incorporate daisies (are we surprised? no, absolutely not.) so then it came to me.
Daisy May.
And then I realized that A camper with the Shasta make goes well with the Daisy motif.
So now this camper has a name (and gender?).



From what I've seen, every vintage camper has water damage.

The trick is finding the leaks, fixing the leak, and repairing the damage.
So here are the rotten portions of the camper I've found so far (that has me nervous that I'm going to have to do a whole pull-apart-and-put-back-together situation - something I did not want to do! And something I may have even scoffed at! But you do what you got to, and I really love this camper girl, Daisy May).
This first picture is the front bottom corner, curb-side (the side the door is on). The street side may be as bad, but I haven't dug as deep. So a lot of the wood debris you see is from me digging it out, it was a strip of dark wood - just not solid - before I started messing with things.


This is the rot around the skylight. I could poke it, it was soft, but my dad didn't think it was too bad. Today I discovered icicles inside. My dad suggested I throw a tarp over the whole thing for now.


Now here are several pictures of the bunk situation because someone asked for detailed pictures as they want to create something like this in their own camper.
The whole bunk consists of three plywood panels, about an inch thick. Their are two sets of hinges holding the three pieces together - one hinge is on the bottom:


and one is on the top, so the whole thing folds up like an accordion when closed.


This is a shot across the bunk. See the red cushions piled below (on the gaucho) and the light colored laminate at the top of the picture is the ceiling of the camper. You can see the top hinge about two thirds of the way across, and where there's some curling closer, that's where the other plywood divide is. Hope that makes sense.



And here are the hooks that you can use to secure the bunk in the folded away position. I had never used these latches until taking this picture. I don't think it is necessary to latch them, but there they are.

Just for fun here's a propane lamp. I'm not really interested in hooking up to electricity, but I'm not oppose to hooking up the propane - especially if it means lighting up this gem!




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