Gutting the Interior

This is a very exciting day, 'cause this is the day when the work on this camper is actually gonna get started. Got it parked inside. More on that in just a little bit. Recently back from that little shakedown camping trip. And I've got a good idea in my head of what to get going on in here.

So first let's talk about where I am. I live in Wisconsin. That's where I'm doing the work. We're early winter right here, which means in a couple of months, it's gonna be 20 degrees below zero. As a result, I'm doing this work inside a heated storage space.

And the reason I'm talking about this is, depending on where you live and where you can do the work on your camper, you might have to have this consideration as part of your budget. I'm paying to rent this space. And I could not do the work this winter if it wasn't in here, 'cause it would just be impractical to do it outside. So as you're planning, as you're working on your budget, keep in mind the idea that you might have to rent a space inside and maybe even more, more so, rent a heated space inside, in order to do the work where you are. When I got the camper here, one of the things we needed to do was pull the AC unit off the roof in order to fit it under the overhead door.

And I'm okay with that, because the cover on that AC unit had a bunch of cracks in it, and maybe just cosmetic, maybe not. I wanted to have the AC unit looked at anyway. So having to take it off the roof to come in here doesn't bother me. Once I got here, I'm a good backer-upper, but thankfully the guy who owns the storage space has a Toolcat, very manipulative, very easy to manipulate device. And so he was able to get this in your easy peasy without me having to back it in with the truck.

That was very nice. Once it was in here, I'm treating this the same way I would if I were in a campground, which means using the jack on the front of the trailer, I got it level end to end. And then I also brought the stabilizers down to stabilize the unit, because of course I'm gonna be going in and out of this thing, like crazy, and you want to have all of that support in place. But basically, the camper's gotta be correctly set up so that you can do the work inside here. Now let's talk about that work for a second.

I've got a pretty good idea in my head of where I'm gonna start this. And a lot of that is cosmetic stuff. Looking at the cabinets in here that are this color of brown I'm not that happy with. There are gallery spindles. There are valances that are stuffed.

There's just a lot of dated stuff in here that needs to go away. Also, I know I've talked about the bed in the front of the camper. That is just very, very impractical. So that's gonna go away. What's going to come out of this is that there are ideas here that you can probably incorporate in your work, but nothing is gonna be absolutely identical to this.

And you've gotta have an open mind. There's gonna be some fluidity to this, where, as I take stuff out, I might find other problems or have other ideas, or as I talk to people, I get other ideas. So nothing here is set in stone. I know where I'm gonna start, but this is going to change as we go. And I also want to point out that I am not an RV expert.

This is not my day job, upgrading RVs. This is something that I want to do to this camper. And I'm excited about it. But I'm gonna watch YouTube videos. If I get the chance, I'm gonna talk to experts in the industry.

I'm gonna use outside resources. And a lot of this is gonna be taking you along as I learn as I go, and we'll go through that learning process together. So that's gonna be fun and it's gonna be fluid and I'm gonna change my mind like I change my socks, probably. But that's part of the gig. And with that, let's get inside there and get started on tearing stuff out.

The first thing I'm gonna do here is go after the nook. I know that this is gonna come out. This is not gonna be a bed anymore in the new version of this camper. So in order to make space, which might be handy for other stuff that's coming out of here, I'm gonna get all of this stuff torn out and let's see how that goes. Behind the man, behind the back there, tricky move.

One thing I recommend is get a bunch of bins because there are gonna be some things here that you want to hold on to. I don't think I'm gonna use those floor mounts for the table again, but even if I don't, maybe they're useful to somebody else and I could sell them or give them to somebody else for the camper. So have some bins on hand so that stuff you think you want to hold on to, you can put in your bins. I mentioned earlier, have screw gun, or impact driver, will travel, throughout the camper here. And I'm finding in this one, it toggles back and forth between a Phillips tip and a number two square drive.

So you're gonna want to have a variety of tips available, and it's just gonna be, see what happens as you go. I think the square drive is gonna be more prevalent in stuff that was put into the camper when it was built. Stuff that somebody else did later might lean toward Phillips drive. Just gotta see how it goes. .

I don't know about you, but I have never built a camper from scratch. So for me, and probably for you, as you go through this, you're learning to reverse engineer as you go, which means I'm figuring out on the fly what is it I need to do in order to take this thing apart and get these parts out of the camper? So my advice out of this is just be conservative. Take your time, examine what you got going here. It's pretty easy to look at screw heads and just start backing stuff out and seeing what happens, which I've done here.

