The work begins....

So time to catch you up on what's been happening to the Caravan of Wrighteousness. We've had the caravan at Spanner Wielders' work for about 2 months now and given our rapidly approaching deadline you'd imagine we'd been zipping through the work right?..... Wrong.

I seem to be taking the lead in this project... and by taking the lead I mean, I seem to be the only one doing any real work - when Squiggle Butt allows it of course - which isn't very often. So its progressing, but much slower then required if its to make a début at Easter. Plus, given my complete noviceness (it's a word, I just used it in a sentence!), I sometimes get overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the task of returning our crapshack to any form of glory. And when I'm overwhelmed I hold planning meetings - I even proposed creating an agenda - that's right I am really that nerdy. Spanner Wielder vetoed this suggestion and we got down to some planning. Planning is what I do best when I lack direction - I still feel an agenda would have been beneficial.

We both agreed that we would do the caravan in section's ie front section, middle section and the rear section. Mainly because if we start ripping into the whole caravan it probably will fall in on our heads. So we've started on the front section...

Here's the before pic

And now you can see what we've done:

We've removed most of the rotten plywood. Our plan is to take as many photos of the internal wall structure as possible to ensure we replicate it correctly. Below is the right hand wall at the front. Please ignore all the junky cars you will see through the caravan windows... Spanner Wielder has an addiction, I'm desperately trying to break him from it, but its been 9 years and no luck!!

 This is the left hand wall, completely stripped back, all of the framework on this side needs replacing.

And here's the front, after removing the bulk head we discovered that most of the timber, including the ply cladding, is in good nick so it stays. This should save us from dipping into our small stock pile of timber.

Originally the curves of the caravan we're pretty intimidating, after all we aren't carpenters, and we're working with pretty basic tools. Spanner Wielder has basically every tool you'll need to work on a car, but they don't necessarily do double carpentry duty.

Below is a photo showing how they frame the curves....

 Its just a piece of of mdf... There's nothing scary about that at all!!

I started to pull the sheeting of the roof.... but i managed to give one little tug, before getting really squimish imagining giant spiders falling into my hair, making nests, laying eggs, baby spiders hatching..... eeek.. So I got Spanner Wielder to do it!! The joys of having a guy around!

But you can see from the photo that all the dismantling is causing the roof to sag... We're going to have to brace it soon. The skylight in the middle weighs a tonne, and is leaky. Our thought at the moment is to replace it with a skylight from a house... I've started trolling eBay and gumtree, but they're pretty expensive.

Next blog post will be tutorial-ish. A step by step guide on how to remove a caravan floor - and a bit about what not to do!