‘Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life” – Psalm 23:6

The sweet older couple that sold us our Airstream stood on the driveway behind us, through the rearview I could see his arm wrapped around her comforting her as she wiped tears from her face. We waved to them as we pulled away, and they both waved back. They had just spent the last three hours talking over how every inch of the camper that meant so much to them, worked. They gave us tons of supplies to care for her, and endowed us with the tips and tricks they had learned over the years. I knew she especially was heartbroken to sell her Airstream, but his eyes weren’t so good anymore, and they were getting ready to move into an assisted-living facility so they could both continue to be together. They were precious, and they gave us one of the biggest gifts of our lifetime – Shirley. They named her and their two other trailer, Goodness, and Mercy, after the Bible verse in Psalms, saying she was always right behind following as they headed out on adventures.

She was well taken care of, a little dated inside, but with good bones. Something can’t help but shine when you care for it as well as her past owners cared for her. She was kept under cover when not out traveling, and had a regular mainatance schedule that involved lubricating window seals, and oiling all her moving parts. We walked around and inside multiple times, seeing the carpet and mouse fur (a type of substance that insulates the walls) that covered the interior, and dreaming of what could be. Shirley’s owners had amazingly agreed to sell her to us, even though they had received an outpouring of offers after posting her on a large Airstream page, and we promised to care for her and pay homage to the adventures they had been on together with the travels we planned to take her on.

I watched Stephan’s hands on the steering wheels as we pulled out of the driveway and onto the interstate on our maiden voyage. His fingers gripped the vinyl wrapped plastic tightly, I knew he had driven large vehicles before with the military, but this was a little different, this was ours. My dad had come with us and he offered words of advice and encouragement, but Stephan held his own on the busy Georgia roads. We were on the way back to my parents house to begin renovation on Shirley, they were kindly letting us stay with them as long as we needed while we tore out the majority of her insides, and rebuilt things to suit our full-time RV lifestyle.

Day one of renovations we easy enough to start. The years-old carpet had to come out! We sneezed over and over as we pulled out rolls of once cream colored floor cover. Even with the best of care, carpet only has so much of a lifetime, and we wanted to replace this with some LVP which would update the space and create more durability for wet boots and dog paws to tromp over. This camper wasn’t in the hands of tourists anymore, it was going to be our home for better or for worse.

The next days were more challenging. I had attempted one camper rebuild before. That project ended up in a wooden shell I built on the trailer base being sold to a man who wanted to make a mobile bar from it. I knew a little bit about what we were doing, but not nearly enough. Shirley became a joint effort. Family and friends teamed up to help us pull her back together. We scoured blogs and instagram pages to learn which configurations worked the best, and how to go about doing this thing that we didn’t necessarily have the skills to do yet. We learned that just because you don’t know how to do something doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It just means you better roll up your sleeves and get ready for a few trials runs if you want things to come out right :).

We learned how to work with tile, how to hang wallpaper, how to frame out cabinets… the list goes on and on. Things slowly begin to come together with each day we worked. Many times we were in the camper for at least eight hours a day. The camper became our full time very expensive job. We wanted the interior to feel clean and open. We chose to pull down the aging mouse fur that covered the walls and paint everything white. The aluminum under the fur was too glue coated to be pretty on its own so we just sanded it smoothed and let the paint cover the imperfections. The LVP went down next, and things started to feel doable with the floor and walls completed. We had pulled an old beige sleeper sofa from the from of the camper and decided to put a desk and some storage in its place. We needed to built these to fit, so we learned to frame the cabinets and properly support the butcher block top we wanted to put on the desk. A new bed frame was the next order of business. We built off the old frame to accommodate drawers, and to fit a normal queen size mattress instead of the RV sized original.

The bathroom got the majority of its assorted mirrors pulled down and we wallpapered, built in a shelf behind the toilet, and replaced the old countertop and sink fixtures with butcher block and a modern sit on top bowl sink. Things were starting to pull together. We pulled the fabric cover from the dinette and painted it a calm olive green. The old couch covers no longer matched the campers new look so we recovered them with a faux leather fabric that promised to wear well. A coffee bar was built in where the small old TV stand had been behind the dinette, and with that the major renovations were completed.

It all sounds so simple with I type it out, but really we had no idea what we were doing most of the time. Ideas would come to us and we would run with them. Dad was so helpful in putting thoughts to paper and deciding on dimensions and proper materials. Halfway through, things started to get overwhelming, but we remembered that big projects always get worse before they get better. We kept on plowing through until things finally started looking better. But a month after we started we found ourselves putting the final touches on a camper that now looked like it had entered 2022 ready for new adventures!