How Did We Get Interested in This Project?
My mom is an avid DIY enthusiast. She loves doing cool projects and as she is about the craftiest dang person on the Earth she can pretty much do anything she sets her mind to. And it always turns out fantastic. She is an artist by trade and training so not only is she determined she's freaking amazing and everything she touches turns to awesomeness. She was reading on the internetz as she is wont to do and came across a blog post about this totally cool Gypsy Trailer make over. She was so inspired by it that she talked about doing something like it with my stepdad. The only problem is that my mom TOTALLY would not go camping. She is not the outdoorsy type. So basically it would be a labor of love that ended in an adoption. She and my stepdad casually perused the local Craigslist ads for camper trailers but nothing too serious as they weren't sure what the heck they would do with it once they got it. They came up to visit my partner and me during Labor Day weekend 2011 and made an off-hand mention of it. She showed me the above mentioned Gypsy Trailer link and then proceeded to go nutso (like she is also wont to do) and looked up every camper renovation in the history of the universe. I exaggerate only slightly. And thus the seed was planted.
Our Baby is Born!
Ange and I casually started perusing the local Craigslist ads for busted up camper trailers. We didn't really have many parameters besides CHEAP. We were looking for $500 or less, preferably MUCH less. I wasn't too regular about looking, mostly because our pickings up north are rather slim. One drizzly Sunday morning at the end of September I was perusing the ads and I came across an ad for a small trailer in a city of north of us for $200! I told Ange about it, she looked at the brief description and said "What the heck? Let's call!" I tried to quickly get in touch with my mom and stepdad to see what types of questions we should ask about the camper as we have no clue about renovating campers or really much mechanical knowledge whatsoever. As usual, neither one of them had their phones on or near them. I posted a Facebook message to my mom's page because she is often on the interwebz even when her phone is MIA. Still nothing. Ange called her dad to ask him and he had a few questions but as this was out of the blue he was kind of bewildered as to why we were asking them and didn't really have a clear idea of what the heck we were even thinking about. We came up with some questions ourselves (does it leak? if we came and picked it up would it make the 60 mile trip in one piece? etc.). Ange gave them a call and spoke with them for a bit. The lady she spoke with said they'd had an overwhelming response and she was just directing people to her mom's house (where it was being stored) so they could check it out. Ange thanked her and said we'd call her back in a bit. Ange relayed the info to me and we decided it was $200 so even if it turned out to be a dud it wouldn't be a total waste. We also decided to call back and ask if the lady would guarantee she would NOT sell it before we could come up there. We didn't want to drive an hour or more and find out she'd sold it by the time we got there. Ange called the lady back and said we could be there in about an hour and a half and we were VERY interested. The lady promised she wouldn't sell it until we got there. We threw on our clothes and took off!
On the way there we finally got in touch with my mom and stepdad. They were pumped! They gave us some questions to ask and some things to look for when we got there and told us to call them again if we had questions while we were there and of course IMMEDIATELY if we decided to buy it!
We arrived at the house and knocked on the door. A seriously cracked out man came out to chat with us. He told us that he lived in the camper for about 5 months when he got out of jail (!) and that he'd decided to move in with his mom and needed to sell the camper to pay her for rent. Anyways...
We checked it out and took a million pictures and sent them in rapid succession to my mom for her and my stepdad to look at. The meth head man blathered on and on about the camper and we had decided we weren't really sure we could believe everything he said, but based on our inexperienced inspection it looked decent. Ange called my mom so they could talk and inspect things virtually together. After about half an hour we decided we'd take it. Ange tried to bargain them down to $150 but they held firm. It was worth a try! We drove to the bank to pick up the cash (we didn't know exactly where we were going and didn't want to get shanked so we didn't bring the money with us). A short while later we were hooking up our new baby and heading home!
Here's her first pictures:
Update 4/30/13: We is no longer. I is the only one. More updates to follow...
1 comment:
I found this site very interesting. The environment for the said page is so pleasing to the eyes because it uses colors that are light. Great job!
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