Oct
26
2009
Airstream Trailers, Ikea By Leslie | 3 comments

Modern Ikea Cabinets in a vintage Airstream

It actually is simpler to do that you might imagine. I think of Ikea parts as large tinker toys or Lego blocks. For example, just because Ikea doesn’t make a tall 18″ cabinet that doesnt mean I can’t make a tall 18″ cabinet from Ikea parts. And, yes, that is one of the things that I did.
IkeaCabinets But a reasonable question is why would we want to put Ikea cabinets in our Airstream?  Why pull out the existing cabinets?  Several reasons:

  1. Our cabinets were decaying.  There had been water damage that required significant repair, we knew we had a major project.
  2. I have an Ikea kitchen and love the cubbys, drawers, fittings and thingamabobs that come with the Ikea Rationale fittings.
  3. Minimal carpentry skills required for a truly professional looking finish.  Drawers, doors, pulls and even sinks are all Ikea-rrific.  You gotta love it.
  4. I knew that I could do it.  I had done my own Ikea kitchen. I had bought the flat boxes and installed the cabinets. If I could DIY 21 linear feet of base cabinets, wall cabinets and another 14 feet of tall cabinets, I could DIY a 19 foot trailer, with help – of course.
  5. Finally, design.  My house, with an Ikea kitchen, was one of Metropolitan Home’s 2001 Homes of the Year winners.  An Ikea kitchen is flat out beautiful and I love good design.

The picture above shows the run of kitchen cabinets dry-fitted in the trailer.  The order is from left to right: 24″ refrigerator-30″ sink-24″ oven-18″ tall pantry.  The pantry is next to the bathroom and on the other side of the bathroom is another 18″ tall cabinets that will be fitted with shelves for a linen closet and will also hold the electrical components and the two deep cycle batteries that we charge with a solar panel.  More on that soon.

Fitting the base cabinets is pretty simple. I’ve discussed my friend the compass in an earlier post. Our trailer does not have much of an arc below the mid-line.  I used the cardboard inside the Ikea boxes to sketch a rough pattern and then used the compass to make the cardboard patterns more precise.  When it looked like I had a pattern that was pretty close I cut the Ikea fiberboard, but only after bringing each piece inside the trailer and clearly labeling which piece went where and which side was up.  You have no idea how confusing all these square pieces of white fiberboard get after a couple of hours, or minutes. I became the queen of blue painters tape and sharpies.  A tip:  the fiberboard will shatter if you cut it with a jigsaw, but a jigsaw makes it really easy to cut the arcs that you need.  I found that taping the fiberboard with that blue masking tape that you use to mask windows worked perfectly.  No shattered  fiberboard edges, and I could scribe lines on the blue and then pull it right off after I made my cuts.  Perfect!

Here’s an after picture.

After

There are a few posts between here and there.  In this view the gaucho is pulled out  and the bed is made because my son is visiting and we use the trailer as a guest house.  I’m just on my way to the airport to pick him up.

Next post:  The final installation and my perfect floating counter….Yes, I did get it! Yay me.

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Oct
23
2009
Airstream Trailers, Do it yourself, Plumbing By Leslie | 2 comments

Step 7: Installing the Atwood Water Heater with the Bowen Cover

When last we left our intrepid DIY-ers and our trailer it had a neatly excised hole in the side, a mutant Atwood-Bowen waterheater spawn and a bunch of Ikea cabinets all clamped together ready to be installed.  Ah, yes, that was the issue.  So it turns out that you really do have to have the cabinet completely installed before you complete the installation of the water heater.  You must have a good solid platform to mount the heater, drill holes for drainage, supply and gas.  These are things that you really don’t want to do until the cabinets are pretty much installed.

So the water heater sat half done in the garage for a few months while we completed the rest 0f the trailer.  But we did eventually complete the rest of the trailer!  Or most of it anyway, and one of the best parts is the marvelous water heater. So lets scoot forward in time to when after all the cabinets are completely isntalled and the plumbing is finished, now we can complete the installation of the water heater.

SytrofoamSucksSo, as it turns out the actual installation- that is the putting of the water heater into the trailer, hooking up the connections (per Atwood instructions) is pretty simple.  It just slides in (take a look at this post for a front view) and the water connections are on the back, the gas on the front.  The gas is a little fiddly to get to, you have to poke the gas line through a small rubber gasket, but its not hard just annoying. The heater barely fits in the 18″ Ikea cabinet and we kind of mangled the crappy styrofoam insulation that Atwood uses.  You see it here artfully repaired with duct tape. We eventually repaired it properly- no really we did, promise.

