It started out innocently enough when I told Andreas, “I have a bad idea, so I don’t really want to tell you about it.” The thing I had been dreaming of: our Bigfoot camper with white walls. I knew it would be a lot of work, but I couldn’t get the idea out of my mind.

Andreas actually agreed that it would be nice, but he thought it would be a LOT of work and said we should wait. That was enough for me, but then I pondered out loud, “What if we just put in some nice floors like the duo from Design Egg did?” Andreas told me, “If we’re doing floors, I’d want to do the walls at the same time.”

Suddenly our plans to wait for renovating the camper turned into making a list of the changes we wanted to implement and creating a “realistic” budget (we have a very limited budget as we’re putting all the money we have into WeighMyRack). And then, without much debate or additional thought, we started to strip the camper of all it’s contents.

A few days later, around 10pm, as we were almost done cleaning and masking Andreas wondered aloud, “How did we even decide to do this?” My reply was a simple: “It all happened kinda fast.”

 

stripping pano

Mid-Strip. We debated captioning this photo, “We stored our camper for the winter and were shocked at the damage the mice did while we were gone.”

 

water damage

This water damage  was the only damage we knew about when we bought the camper. Not impossible to live with, and we have for 2 years, but it definitely wouldn’t survive new paint.

 

water damage panel gone

Goodbye water damaged panel and structure! Hello to a temporary stilt as we added reinforcements to the upper side cabinet that was beginning to sag.

 

small water damage panel

Andreas was excited to fix any/all water damaged panels and he couldn’t help but eliminate the small amount here with the anticipation of adding a shoe storage area.

 

daytime sanding cabinets

My mom donated her weekend to helping me sand the cabinets! Fortunately for us, she likes projects; Dad mysteriously disappeared as soon as he heard our plans.

 

rusty screws

These were the three anorexic screws holding our door jam in place. I’m surprised they even came out.

 

night time putty job

After the midnight putty session Andreas is showing off the high-tech vacuum sanding technique.

 

night time sanding

Sanding, sanding, sanding as the hours slowly passed by. I ended up leaving the sanding party around 1 am, but Andreas couldn’t help himself and stayed up ’til 3.

 

masked camper

Masking the camper was fun compared to sanding it. It looks so clean now that it’s completely empty! Finally ready for a coat of primer.

 

 

In 4 days the camper became stripped, sanded, cleaned, and masked; ready for priming and painting. Now we just need a no thunderstorms or rain showers forecast to start that process (thanks to Stan for loaning us his paint sprayer!).

We’ll create another post once we’ve painted and put the camper back together!

Update: Click for pictures of the final remodel!

We’re still open to answer questions so let us know if there’s any other details you want (pictures, remodel questions, budget, etc) in the comments or shoot us an email.