What would spring be if it weren't for the pain and anguish of getting the venerable 'ol Casita out of mothballs and ready for another season of abuse in the cold, rainy state I affectionately refer to as Misery....uh, I mean Maine. And sure, just because our trailer is old and decaying (it's a 2007 after all!), I guess I still thought fiberglass trailers were superior to stickies. I thought that until a few weeks ago. Let me tell you how my mind was changed.
It was one of those rare mornings here in the Great State of Maine, that prefect blend of being awake AND actually wanting to work. Combined with a ray or two of sunshine, and the hamster wheel in my head started spinning. That is never a good thing.
I had noticed previously that the frame of the Casita had a bubble or two of rust here or there which is something completely unacceptable. What this would translate to is that in 40 or 50 years there would be a complete disintegration of the frame which carries our beloved fiberglass egg. Never mind we'd be dead and gone by that time, or too old to care. The thought of rust bubbles eating away was too much to bear.
So I grabbed my drill, one of those abrasive wheel thingys and a piece of cardboard. That, along with Permatex Naval Jelly and a can of Rustoleum brush-on paint and I was good to go. I kissed my wife goodbye, told her it would take an hour tops and started the long journey to the other end of our driveway (maybe 75 feet) to start the process.
When I crawled under the trailer, I realized how foolish I had been to let those hamsters loose in my head. There were bubbles all over the frame instead of here and there. However, realizing how priceless our decrepit trailer was to the family, I took a deep breath and started "grinding" all the evilness away.
This process took slightly less time then it took the Egyptians to create all 3 pyramids, during which the grinder made an intimate acquaintance with my chin and throat while spinning slightly faster that the speed of light. Take my word that skin loses to the brushy bristles hands down. After taking time off to have a half dozen blood transfusions, I finally had all the offending rust removed from the frame. Even though the grinder/brush/bristle thingy took the paint completely off leaving gleaming steel, I still applied the naval jelly, in-between gasps of pain due to the fact that I had been laying under the trailer for literally hours.
After letting that dry in the wind and sun I commenced applying the paint. It was somewhere at this point I starting cursing all the fiberglass elitist's and their argument that fiberglass trailers were superior to stickies due the fact that a lot less maintenance was required. In less polite company, they have a word for that, but since we are a bit erudite, I'll leave it unspoken. All in all I spend over 5 joyless hours (my wife kept sweetly asking "I thought you said it would only take 1 hour, why so long?"). At this point I could barely muster enough strength to grunt, so I let that be my answer.
In a way, it would have been fun to have photos of the process, but maybe it's just as well I didn't take any or have any taken. It would have opened up painful memories that are better left to slowly fade into a slow oblivion.
So I have come to an obvious conclusion; if you want to keep something in good shape, it takes work regardless. Now where is that bag of potato chips?
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