Gallery
Before Images
Every journey begins with just one step— although it could possibly be off a cliff
So we brought her home. After several attempts, we got her backed into the driveway. You can buy a T-shirt on line that says, “I’m sorry for what I said when we were backing in the camper.” And I was. The very next day we started researching renovation shops, learning about basic camper systems like 12-volt and solar power, the intricacies of trailer plumbing, and we spent some time talking about where we saw this project going.
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Not bad for a 54-year-old, but in need of a makeover
The black box on the back? It was causing the aluminum skin to buckle near the bumper, and it was clearly an add-on. It stored a lot, but the extra weight when you loaded it caused Birdie to sway under tow. It had to go.
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All the features we wanted a small camper
It was a challenge to find a really small trailer with a kitchen, a bathroom, a closet, and places to eat, sleep, and work. We thought perhaps it was pie in the sky until we saw the floorplan for the Cardinal Lovebird 13 Compact.
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Showing her age, but with life in her yet.
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She’d had a few add-ons and modifications.
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She had teardrop lights somewhere in her past.
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Looks like a run-in with some tree branches perhaps? There were a number of skin penetrations.
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See just the shadow of her wing at the top of the door?
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Renovation versus restoration
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The dinette walls had been paneled with wood tambour —what you would find on an antique roll-top desk. The table top had a deep gouge in it — actually more of a hole. The particle board core was swollen and disintegrating as a result of water penetration, and the rubber bumper edge was dry and cracked. The table would need replacing. We added it to the list. Click below for a few pins on recovering cushions.
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With the cushions and table lowered for sleeping, the resulting space is just slightly narrower and shorter than a full-sized bed. Since neither of us is over 6 feet tall, we were golden! We opted to completely replace the cushions — 50 years old after all! We chose a nice, dense foam for good support. We should have paid more attention to the fact that the tabletop tapered at the leading corners, however.
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Birdie still had her original cabinetry, counters, light fixtures, refrigerator, stove, sink, hood and toilet, but there were issues with several of those items. The kitchen counter sagged in the middle due to deterioration of the framing underneath. The propane light was missing its original glass globe and its location limited the swing of the upper cabinet doors which limited access to the cabinet contents. Bob also saw that LP light as a source of — what else? — fire and suggested an LED light.
The toilet and refrigerator were due for replacement, as was the aluminum wiring. It appeared that a battery had once been housed under the sink. Today that is not considered a safe practice.
The upper bunk and area around the dinette had a wallpaper border and a mirror affixed to the back wall. The birch walls throughout the trailer had been painted in shades of yellow, mauve, and white. The refrigerator had been trimmed with more wood tambour. The curtains were mainly a black and floral stripe, and the carpet looked like perhaps it was a remnant from a hotel banquet hall.
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The sink and stove were in amazing shape and really just needed cleaning. The hood had a small dent, but let’s just call it a beauty mark. The pull-out bread board was missing and a strip of wood had been affixed over the area where a water pump switch would have been. There was no oven, but I had an idea or two on that front.
Birdie’s Before Interior
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The bunk provided lots of storage space, but Bob and I both smacked our heads on it several times in the course of a week. We thought that narrowing it just a bit might save our noggins but still leave ample storage space. We got the idea to wrap the bunk shelf around the sides of the dinette to provide a space for a small TV, some books, and more storage. Could we make the puzzle pieces fit? Check out the rebuild photos to see what happened.
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The refrigerator was a three-way model, but it was really small with a pocket-sized freezer. It smelled musty, it’s plastic parts were brittle, and there was no getting the mold stains off. Time for a new one.
I had seen a remodeled camper with wine bottle storage above the refrigerator door. I thought that was a really cool idea, but it wasn’t… cool, that is. Camper refrigerators work like your home A/C unit but they use ammonia as a refrigerant to remove heat and cool your food. That heat builds up in the air space around the refrigerator before venting outside. Heat and wine? Hmm, perhaps not good a good combination.
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There were no black or gray water holding tanks on the trailer. It appeared that the toilet was plumbed directly to a blackwater outlet. So unless you were connected to a sewer hook-up or a collection container, there was no way to flush.
Click below to see my Love Bird Pinterest page under the Plumbing category to see how other camper owners have dealt with this using a Blue Boy when hookups are not available.