Did I mention that this water heater was not exactly cheap?  I was appalled at the quality in general.  The dump valve for the water heater is plastic and on the front. It looks as though the first time you use it you will be replacing the whole heater. I decided to add an external dump valve of my own devising here in cabinet.  Since I use quick release plumbing fittings throughout the trailer, the only difficulty was drilling the hole and running to the hardware store to buy the valve.

I mentioned in an earlier post that the Atwood vent is on the opposite side from the Bowen so we had to flip parts of the cover, this means that much of the exterior connections on the cover did not actually work well or at all. I were faced with trying to figure out how to connect the pieces of the cover to the trailer.  However, once I decided to move the dump valve to the interior of the trailer, I didn’t need to access the outside of the water heater except in odd circumstances. Essentially,  the electronic ignition and the installation of the dump valve inside the trailer means that I never have to open the exterior cover.  So we just screwed the cover on. And we used the same stainless steel screws that we used to attach the permanent parts of the heater and cover to the trailer so it all looks the same. Simple.

AtBowen

So what do I think of the mutant heater?  I’ve been using this for more than a year now;  it’s quiet,  it certainly does heat water well and I do love the electronic ignition. I love that the outside of my 1964 Globetrotter still has the original Bowen cover even if it is a bit dinged up.

Now, when we pull in we turn on the gas refrigerator and heater (if needed) but always flip on the water heater.  It was certainly one of the nicer things that we did for the trailer. I recommend it although I questions about the quality of the Atwood. I guess time will tell. The Bowen worked for 40+ years before getting a bit touchy.

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Oct
15
2009
Airstream Trailers, Do it yourself, Ikea By Leslie | No comments yet

Airstream, Latex, Dacron, Memory Foam and My Back

One of the design goals for the new look of the trailer was a lower line, sleeker cushions.  The original Airstream foam is 5″ thick polyester foam.  When we initial refreshed the trailer in 2001, we just used the old foam as patterns- that is we took the foam pieces to the local House of Foam (not kidding, that is really its name) and said “Make new ones…just like this.”  That worked out OK. Not great just OK.  I guess they did not have the quality control that Airstream did but those cushions never fit quite as well as the the original ones did.  So this time, I decided that I wanted to take a new approach.

  1. I wanted a lower line. Not 5″, I wanted a sleek modern look.
  2. I wanted the cushions to wrap around the curve of the trailer so we could snuggle into the corner.  I just love doing that.
  3. I did not want to give up any comfort.
  4. I wanted something that would last a bit longer, the cushions we had replaced in 2001 were already starting to get hard in places.

I talked to my trusty, neighborhood architect buddies at GreenMeadow Architects who suggested Latex Foam from an online reseller Absolute Comfort. Mark brought over a 4″ latex cushion that had been wrapped in Dacron batting and I sat on that for awhile. It seemed comfortable enough but would not bend, and I really needed it to bend.  The folks at Absolute Comfort assured me that there was not difference in sleeping between 4″ and 3″ so I bought Medium-Firm weight 3″ Latex Foam. I mentioned in an earlier post how that was not quite how it worked.

WrappedFoamHowever, it really does wrap beautifully, as you can see in this picture of the cut foam dry-fitted onto the banquette in sleep mode. Even after I added the Dacron to both sides, and covered each cushion with a muslin cover, then a final slip cover they still wrapped nicely.

So the problem started the first night…well, it was damn hard to sleep on.

Really, hard.  I think I actually had bruises.  After a week both Chris and I agreed that this was not going to work and we needed some extra cush.  However, we had dropped some serious money on the latex so we weren’t going to start again.  Thanks again to Mark, who suggested the memory toppers from Target.  We have slept on these and they most definitely do the trick.  They also keep the flexibilty that I wanted in the foam, which I would have lost had I gone to the 4″ Latex.  So, I guess this is one of those situations where I muddled through and came out with the right answer.  Thanks also to my friend Mark!

If you are interested in how we cut the latex cushion like that, I used a Rival electric knife – works like a dream.  I’ve started a odd tools I like to use page and have added that to it.

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