If you follow me on instagram, you know that we recently became the proud new parents of a 1965 Airstream Caravel. She’s 17ft long end to end, 91 square feet, and we named her Sandy in honor of all of the sandy beaches we’ll hopefully see with her someday.
I’ve always loved airstreams, I can’t really say why but I was obsessed with them. I used to dream of converting one into a mobile craft studio and taking it with me to craft shows. Or putting one in our backyard and having a vintage themed engagement photoshoot in front of it- thanks to inspiration from the early days of Pinterest. But never in my wildest dreams did I think we would have one ourselves. (I painted this when I was in college, way back in 2010 because I’m old. So crazy how life comes full circle sometimes)
But Sandy is extra special because she belonged to Danny’s grandparents, they bought it in the 60’s and enjoyed decades of road trips before passing it down. So we’re feeling very grateful and lucky to be able to restore a family heirloom to her former shiny glory.
We’ve never done anything like this before so as you can imagine there is a LOT of DIY renovation googling going on over here. Questions like “what does asbestos look like?” and “how to remove pop rivets?” have literally taken over my thoughts. When I’m overwhelmed I can sit on my computer for hours without realizing, making list after list of what needs to be done (which ends up making me feel even more overwhelmed to see the to-do list pile up.. I’m an Enneagram 9 if that tells you anything). But Danny is the opposite. He takes my list and works his way down one by one. If he hits a snag and doesn’t know how to do something, he goes through the process of figuring it out (he’s an Enneagram 5, btw). I research, stress, and tell him what to do. He listens, tells me to calm down, then figures out how to make it happen. So all in all we make a pretty good team.
Progress so far:
picked her up in Texas and got her situated in our super narrow driveway (that was intense)
Gutted all of the interior (walls, countertops, refrigerator, stove, bathroom, etc) saving what could be reused and tossed everything that was rotted or cracking
Labeled all of the interior skins so what we can remove them and put them back in their correct place later
Started drilling out all of the interior rivets
Next up:
Remove the interior skins
Discard the old insulation
Update the electrical (this one is going to take some major research)
Add new insulation
Need to Purchase:
Respirator masks for all of the insulation work
More 1/8” drill bits for rivets (because we’ve already broken 3 or 4)
New insulation (need to decide which kind we want)
Electrical…. wires and stuff (?)
New rivets
I’ll be posting progress videos every Sunday over on instagram, if you want to follow along click here!