Remember the bolster was up here. And at this point that's still pretty darn stuck to the wall. So I'm missing something. Now it's possible that our little flat bar is not gonna, in some cases, give you the leverage that you want. So a bigger flat bar is a good thing to have on hand.

And then maybe we're gonna have to go so far as a crowbar in some cases, but be conservative. If you put a crowbar or a flat bar against the paneling of the wall and you try to pry, you're gonna blow a hole through the paneling. So just, these are kind of tools of last resort for what we have going here. The other thing is, as I'm working in these confined spaces backing screws out with my impact driver, I'm wearing hearing protection because impact drivers are loud no matter what. In this tight spot, they're really loud.

So you really want to watch your hearing and take care of that. You only get one set of ears. I'm gonna keep looking at this 'cause my, I'd like to get this out and in one piece as much as possible. And I kind of feel like I'm just, there's a little something here that I'm missing that's just holding me up. It's really close to coming out of here.

I gotta do a little research. Let me give you a tip about a tip in here. I've got a spot where, as much as I love my cordless drill, the screws are in too tight a spot for me to get the cordless drill in here. But I've got a solution. I've taken my number two square drive out of the cordless drill and I grabbed a socket.

A 1/4 inch socket is the size of the hex on these drivers. That can go in there, and then in a tight spot like this, instead of trying to snake your cordless drill in here, get that tip engaged in the screw, and then you can use the ratchet like that to back the screw out. So it's a great way to get after these screws in these really tight spots. I've got a corner piece here that, in all honesty, is kicking my butt. It just doesn't wanna come out.

And I can't see any visible fastener. So I'm bringing in a multi-tool here. And what happens with these is, the cutter is gonna oscillate back and forth. Probably impossible to see, but there are very, very fine teeth on there. This is a metal cutting blade.

So if there's a screw or a nail or something still holding this thing in, that's gonna cut through it. Maybe there's some adhesive here. I haven't run into that any place else, but who knows? So same thing, if I slice in with this, it's also gonna take care of any adhesive. So nothing to do, but do it.

Hearing protection again, a great idea. This noisy tool. Get a little separation and see what happens here. There is something. Well that kind of took me by surprise when it went.

A little bit of, there's definitely caulk in there. A little more in here. Wow! So yeah, definitely a fastener, I dunno, snuck in from outside somewhere, 'cause there are no heads on this side. These are knots.

Don't get tricked by those. Those are not screws. So I dunno. Something sure had that baby held in place. But now it's out.

And here's the deal. This side's cleaned out. I'm just gonna keep going on that side, and it's gonna be more of the same. Moving right along here, that whole countertop over here that was in front of the window, all of that's gone. All of his bed-table related stuff, outta here.

Next thing, I'm gonna go after the cabinet. And then also the valances on the wall here. So a couple of things to keep in mind. We've got electrical components here. This is the indicator on my tank levels.

And then this of course is a radio. So electrical devices, trailer's unplugged, battery is disconnected, so I can't run into anything funky when I start working with those. I've also got a roll of masking tape and a Sharpie so that when I start working on these, if I have to disconnect anything, I can label the wires and what they were connected to here so that whatever it's gonna be, a month from now, a couple months from now, when stuff is coming back together, I know what's what, and that labeling, like setting parts aside in the bin is gonna be hugely important to make sure that you know where stuff goes. So next thing is just gonna be, what a surprise, we're back to the cordless drill and just start dissembling. The assembly here is pretty loosey-goosey.

There's just a couple of screws holding it in. But there are wires that go through the frame here and we've gotta deal with those. I'll show you in here. I don't want to cut these, 'cause they go from that wall to that wall. But they're through holes in the framing, so we gotta work around that so we can get frame off the wall.

I'll show you what I'm talking about here. Here's what we've got going. The wires run through these boards. And then they also go this way through some spots right there. And this one in particular, there's kind of nothing I can do with that, 'cause it comes out of that wall and goes into this wall.

And I don't want to cut that wire if I can avoid it. What I'm gonna do is grab our multi-tool again. Last time I had a metal cutting blade in here. This time it's a wood cutting blade. And what I can do with that is get near that side of the hole and then that side of the hole.

