Restoration Project

Good Sunday afternoon Friends,

Summer is here, and no rain is predicted in the near future. We are in drought conditions so I am hand watering to keep things from crisping up. In the shade isn’t too bad but once the sun comes up over the trees, it starts becoming really miserable, especially when the humidity is high.

We are working on a restoration project. It has been on our mind for a few years now and it feels good to be making forward progress

We are calling it our Gypsy Wagon. Size is about 6’x9’. It was a Datsun Chinook Pop-up Camper, from the late 70’s. We bought this from a friend of ours who was dying of brain cancer. It was a rust bucket, but still had some life. Then three hurricanes brought down heavy, hard sections of the melaleuca tree in our back yard, right onto the little Datsun.

We popped the top after hurricane Wilma as the camper had a propane stove so I set up camp as we were without electricity for 13 days, and this was our little cookshack.

This past winter we decided to save the camper and sell the Datsun body to a junk car dealer

We wenched the truck out from under the camper shell. The guy hauled it away, we moved the shell back, made a floor on a base that is anchored into the ground, and have started working on it.

I love the project. We are using curbside shopped materials that we’ve had in our stash, trying to buy as little as possible, although, we’ve had to buy some pressure treated wood for base and flooring.

I’ve already got the garden area going to the east of it, which is where the clothesline and the picket fence garden are too

I will just give a some teaser pictures as to how it looked before. The first picture shows how it looked with a pile of cut up pine branches, from our tree that smashed into our back shed and into the neighbor’s yard. We were cutting it up in our neighbor’s yard and bringing it into ours. From here it went out front as the trucks were able to come by and pick up more debris. It took weeks and months to clean it up all over the county.

I put a piece of marble over the little stainless steel sink for counter space to set hot pans.





The pop top is gone as it was wrecked, and DH is making a solid top with a tin roof with extra windows above the lower windows too.

I’ll show pics when we are all done with the project. I just wanted to share this much with you all.

Here’s a picture of a camper that is similar that I found online.



I am writing this post using Windows Live Writer and will see how it does posting it to my blog.

Zone 10 ~ s.e. FL