Tuolumne Trip

We took the Scamp to Yosemite this week, and it was awesome. The girls loved sleeping in the "camping car" and I loved having cabinets and drawers to keep all of our gear in! Our friend Glenn got the electricity working off the battery, but we discovered a propane leak, so we did all our cooking on the grill or on my in-laws' stove. The curtains worked great keeping out the light and they looked super cute, and I even slapped some paint over the "custom" flowers that were covering the wall (sorry "Carl 2000," your masterpiece is no longer.) The scamp is finally feeling like ours!

Lots of work yet to do, but our goal is to keep in campable condition through the fall. The rest of the big jobs will have to wait until winter!

BTW, Tuolumne Meadows is awesome! Beautiful, but much cooler and less crowded than the valley. No hookups, but that's no problem for us. We're used to tents, so to us, this little Scamp is like the Taj Mahal!

Cabinets and Flooring

Zach has been working SO HARD to get new cabinets built from scratch for the kitchen area. We had a sink and stove from our old tent trailer, which were nicer than what was in the Scamp. Also, we wanted more counter space, and didn't mind giving up some seating for it. Zach also got a used dometic fridge in great condition from Camper Bob, so he built the cabinets to go around all these elements. He even made drawers! (Can you tell I'm impressed?)
Zach used plywood, and laminated it with Formica in Almond. He had a little trouble with the big piece for the counter top, so we found a really nice speckled piece in the "As-is" section at Ikea for $10! That's right.

We thought we had enough wood left over from our house to use, but it was questionable, so Zach bought this stick-on, wood looking vinyl flooring from Lowes for .98 per square foot.

Zach is going to work tomorrow, but I'll be working through the weekend. More pics to come as we progress!

Curtains!

Our little scamp sure has a lot of windows! Odd sizes, too, which you don't really think of until you're making coverings for them.

I used the Sydney Tropic fabric from Denverfabrics.com.
It's a medium weight cotton blend fabric, $11.95 a yard but totally worth it. Once I saw this fabric, there was nothing that I liked better. For the lining I bought "Budget Blackout" fabric in ivory at JoAnns. It's $5.99 a yard, but I had a 50% off coupon from the Sunday paper.

Now, I'm sure there is a "best practice" way to do this, but I am a novice. I'm writing my steps just in case someone is as clueless as I was and might be able to learn from my experience. I am careful about measurements, so for what it's worth, here you go:

window measurements. The windows are trimmed with a black border, so I measured from one outer edge to the other. width x length

door 16 x 16.5
side 19.5 x 13.5
side 19.5 x 13.5
side 26 x 19.5
side 26 x 19.5
rear 44 x 19.5
front 43.5 x 19.5
front side 37.5 x 19.5
front side 37.5 x 19.5

To calculate yardage, I made up my own formula. Usually for curtains you cut 2 x width, but I wanted the curtains a little less gathered, so I used 1.5 x width, plus .5" seam allowance for each side.
I am using Riktig gathering tape from Ikea that is 3" wide. You sew it to the top and there are clips and a track to hang the curtains. (more on that later) so, I added the 3" plus 1" seam allowance to the length. (oh, and I rounded up)

1.5(width) + 1" seam allowance
length + 4" seam allowance

door 25 x 20
side 31 x 17
side 31 x 17
side 40 x 23
side 40 x 23
rear 67 x 23
front 67 x 23
front side 57.25 x23
front side 57.25 x 23

Home decor fabrics are typically 54" wide. Both mine were. I bought 6.5 yards of each fabric. This gave me plenty to cut my pieces and a bit left over that will make a couple pillows. Because my material was a pattern that could hang in either direction, I was able to cut the pieces sideways, getting two curtains from one width of fabric. (glad I didn't choose stripes!)

Hardware: Now, this was a total fiasco. We bought some rods from Ikea that have little plastic gliders and hooks, but we couldn't figure out how to mount them so the track was on the bottom. We mounted sideways, which caused the plastic gliders to fall out once the curtain was hung. This totally blew our plan out of the water, so we're using one-inch rings with drapery hooks on the rods. The rods are ugly, and now we wish we had just bought standard curtain rods. Whatever. The curtains are cute and they work.

Possible Fabric Choices

I am in love with denverfabrics.com! It is very searchable, has a photo swatch of everything, and the prices are reasonable.

Update: Love the Floral, I have not been able to find anything that I like even close to as much. Just ordered 6 yards, which should be enough for the curtains and a few toss pillows.

Now we're looking for something that coordinates for the cushions. I originally thought it would be fun to pull out that bright blue, so we could be bright and cheery, but the color is going to be very hard to match. I found a beige-on-beige stripe at Joann this morning that actually looks really nice. Might go for that.

The Official "Before" Shots

OK, folks, here is our major project, as-is today. Keep in mind, we have already scrubbed it down. It looked (and smelled) a lot worse when we picked it up! There is so much potential, though; we're so excited to fix it up!

Hitch modification

I'll let Zach edit this to explain more, but here are the pictures of our new tow package. When we bought the trailer, we were not thrilled with the huge hitch hardware taking up so much of the truck bed. So Zach figured out what he wanted and got it done at Pac West Trailers in Sacramento. It cost about $500. Here are some pics:

Scamping in Coloma

We had a camping trip on the calendar almost immediately after bringing the Scamp home. Our friends Kirt and Abby have a new 19 ft trailer and have been camping regularly with their 2-year-old daughter. We took the Scamp to Coloma, Ca, in the heart of "Gold Country" and had a great time. We had only time to get the hitch situated in Zach's Tundra, and give the Scamp a good scrub down and new mattress from Ikea, so our accommodations were sparse, but comfortable. Our twin 2-year-old girls loved sleeping in the "camping car," and now I am excited about fixing up our little Scamp and taking it on more adventures.

Zach is thinking through all of the reconfiguring of cabinets, cooking area, etc, and I am looking at fabrics. I think we're going to go for a "vintage so-cal surf" vibe with a contemporary twist.?! We'll see how it turns out.

Our New Project

Since our 1979 Coleman tent trailer decided to leak and mold-out on us this winter, Zach has been in search of new accommodations for our future camping trips. He set his heart on a Scamp, which was a good choice in my mind, since I love the retro styling of the Scamp trailers. They are rounded off and look like little white pills. As Zach cruised the internet dreaming of this trailer, I simply ignored it, believing that he would never find one in our price range anytime soon.

Of course, I was wrong. Zach found one on Craig's list in San Jose, and it was listed at $3900, including the 1990 Dodge Dakota Pickup used to pull it! We figured the Dodge was worth about a thousand, so we scooped it up. (If anyone is looking for a decent old pickup, give Zach a call!)