Absurd Self-Assurance and other DIY Stories (part 1)

As anyone who has ever attempted a major DIY renovation project will tell you, there are two things  you need before you can get started:

1. An absurd level of blissful ignorance about how much time it will take, what it will cost and how difficult it will be, and
2. Lots and lots of inspirations pictures of completed projects by people just like you who didn’t know any better, either, when they started, but finished on top anyway

As to the first, Dean and I are naturally blessed with a healthy abundance of cockeyed optimism about any new project we start, and experience has yet to damper our deeply held conviction (every time) that this time, it’ll be different.

As to the second, I have to give full credit to the crafty gods who created Pinterest and the combined genius of Caro and Dickie of The Twinkle Diaries (check it out: http://www.thetwinklediaries.co.uk).  One of the BEST blogs I’ve ever come across, and absolutely pivotal to our efforts over the last few weeks.  Seriously, their Caravan Renovation posts became as necessary to me as coffee and ibuprofen when the chaos threatened to overwhelm us mid-project.  More on that later.

This post is about before that.  In the beginning.  When we were young.

So, five weeks ago.   AKA: weekend one of Project Caravan Renovation.

Having ascertained early on in the buying process that our new old caravan was structurally sound, we drew up a plan for the renovation of the interior that went something like this:

• Pull everything out.
• Paint it all white.
• Wallpaper with wild abandon.
• Put some things back.
• Bask in glory.

Plan in place, we set about pulling everything out.  It was a beautiful day and the minions were freshly scrubbed and ready for action.  First went all the bedding, cushions, curtains and covers.  All but the curtains are destined to be recovered in something not-chocolate&naartjie by the ever-handy Lynn, who knows about such things.  The curtains are to be donated to a needy funeral home somewhere.

  

Next came an assortment of crockery and cutlery left behind by the previous owner. I wasn’t expecting this, but they’d very kindly left us a full kitchen’s assortment of useful things.  We ended up donating most of it, but I kept an old-school snackwich maker and a beige kettle that are both from the eighties and testament to an age before built-in obsolescence in appliances.  That’s a whole other rant in itself.

 

Thanks to a heads up from The Twinkle Diaries (such a good blog!), we removed all the cupboard doors and hinges, as this makes it easier to paint and cover them.  There are 21.  I know, because I diligently numbered each one and created a scaled pencil diagram so that we’d know where they all went.  That’s 54 hinges.  Which is 216 screws, mostly from 1982.  Of those, roughly a third stripped instantly the moment I applied my electric screwdriver, and no amount of cajoling with a hand-wielded Pozidriv or, as desperation set in, vice grips, would get them out.  Thus my quick ‘take all the cupboard doors off’ plan became three hours of blood, sweat and shameless cursing as I drilled each rusted screwhead off.

While I was busy with that (and possibly to escape the free-flow swearing), Dean applied himself to the electrics.  One of his many (many) talents is knowing what needs to plug into what in order for things to work, and a cursory examination of the caravan wiring showed that we were likely to all die horribly in an electrical fire unless stripped completely and totally redone.

As an aside, it’s worth noting that Dean believes in Doing Thing Properly.  It’s one of his most endearing qualities.  It’s also the genesis of what I like to call Interminable Project Creation.  I.e one project becomes twenty little ones very quickly, and those little projects tend to spawn even more projects, until Project Overload sets in and he collapses under the strain of everything left to do.  Reminding him at that moment that he created the work for himself is apparently a very churlish thing to do.  Thus, stripping and rewiring the caravan electrics became a three-week master performance of electrical wizardry, but more on that later.

Last, but certainly not least, I had at the carpet, armed with a Stanley knife, pliers and the righteous conviction that carpets belong in neither this century nor the Southern Hemisphere.  I loath carpets.  All carpets.  Never met a carpet I liked. They’re filthy things and lifting the gross, grungy brown fuzz stuck to our caravan floor did nothing to dissuade me of that.  No matter how clean you keep a carpet, the dirt that gets trapped under it is ALWAYS THERE.  Thirty-plus years of dust and filth, in this case.  It was gritty, sweaty work as most of carpet was stuck down with staples and adhesive.  I discovered that the carpeting around the double bed was actually made up of little scraps of carpet, jigsawed together and glued down with something like tar.  I was so hell-bent on getting the whole lot up, bagged and gone from my life that I neglected to take any photos of the carpet or the process of exorcising it from our lives.  I can only find this one shot of what it was, before it was no more:

  Ick.  No more carpets.  Ever.

At the end of the first weekend, our poor van stood completely naked and about 100kg lighter, with all the cupboard doors and hinges off and everything not bolted down removed to be reconditioned, recycled or redistributed.   We collapsed into a heap and congratulated ourselves on a Good Start.

 

Our final task was to apply a coat of primer to the cupboard doors so that they could dry during the week in readiness for phase two: painting and wallpapering.

Aaaah, wallpaper.  That’s a story deserving of its own post.

And it shall have one.