The Chrome Cottage

We were loving this tiny life; I never thought I could because I also loved our big houses and decorating rooms we never used. I even made a room into a photo studio once because the lighting was so good and I had a great wall to cover in barn wood; I was not a photographer. OR, the time I turned a room into a gym; complete with a holder for fresh white hand towels and a recumbent bike…I didn’t work out; I’m a perpetual curvy girl that embraced that fact years ago. I even joined a gym last May because they were running a special and have only been twice…two days in a row in JuIy; guess that’s another blog entry all in itself…I promised you randomness, right?

We lived in The Rolling Cottage just about six months when we decided that if we weren’t going to be traveling the country in our tiny casa, we could get something a bit bigger. One interesting tidbit about travel trailers is, that you have to pull them, and in order to do that…you had to have a vehicle big enough to do the pulling or buy a travel trailer that didn’t exceed the towing capacity. Our Rolling Cottage was a LITE version and the longest that our new truck (Ford F150) could pull comfortably. More randomness…I don’t drive; too scared after a car accident about ten years ago, and I’m not even a good passenger some days. Not only did we pick this truck up to pull a travel trailer, we also loved that the backseat pushed all the way up and I could lie on the floor for long trips if I got nervous riding shotgun.

ANYWAY…hubby came home one day in June after work and said that he was just looking at Craigslist at vintage campers and found one we needed to look at, in Kansas. I didn’t know we were looking again and asked “What would we do with it?” He told me that since we weren’t going to be traveling that we could get a bigger one to live in and later buy another travel trailer to travel around in…giving us a “home base.” Sounded good to me. I’m sure it didn’t help that in May; just a month before his newest Craigslist news, we were rained in 29 of 30 days AND I was very sick…the 27ft travel trailer was definitely closing in on us, and not traveling meant no change of scenery to make it worthwhile.

We made an appointment to see this new to us; 34ft travel trailer the very next weekend. It was a 1974 Avion…emulating the Airstreams of yesteryear but in a different price bracket; looking like a metal twinkie (my 4year old grandson calls it our robot house and gets to see it for the first time in May when he comes from Wisconsin with his parents to attend my youngest daughter’s wedding…I can’t wait.) We saw just three pictures on the ad before making the 2.5hour trip north to see it; it was going to be A LOT of work but we felt pretty invincible when it came to vintage campers and our rolling renovations.

We found the small town that we were looking for and soon found Alice (I name everything) sitting in a lot all by herself. It was love at first site for me but my husband… not so much. We got inside and my imagination when into hyper drive, my husband made lots of grunting noises but didn’t even respond to my many “Imagine this” or “Can’t you just see what this would look like if…” I was inside, snapping pictures and letting my mind go crazy; flipping where the bedroom and sitting rooms would be and taking out some of the “too many” closets to make room for a makeshift dining room. He was outside kicking tires and noticing all of her dimples and dings; she was pushing fifty…just like me and he was pointing out every flaw. There was insane amounts of water damage inside due to the skylights not being there for over ten years and water, snow, and animals making it there home. When I say that she needed lots of work…that was an understatement, even from me.

It took some doing but I finally got my husband to trust me. We paid the $3000 and asked if we could come back another weekend to pick up; we still had to figure out what to do with our Rolling Cottage and where we would start this project. Lots had to be done before it could even be livable but…if you’ve read some of my earlier blogs, you know that this was our “normal” and we always made things work.

I decided to post a few pictures of our renovations to the Rolling Cottage on a Facebook page called RV Interior Ideas with about 11,000 members; it has grown to over 50,000 members. I guess decorating and redesigning RVs has really taken off. After posting some of my pictures and hinting that we were going to sell, it was just a few days before I had a private message from someone in Alabama that wanted to buy it. I told you things have a way of working out. She was excited that it was totally her style and wanted to buy everything in it; the artwork, the chandeliers, she even wanted the designing tiny spaces décor books that she noticed in one of the pictures…I drew the line there but she picked them up on her own after writing down each of the titles. Here is the crazy part…I never even met her. She wired the money into our bank account and then hired a transportation company from Texas to come up and get it to deliver to her. The deal was done. Now…it was all about timing; how to get Alice home…since she was bigger than our maximum comfortable tow weight, how to renovate it enough to live in prior to the Rolling Cottage rolling to Alabama from Oklahoma, and making it all happen so that we weren’t homeless in the process.

It was mid-June when we looked at our Chrome Cottage for the first time, it was mid-July when we tugged her home (new brake mechanisms and tow bar and taking out some heavy wooden cabinets before hooking up helped with our weight problem). The Rolling Cottage was set to be picked up on August 7^th, just days before my 46^th birthday, so I had to get real creative. We rented a second lot in our RV park for the month and I got busy. Every day was me cleaning and painting, and painting, and painting. We bought new appliances and took out more cabinets, built a new buffet and added a dining room table, got a small loveseat from IKEA that came in pieces and would fit through the door and built a bed base to accommodate our queen mattress. It has been an evolving process but below are the pictures of what she looked like before we picked her up and how she looked at Christmas…because, let’s face it, we all look better in the glow of clear twinkle lights and shiny ornaments.

I created a Facebook page all of her own for people to follow her daily progress; you can visit that too…if you’re so inclined but here are the pictures to Ooh and Ahh over as a quick “get to know her.”

UPDATE: She will be getting even MORE fabulous since we are going to upgrade the kitchen AND the bathroom before the end of this year so you may want to “Like” her page now so you don’t miss a thing.