I am positive that when we started looking to purchase a travel trailer, my husband, Richard, never imagined we would be in for a remodel. I love the old vintage trailers and have, for the past year, before we even had decided to go this route, been pinteresting my heart away on remodel ideas. When we did start talking about the RV life, Richard quickly doused the fire that I had for a small vintage trailer, too small! Now I probably could have pushed it, but wanting to really take on this adventure called full-time RV life, I thought I would have a better chance with a larger version.

As we entered the searching stage, Richard was drawn to those RV’s that, let’s just put it, were out of our price range, way out! Finally, after looking at his dream home on wheels he came back to earth and started to look at ones that were more along the lines of what we could afford. Some of the newer ones were nice, but in our price range, very small. The salesman at Dodd RV Sales was patient, but when he realized nothing was hitting my fancy, he sighed and said okay I have one more to show you. And low and behold, there stood “Betsy”. A 20-year-old, as-is 24-foot travel trailer. I fell in love. Richard not so much, however, I think my excitement took over and spread to him because we ended up that very day putting a deposit down on her until we could get the money together.

Although she was in rather good shape, she was 20 years old and needed some refreshing. I figured as long as we were refreshing, why not a make-over! Hence the hard work began. First off, I wanted to recover the couch and cushions for the kitchen table benches. This trailer was a Fleetwood Mallard, which true to its name had mallard print everywhere, even two pictures hanging on the walls of Mallard ducks. Gotta go! While looking through Goodwill for some t-shirts for Richard, I happened across a whole bolt of upholstery material that fit the bill. Bright colors, just what I imagined as I perused Pinterest. Price was right, $30.00, couldn’t beat it!

As I contemplated colors for walls and cabinets, Richard started to clean up the outside. I have to say a little warning here. Pinterest is a good source for ideas about just anything, but be careful, they might work better than you want. The outside of the trailer was white with a strip of blue and red colors down the middle. Needless to say, being twenty years old, it was a bit dirty. There were black streaks running down the outside of the trailer and did not look too pretty. After researching and trying several suggestions found on Pinterest and YouTube we found the best and easiest stuff to clean with was Awesome Cleaner. Now just as the name says, it’s Awesome!! It is great for cleaning in the house as well, we used it to get marks off the floor and walls which I could not get off before. If your interested in where to purchase this product see our resources and links page.

So awesome in fact it took all the streaks away, but also most of the paint on the outside of the trailer went as well. Well, sure did give us an excuse to give Betsy a new outside do. Richard started doing some research, and I have to interject right about now, sometimes things look like they will work, and they do, but sometimes they don’t. It’s all a learning game, so if you try anything and it does not work out for you, take this advice, don’t be so hard on yourself and don’t give up! Sometimes you find out the coolest stuff when you just keep trying. Sorry back to the subject. He decided to try to paint with an exterior paint. Now we were trying to cut corners, save some money, so we did not go with an expensive brand. In fact, we went with the Walmart exterior paint.

So he laid out a design, picked the colors and went for it! Little need to say we were on a tight time budget, so this was all done during the hottest, highest humidity part of the summer, and it was well around 100 degrees with a heat index of over 105. But we had little time to play around so onward he trod. After getting the outside done, I started working on the inside. A fresh wall color, painting the fake wood cabinets, installing new flooring and re-upholstering the cushions did the trick. We learned a few things along the way which we will share in upcoming posts. Let’s just say during the process, with a little over two weeks to get done, along with painting the house we lived in at the time, downsizing our stuff and generally figuring out what we would need to live life full-time in our trailer, was a bit much. The end results were worth it though!

More to come and travel on!