In other words, I'm gonna basically cut the top off of that cleat. So instead of that being an O, I'm gonna turn it into a U, and then I can slip the wire up out of it, of course, being really careful to not let that cutter get down there and hit the wire. Valances are next. And one of the things that's neat about getting this stuff out of here is opening this area up to really start to get a feel for the possibilities, which is really exciting. Pww-tch.

The next thing I'm gonna tackle is removing the sink and the countertop. And my goal here, I've said it a couple of times, is to get to a single bowl instead of a double so that there's more countertop space. So not, getting the sink out there, not horribly difficult, he says, hopefully. A little bit of plumbing to undo inside there and then the screws gotta come out of that countertop. So first part of this, much like any other sink, a drain.

And I'm just gonna go ahead and see if I can take that whole trap off. And again, remember we're saving parts. So, you're gonna get another sink, so I'm gonna save this trap because we'll probably use it someplace else. Our next thing is to go after those faucet connections. There we go.

Boy, it's funny, even though the water's been off and drained, there's water in the pipe. And I guess that's been on there a while, like 23 years. All right, now with the drain disconnected and the feeds disconnected, what I wanna do is leave the sink attached to the countertop and just take out the countertop, if I can get to all the screws. So this is stuff we've already done. We're just gonna find the screws up in there.

Like there's one. And get a driver on it. And rinse and repeat with a bunch of other screws. Well, you know how this goes, best laid plans. And as I said earlier, I jinxed myself, this should be easy.

What I found was the fasteners holding this countertop in the back are impossible for me to get to from here. So I wasn't gonna take the sink out, separate from the counter, but now I am. And that was, this part was pretty straight forward. They're just fasteners from the bottom, holding this, kind of clamping it to the bottom of the countertop. So once those are out, we've got this.

Now I can get to the back of this and figure out what I need to do. It's loose, but not ready to come out, to get this whole thing out. Here's what I'm trying. There's a cleat inside the cabinet and that's got staples through the cleat into the bottom of the countertop. So I'm trying to see if I can work my way around.

A flat bar is your friend. And get this to lift. It's a start. All right. We learned something.

There are screws from the stove into the countertop. All right. A little more work than I anticipated. But the good news is, we got her. And we're queued up for a new countertop and a single bowl sink.

And who knows what else will still change with this cabinet? We'll see as we go. My next agenda is to get this back room cleared out to get these bunk beds out. And I've already had a look in here. And a couple of things.

It's gonna be really difficult in this tight spot to get camera gear in here. But, this is stuff you've already seen. I've looked at the beds. There are cleats that go up against the wall, with screws, that are holding them to the wall. So this is very similar to the tear-out that's already happened.

Now, in addition to these beds coming out, I think this cabinet is gonna end up coming out. It's already pretty marginal. And I think that, at the end of the day, in order to optimize the space back here, my goal is to get a queen sized bed back here. In order to optimize the space I think that cabinet is gonna have to go and some rework is gonna have to be done in order to make good use of the space. So I'll get what I can for you on camera here, but you're not gonna miss much if you don't get it all, 'cause it's redundant and repetitive of what we've already done on the other end of the camper.

That wraps up as far as I'm gonna go for now. So, I don't know, a bunch of stuff here. When you're doing this on your project, on your camper, you're probably gonna have a completely different approach. In my case, what I was looking at was stuff that's really, really dated, like the stuffed valances. That's gonna go.

Anything that was already a little iffy structurally, that's gonna go. And then as I've said a couple of times, a really big goal of mine is to get the main bed for this camper away from the front and into the back. And I measured ahead of time, so I know I can come pretty close to putting a queen bed back here. I might have to custom cut a piece of memory foam, but it's gonna work. So, I'm not just randomly tearing stuff out.

I've got some thought process here. That being said, for instance, back here, that tall cabinet, floor to ceiling, and the cabinet that's covering the inverter, are still in there, 'cause I'm gonna let the dust settle a little bit and see what ideas I have about working with this space. Same in the front. That portable water tank is there. That scuttle hole access to the outside is there.

So I just want to, I know I'm gonna make changes there, so I tore this stuff out, but I'm gonna think for a while and see what's gonna be the best approach to putting everything back together. And the same, with that big cabinet with the mirror doors, one, the media center that was in there was kerflooey. It's an AM-FM cassette player, and I want to upgrade to something that's Bluetooth, better sound, who knows, we'll see what else. And also just that whole cabinet was just plain ugly and needed to go away. So for now, anyway, that's as far as I'm gonna go.

And we'll kind of see what happens next and I will take you along on that trip.