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!
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.
Before we could or should cut the new hole in the trailer, we did some dry fitting of the old cover to the new heater. This was to get the dimensions for the new appliance- which was the combination of the old cover and the new heater. There was a lot of fiddling in this process so to reduce the likelihood that the styrofoam insulation on the Atwood would be damaged, we removed it.
We flattened out the lip on the front of the Atwood as well as any bends in the Bowen Flange with a heavy hammer and a metal bar-any heavy bar seemed to work. The bar is used as a metal break so it must be harder than the metal we were forming. Not so tough with aluminum! We used a spare hitch extension for this work, you can see it in the picture below. Once this was done the Bowen flange and cover would fit snugly against the front of the Atwood.
After flattening, the larger Bowen flange was snipped to fit the outer dimensions of the Atwood. You can see the initial snips in the picture above, left. We were really amazed at how well this worked! Take a look at the picture below (the intial mating of the Bowen and the Atwood). We used tin snips and a Dremel with a metal cutoff wheel to do the fine fitting. While the Atwood is about the same width its slightly taller than the Bowen. Cutting the Bowen flange and bending the extra bit inward also gave some additional structure to the new contraption so we left the bent pieces.
I am going to give you a sneak peek of how the flange fitting looks finally assembled. We were just amazed that it went together this well.
In the next episode, I will discuss that most terrifying of all…cutting a hole in the outside of the trailer and how we figured out where to do it!
