Northeast of Eden: Clementine the 1969 camper comes home

I went and bought myself a camper trailer to fix up this spring. She's an old gal, but she's licensed and titled and has much of her original parts and now she's all mine. I kind of love her already.

fold out table that drops down and becomes a bed platform. check out all that red check- my clementine has a 50's diner feel to her. But then she also lived through the age of hippy's and love, so she's got "tats" of butterfliess and peace and love giving her some street cred as well. The street cred will be the first to go. In fact, as I type, it's scraped and gone.

Job 1 was to strip the inside of everything that I could. Every cupboard door came off, every cushion and curtain came out, every hinge was removed. One tidbit of advice I will highly recommend, nay, demand that you follow- Label EVERYTHING. See the picture below? That blue tape is labeling where this panel came from and also taping all applicable hardware to it. I've worked on enough houses to know that when you take a room apart, you always think that of course you'll remember where that whoozy-whatzit goes. A few weeks pass and you NEVER will remember where the whoozy-whatzit goes.

Next, I took my handy scraper/mudder tool and I got scraping every loose bit on her walls. I need a smooth clean surface for paint to adhere to.

Job 3: sanding to make drawer fronts even smoother. They will take a lot of handling in the future so paint needs a fantastic surface so it won't just chip off in a year.

Next, I primed all my cupboard and door fronts. I chose oil based Kilz. The stuff is thick.

The picture below shows what a drawer front looked like after the primer was dry. Big 'ol grand canyon of a crack from peely paneling that I hoped wouldn't show through. Hmmm, problem.

I took spackling paste and smoothed it into the crack with my favorite mudder/scraper tool. I know some construction genius out there is gasping. I'm just using what I know. Here in MN it gets freakishly cold and something about this spackle bends and stretches with the temperature changes better than the caulks and glues and wood fillers I've used.