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.