Atfore

There was a hiatus between dry fitting, hole cutting and the actual installation of the water heater. There was some cabinet work that needed doing before we could complete the heater installation. Our Master Plan involved ripping out all the old base and tall cabinets and replacing them with Ikea cabinets. The benefits included zippy interior fittings along with instant doors with the proper design aesthetic.  Besides, they look amazing in our Ikea kitchen.  What’s not to love?   Wee problem though, Ikea kitchens are square and Airstreams are roundy. Our good friend John introduced us to the perfect tool to fit a square cabinet into a round Airstream.

The Compass

You remember, your old friend from third grade. Well, it turns out that you can trace a wonderful curve on a slab of Ikea press board, trot that press board over to your handy Jig saw (our Brand of Choice is Bosch) and et voila an Airstream-fitted cabinet side.  Now, the tedious part is to do this properly, you must have your tired and irritated helper hold the cabinet side perfectly in place, while you traipse back and forth, cut a curve, fit that cut against the trailer side and cabinet base (held perfectly in place- helper irritated, tired and now hungry), draw a new line for a better fit….repeat.  You repeat this until the fit is perfect or your helper smacks you on the head and demands a beer.

In reality each tall cabinet took roughly a day to fit. This is also where you discover the concept of Good Enough.  What is Good Enough for me might be clearly a Crappy Job for your helper, or vice versa. Ahhh, the opportunities for neighborhood entertainment are endless. Especially when you do this work in the front yard and your helper is your spouse.

Below is a picture of the cabient slot in the trailer.  We have dry fitted the other cabinets and the new bathroom.  We had not cut any holes yet, but you can see where the hole will be cut.  Dry fitting the base cabinets is extremely easy with the compass. It is also a one woman job.  This alone ensures that the next trailer I do will not have any tall cabinets.

Above you can see the cabinet, now dryfitted and attached to the adjacent short base cabinet with a clamp. You can see the curves that we cut in the Ikea tall cabinet.

Pretty nifty for a tool you used last in third grade!

Each of these sets of steps occurred over a weekend. So, each Saturday morning Chris and I sat at the island in our kitchen and planned the weekend’s work. The “Cut the Hole in Trailer” Saturday morning mission brief went something like this…

Leslie “We need to cut the hole in the trailer for the water heater…”
Chris ” OK, where?”
Leslie ” I thought you knew where!”
Chris ” Me!! I thought you had all the plans!!”
Leslie ” I have the visually appealing design plans..you have the rip open the side of the trailer plans.”
…

Now I admit to some hyperbole here, but I can say that cutting a 12″ x 14″ hole in the side of my perfect vintage trailer was, well breathtaking.

So I left.  I left the kitchen, block, town.  I figured three hours would just about do it.  I went to Ikea and then to Trader Joe’s with a brief stop at Target to check out the latest from Isaac Mizrahi.

When I returned, Chris had cut a perfect hole and was well on his way to dry fitting the water heater.

“What, and you didn’t wait for me to see how you did it?” He’s right, you know he really can’t win.

To hear him tell it, was pretty simple. We were replacing nearly all the interior cabinets with Ikea cabinetry. All of those cabinets, including the one that would hold the heater, were assembled and dry-fitted. So the dead simple approach was to fit the heater inside the dry-fitted cabinet and draw on the interior around the edge of the cabinet. When he removed the cabinet, the outline was left on the wall. He then just cut from the inside out following the line he had drawn. Tools used? Mostly a Dremel with a cut-off wheel and metal snips

Above., left looks from the inside of the trailer out. Above, right, the outside of the trailer in.

We have found that the aluminum skin on our trailer is soft enough that this makes for a simple and controllable cutting. I would not use anything more powerful than the Dremel.  A a standard sized cutoff wheel on a grinder is just too aggressive. It cuts through the thin aluminum like butter.

One interesting note on both of the pictures, you can see the U-Channel that the aluminum shell is attached to.

The atrium in the dowhaus has gone through several versions. It had a tree in it at one time. Debate still rages as to whether or not it was actually necessary to remove it or even regarding who said it should be removed. In any case, after the arborcide, the atrium evolved into a nearly zen-like space, as shown above and below.

See the ball in the second image? That was a neato fountain that Leslie designed herself and implemented by exploiting one of our free labor sources (aka Thelen). It was leaking water, though, and had been turned off for some time.

I got in from Taiwan last weekend, and figured nothing’s better for jet lag than sunshine, so I set about trying to tweak Leslie’s design to make this thing work. A few weeks ago, one of the other free labor sources (Walker) and I had cleaned the leaves out of the space, and I’ve been kind of focused on getting the zen back into the space.

Leslie’s second revision of the design is where I started. This one involved an in-ground garden fountain inset with pavers stacked in it to support the ball at ground level, then screens around the rest of the pool to hold up the rocks around the base. There was some speculation that the pavers and the weight of the ball were causing the leak. There is a pump at the bottom of the pool with a piece of plastic tubing connecting it to a hole in the bottom of the ball. The pump brings water into the reservoir just fast enough for it to spill over the sides.

I pulled off the ball, screen, and covering rocks, then removed the pavers. I put two three-foot angle irons across the pool, and set the ball on top of them. The pump went back in under the ball, and I replaced the screens around the ball that hold up the rocks that cover the pool. I turned it on and so far, so good. Even if the pool liner is broken, at least it’s now a lot less labor (no pavers stacked in the pool to remove) to replace it.

Here is a movie of the fountain in action:

Groovy, eh?