The camper make-over

Well here goes nothing. The camper desperately needed a makeover. As it is we squeeze a family of five plus three dogs into a small pop up camper. We desperately needed some organization and freshening up of the eight year old camper. So I did some research, bit the bullet, and hopefully am getting the camper redone for minimal cost. Right now with as much of a weekend as I could spare (which isn't a lot really as kids sports eat up most of my free time), I'm guessing 8-9 solid hours of work. Here's the before....(for a more in use before look at the flyball camping post below)

I hate how dark the camper can be. Plus there is some wear and scratches and such on the cabinets and veneer and the floor was pretty trashed. So on we go.

Step one was to empty the whole thing out. So now my garage looks like this...(only the stuff on the tarp and the seat cushions are from the camper)

What a mess right?? Then the next question is "How in the world did all of that fit in that little camper?" If I can do nothing else well, I can pack!

Next step was priming. I painted all of the wood surfaces with Zinsser primer (they make one for those glossy wood look veneers and it was $18).

Then I found two gallons of semi-gloss white paint in the basement. Free works right?? So add a coat of that.

Next went in the new flooring which was the expensive part at $60 before we return the left over tiles. (Ok so I pulled the flooring before I put the final coat of paint on. Didn't want to damage the nice paint job tearing out the old stuff.) Did you know that the original flooring in campers is cheap vinyl that is all one sheet in the entire box? UNDER everything? So a box cutter and I went to work and pulled most of it out easily in just a few pieces. So wood look, self stick tiles it was.

Things are slowly coming together. I had "help" putting all of the cabinet doors back on and returning everything to it's proper place. Next to make the curtains!

Marvin & Silk hanging out.  I think secretly wondering

 when we were leaving for the flyball tournament.

Velvet is such a princess!

New fabric for the curtains. We found the green for $2/yd so 12.5 yds of that for $25 more plus we have a lot left over. The bed curtains were curtains I bought at Target, for $44. We reused the mesh and the clips. Then hanging racks and baskets for organization $37. And viola! Nice fresh camper for less than $200.

Here's the final for now.  We need to get a better adhesive under the floors and I'm still debating recovering the cushions, but they don't look so bad now that the rest of the camper is lightened up.  As you can see we took the camper for a road test last weekend.  The new organization and fix ups made the trip much nicer than in the past!

 I love how much lighter it is.  And as you can see, organization is huge when fitting our big family in this small space.

We got the hanging baskets which were so wonderful at keeping the needed little items up out of the way and protecting our fruits and veggies.

The blue totes (there are four total for the camper) were great, kept things together and neat and were inexpensive.  We have two for non-perishable food items and they store under the table when we collapse the camper.  One of those totes stays in the house when we are not camping with our spice kit, coffee, coffee filters/sweetener packets, extra kool-aid mix for kids, anything that can hold up until the next trip.  The other tote stays in the camper until we need it for packing. 

 Then there is the tote for dishes.  This worked great and I got the idea from a pinner on Pinterest.  She also has a great list for packing on her site!  We immediately knew where to find dishes, and then even though we wash them while camping, being able to grab the whole tote and run anything we used through the dishwasher was great!  Once dishes are clean and dry the whole tote slides under the table until next trip.

The last tote has the dog stuff in it..water buckets, sheets, toys, just the basics.  It's separate so that if we camp without dogs we don't have to take it, and it also is nice to be able to set it outside near the pens when we do have the dogs with us.

Enjoy!!  We plan to!

Just a glimpse....

The camper project is moving well, just need to recover the cushions, but that has to wait until we get back from our camping trip this weekend. But maybe I'll post a sneak peek Friday.

Until then, I thought I'd share one of my tricks to managing my life. Well, honestly my google calendar is my life blood. Now that the kids each have a smart phone and an email address, everyone has their own google calendar. They are all shared with me to our family email and I can control them all, make changes, etc as needed. In addition I keep it color coded. That's important! At a glance I can see who needs to be somewhere and when. Now, as I am paranoid with losing digital stuff, I also keep a paper calendar. You never know when something may happen to our digital world and we may be offline for a day or two. So, check this out.

As you can see, this month is pretty much over. Every person has their line as well as their color. Age order from top to bottom. Family stuff is purple so I know it involves everyone.  Thankfully TKD for the boys is the same class.  And yes, I white out the rained out activities, colored pencil doesn't erase well and I like to be able to actually look back and see what my life was like.  So yeah....crazy life. Did anyone doubt me?

I  just noticed that I have no times on there.  Fun fun.....that's because things like TKD are always at the same time (5:30pm on Monday, 4:45pm on Thursday), Gymnastics is always 4:30pm Tues, Thurs and 8:00am on Saturday.  Cello lessons are always 3:15.  Strategy Games and Academic Trivia Team are after school activities so are pickup at 3:30.   Produce basket is always 4:45pm.  So some of my life is permanently rooted in my brain...until gymnastics summer schedule kicks in and we move to a new TKD class...

Long time no see......

It's been forever it seems since we were on here. I'll try to get some posts out and be a bit more regular. Life is crazy, organized yet not, super busy with three dogs, three kids, and three jobs between the two adults in the family.

I'll toss out a quick update here. We retired from flyball in the Spring of 2012. Cassie was showing signs of struggling at 12 years old, Marvin's body had started to break down, and Silk, well Silk only ever played because we asked him to. Don't get me wrong, he loved the sport but at the same time, he's more than happy to be a home body. In addition, we acquired a new dog, Velvet,

who was at the time 13 months old and CRAZY. She was in no way going to be trainable for flyball easily, and with three kids now all in different sports and school activities, as well as gas prices climbing steadily, we decided it was time for retirement. So, as life goes on.....it seems that Cassie's signs of "age" were actually signs of a brain tumor and we lost her suddenly in October of 2012. Marvin and Silk are still going strong at 12 & 10 years old, and Velvet is now three and still crazy.

The kids, well Sam is now 11, in sixth grade and doing well. He plays cello, is currently a purple (soon to be blue) belt in TKD. Daniel and Kyleigh are eight, almost 9 (where does the time go?). Daniel plays baseball and really enjoys it, he also is a purple (almost blue) belt in TKD. Kyleigh is my crazy busy one, she's a gymnast, going into level 4 this summer so lots of practice there, and she plays softball. Plus add school activities, etc and work....yeah my life is crazy busy. But somehow I keep up.

As I'm always onto one project or another....we just finished a bathroom remodel last month. Kyleigh was a huge helper and loved learning how to do all of that stuff.

And my current project is a complete camper remodel. The camper is now eight years old and needed to be cleaned up, etc. As the finances are not there for a new camper, I did some research and found ideas to spruce our old one up. So...stay connected and I'll show you what I did when it is finished.