Atfore

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.