The past week or so we’ve gotten a few good work days in on the lil bean. After gutting the interior walls to assess them, we next needed to check out the condition of the floors. We knew there was water damage in the corners of the trailer, but in order to really figure out what needed to be done, we had to rip out all of the linoleum flooring.
linoleum, the enemy.
Scraping up linoleum that has been glued down for 50 years is a horribly tedious process. That glue is no joke. I spent a few hours struggling to get up off before realizing I needed a new plan. I watched a few youtube videos and the general internet consensus was that its much easier to peel off linoleum once it is heated. So I broke out the good old heat gun and started heating up the floor. I ran it on high heat and held it over one section of the floor for about 15 seconds and then LIKE MAGIC that stuff came up. Magical, magical heat guns. What wasn’t so magical was the smell of old, burning floor glue. Wear a ventilator, y’all.
Black Tile glue under the linoleum
So, like two days later we had heated and scraped up all of the linoleum and what we were left with was this thick layer of black tile glue. The trick to getting this up is to spray the entire floor with a mist of water and then lay newsprint on top of it and spray it again with more water. Every few hours, keep spraying the newsprint. Eventually, brown spots will appear on the paper which is a sign that the glue is softening. We let it sit overnight before taking off the newsprint and scraping the glue off. It came off so easily and the plywood floors underneath were BEAUTIFUL. There is only one piece in the back where the water tank was seated that is rotted that we will have to replace. Other than that, the floors are in good condition.
Laying down wet newsprint on top of the tile glue
Original plywood floors after glue was scraped off
As for the exterior of the trailer, we continued to strip the paint off. We would paint on a thick layer of citristripper, let it marinate for two hours (or until it began to bubble up) and scrape it off. After most of the paint is scraped off, we would brush off all the little bits we missed with one of those big, nylon scrubbing brushes. Then we pressure washed the rest of the paint and residue off.
One side of the trailer stripped
Look at that glorious aluminum that was hiding under there! I wish we could keep it bare aluminum, but I think every little dent would show up and there are a few areas that have bondo covering them up, which doesn’t look very nice.
That’s all for this week. Oh! And after a few hours of digging online, I finally found a picture of what the original paint job looked like on our model of trailer. I’m not crazy about it, but it’s cool to see what our lil bean looked like many years ago.
What the original paint job of the Playmore 140 model looked like
Bonus scraping song. I had this stuck in my head the whole time I was scraping. THE WHOLE TIME.