Picking a toilet took us a while and we researched a lot! We looked at adding a black water tank. We looked at a number of toilet types including composting, self-packaging, separation, waterless, cassette, incinerating, and standard water reservoir toilets. In the end we ended up choosing something that wasn’t even in our top three choices, but we’ve been quite happy with the result!
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The kitchen sink had the same issue as the bathroom; no way to run water without a place for the water to go. We realized how little consideration we’ve had to give this issue in our lives. This was humbling.
You can just see the sag in the countertop right along the left edge of the stove top due to lack of support underneath, but the stove and sink were in nearly perfect condition.
In this original kitchen layout, the freshwater holding tank stretched lengthwise across the floor behind that long, narrow door at the bottom. It was stainless steel and was shaped like a pill capsule. In order to add a water heater, we had to change out the freshwater tank and that meant sacrificing several of those lovely drawers. That was sad, but I felt that I could find ways to use the remaining space creatively and effectively.
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It seems there was an electric water pump right here at one time with a jerry-rigged switch. You can see the original metal water tank just behind that chunk of plank. And the thin copper line? It was for charging or priming the freshwater tank. The trailer came complete with a bicycle pump for this purpose!
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This photo of the corner of the dinette was one of two places in the trailer with evidence of water damage. The other was around the vent pipe in the bathroom. It didn’t seem all that extensive in either location, but we were just about to find out otherwise.
After taking stock of what we wanted to replace, what we thought was repairable, areas we wanted to make changes and upgrades and add-ons, it was “Pack yer bags, Nellie!” and off we headed to the repair/renovation shop in the wilds of Montana! Well, okay, not far from Helena, the state capital.
Bob and I do well on road trips; one of us naps while the other drives, or we have long, uninterrupted talks. It’s our special time. We figured we could easily make it in two days. But we were novices at trailering! We did all our safety checks, gassed up, grabbed a cooler of sustenance, and away we went! About the time we thought we’d be in Provo, we were just crossing the state line near St. George. We’d had to travel a fair bit slower than we were used to. “Is it normal for the trailer to be weaving around like that so much?” I asked Bob as I clutched the handle on my passenger side door. “Let’s try adding some weight to the tongue by moving things forward a bit,” he said. That helped some, but there was still a bit of sway. We added some water to the tank as well and slowed down even more until we got a smoother glide. I will say I got to gander a lot more at the countryside rolling by, but we pulled into our reserved camping spot in Lehi after dark. We tried to be super quiet and not turn on too many lights. We didn’t even unhitch. We tested out the shower house, grabbed dinner at the restaurant next door, and hit the hay. Next morning we were up an hour earlier than planned to get a head start on a slow drive. We made it to the shop with some daylight to spare, met the guys who would be doing the work, and headed back the following day down I-25 through some really magnificent county. We wouldn’t see Birdie again for a while.
Several weeks later the phone rang. It was the shop. What they’d uncovered wasn’t happy news.
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This shows the lower curb-side back corner of the trailer or what was left of it after the metal skin was removed. It’s amazing the trailer didn’t collapse like an ACME crate in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. No wonder it had been swaying! I think the roof was the only thing holding the walls together back there. This was the rusty nail in the coffin for the hope of “just a few repairs.”
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The floor near one of the rear storage compartments. You can see the metal belly pan on the bottom, but wow, we had a project on our hands.
The corner of one of the dinette window frames. Staples! Really?
Change of Plan
We were now looking at much more extensive repairs and a possible frame-off rebuild. The pros? We would end up with a mainly new trailer and could drive off knowing that we could enjoy her for a long time with minimal further structural work. The cons? The time and the cost. It would be months before Birdie would be ready to tow home, but that gave us extra time to budget for the work.
We opted to go ahead with the rebuild and passed the time focused on some other projects for some vacation rental property in the interim. Camping would wait until the following year. Little did we know that COVID-19 would change our plans yet again! Check out our vacation rental website below, or better yet, pay us a visit!
The next section of the gallery focuses on the rebuild and then the interior design. Check it out. I hope that you find it interesting!
Would we have proceeded if we’d known what lay ahead? Perhaps so, perhaps not. We’ll reserve our opinion until after we’ve had an opportunity to get out and explore and see if trailering is for us. After we knew we were looking at a rebuild, Bob joked with the shop crew asking them to add an additional 5 feet to Birdie. So who knows? Maybe something larger is in our future.