Saturday, August 31, 2013

Stripping the Aero: Part 1

I am interested in getting into the tiny house movement. I yearn to downsize in a serious way. To get rid of the couch and shrink my life down into an eight foot wide box that is as long as the trailer I buy. As such I have been looking at trailers for a while, trying to decide what sort of flatdeck I ought to get.

We did pick up a flatdeck for my dad, since he was insistent that he get a car carrier for his Nova before he passed away. It was easier to humour him then argue with a brain cancer patient, so we picked up a new 16 foot flatdeck. Buying one of those means that you have a solid frame, but the amount of waste I would have to make in converting one means that it seems like a waste of cash. I could have gone the tiny house trailer route, since tumbleweed tiny houses started producing their own, but that was also a very expensive option. So I kept looking for something that would be suitable for me to use as a framework for my house.

As it turns out, our friends had an old Boles Aero on their property up at the lake. I had seen it many times when visiting them, but had never stuck my head inside. This could be an option for me, so I decided to check it out.


It seemed to be fairly solid, but it would be a ton of work in order to strip it down to the frame and convert it into something I could build on. These things were built to be lightweight, so I would have to heavily reinforce it, plus add some modern features like  the breakaway box that all these modern trailers have. But hey, the price was right. I could have it free, if I could get it out.

They had built a deck around it before they built their house on the water. Since I am presently unemployed, time is the one thing that I have plenty of. So I went up there and spent a weekend worth of time breaking up the deck, saving the pressure treated framing members for them but utterly destroying the rotten 2x4's that made up the decking. That was a chunk of work, but no where near the amount of work that would await me in the next step. The trailer sat there, mocking me with it's seemingly semi-decent interior. Friends and family members suggested just fixing it up, but I had already seen the red-flags that meant the entire thing was rotten to the core.



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