Chaos! at the Camper

So apparently that last post sat as a draft for approximately 2-3 months and I thought I'd published it. We have had many updates and changes to plans since that post was written. The medboard process drug on and on thanks in part to covid, but also because that is just The Way Of The Army. We were given an estimate of late November whenever Steve asked about a separation date. Recently Steve found out (as an aside, not even a formal notification) that we have to be cleared from post NO LATER THAN 30 days. From yesterday. Which was actually sometime two weeks ago. You get the gist. It's time to get the heck out of dodge. This coincides beautifully with our sudden and unexpected decision to rip the entire bathtub and shower surround out of the trailer. 

Yellow tub, original wallpaper, heebie jeebies, Steve as a frame of reference for size of this bathroom made for ants

I like to tease Steve that ripping out the tub generated the orders. But in reality, it's just some typical Murphy shit and we should have seen it coming.

In the meantime, the camper keeps presenting new and exciting problems. Like we discovered:

Yeah, the previous owners said all of the tanks were empty. The tank indicator lights determined THAT WAS A LIE. We also think our slide motor might be approaching death quite rapidly. Steve swapped out the upper vents/skylights (but not without ultimate bloodshed) and I guess I did not order the correct interior pieces so now we wait for those... At this point I will be absolutely dumbfounded if we get to the campsite and this thing just straight up works when we plug it in.

Oh Cougar, you cunning money pit, you

I managed to score us a *lakefront* campsite for later this month so that once it's really time to get out of this house, we have another house waiting just a couple miles away. Steve is currently enrolled in a crane operator course (when he enrolled, he had no idea he'd be separating during the course) so it's been fun watching him study while simultaneously applying for jobs and never talking about the massive life changes approaching because he is up to his eyeballs in work.

In his free time (LOLZ) Steve has spent many hours wrestling not only the tub into this bathroom built for elves but the tub surround as well. Because as you can imagine we did not just put some pre-fabricated shower surround in this glamper. So I saw this cute camper bathroom on instagram... and absolutely zero tutorials on how to achieve the look for ourselves. Naturally it seemed like a good idea to wing this process on our soon-to-be only bathroom. We actually used the vinyl flooring you can buy on the roll at Lowes (like the low rent white trash that we are), cut it to size, then did the most chaotic mounting job possible in 8 square feet of space. During the mounting process, Steve was doing his best to smooth out the liquid nails underneath the vinyl while I was furiously wiping it down with baby wipes because somehow that was all we had on hand and also because the vinyl smeared something like 85% of the liquid nails onto the wrong side as we tried to wrangle it into place. Hank wanders into the camper and mumbles something to me but he doesn't speak very clearly so I just respond with, "Yeah ok bud, sounds good," without looking up. (Keep in mind I have zero knowledge of liquid nails and I don't know how fast it dries so I am laser focused on using Huggies wipes and a crap ton of elbow grease to make sure we don't have a big problem later on.) Not long after we get the floor on the wall, Hank comes in and asks me for a baby wipe. I absentmindedly hand him one and he leaves. Enter Sam from stage left (also known as the only door on the camper). "Someone... or something... pooped on the playground. It could be an animal (it is a farm after all), but I think it might have been Hank... he's wiping himself by the tree." Obviously at this point I realize all of my previous errors have now resulted in my youngest baby using the sandbox as a LITTERBOX and is now using one brave baby wipe to do the job of something usually reserved for 20 wipes + a hazmat suit + a grown man. I got him (and the playground) cleaned up and apologized for yet another maternal shortcoming. 

 

Still smiling so obviously he hasn't put up a single piece of trim yet

Also, the floor on the wall held! I went back out a day or two later to check on it, fully expecting it to be lying on the floor surrounded by 87 plops of liquid nails. A few days later the tub came in. I attempted a dry fit just to make sure I ordered the right thing. But it looked like pushing it down into place was going to cause the corners of the tub to catch on the corners of the surround/vinyl and possibly rip it. *screams* Without going into a lot of boring details, Steve fixed it, but the fix involved us needing trim for the corners. Cut to me at Home Depot, describing what I'm trying to find: "uhhh.. it's trim for a shower surround but the inside corners, so it needs to be PVC or some sort of waterproof material. ... Well no, it's not tile on there. It's flooring. Haha well you see it's flooring but on the wall. Yeah. Yeah. Mhmm. This was actually all my idea so it does seem odd that I don't know what it is I'm looking for exactly, doesn't it." The Home Depot employees, despite their valiant efforts to comprehend what was happening in our camper bathroom, all but left me next to plastic corner guards and told me good luck. Luckily, Scott (owner of Hank's litterbox and the land we store our camper on) was able to tell me the composite trim's precise location after a few frantic texts. 

*INTERNAL SCREAMING*

Long story even longer, the trim is up, the tub is in, the pipes are hooked up, and all we are waiting on is the faucet. Getting a camper grade faucet has been an ordeal in and of itself and the trauma is all still too fresh to relive just yet. Just know, if you're out there trying to renovate a camper bathroom, yes, all four of you- save yourself some heartache and some dollars, and order whatever Amazon carries.

Unrelated to the bathroom, the moody teenage motor (15 year olds, ugh, the worst!) that powers our one slide is dying a very rapid, yet dramatic, death. So stay tuned because later this week we will attempt to install a new one! Thoughts and prayers that it will have enough juice to slide in so we can move it to its new location at a nearby lake.

Housing came through today to do a pre-inspection. No issues, praise God, just regular move out cleaning needed. The gal that did the pre-inspection (and will do the regular inspection on move out day) also has four young children and was just super laid back and exactly the kind of person I want nosing about my house inspecting for general cleanliness and order.

Packers come the day after we get the camper to the lake. Movers come a couple days later. And then we turn the house back over to the Army. And then.... and then we live full time in a camper, I suppose. For a little while at least. A lot of people have asked me what's next, and to be perfectly honest, we have no clue. We didn't think any of this was going to happen for a few more months so we are a bit caught off guard! We are waiting to hear back about a few job leads. But nothing is set in stone so we are just planning to travel a little until we have plans as firm as liquid nails holding up flooring on a trailer wall, y'all.