Finally, some updates! — Marla Sparks

Welp, it's been quite a while since my last post and since any significant trailer progress has been made. I spent the summer doing an internship, working at school and doing lots of freelance design work, so finding time to work on the trailer was hard. Thus, things move very slowly. But now I have a lot of updates and progress to show you! Finally!

The subfloor proved to be much more challenging than I thought. I redid the entire subfloor at least three times for various, stupid reasons. Something I am seriously regretting in hindsight is not taking measurements of everything on the trailer before we demoed it. We spent an embarrassing amount of time staring at pictures of the trailer, trying to figure out how many inches away from the wheel well that piece of wood was because I didn't think to take measurements.

Not having a table saw or the proper workspace also makes everything much more difficult. We considered just biting the bullet and buying a table saw ($$$$) but instead ended up purchasing this Kreg rip saw jig instead. I was skeptical at first, but this thing works just as well and actually feels a lot safer than using a table saw because there's no possibility for kickback. And it was less than $30!

I spent a lot of time cutting (and recutting) pieces for the framing that sits underneath the plywood. This was another one of those situations where my life would have been 10000000 times easier if I had just measured things before tearing them apart. LESSON LEARNED.

After finishing the framing of the subfloor the first time, we laid out pieces of plywood on top and stood on it to make sure the floor actually had enough support. I'm glad we did that, because there definitely was not enough support, especially if you stood in one particular spot, the ply wood bend under our weight. So I took the framing out of the chassis and added additional support beams.

Cutting pieces of the subfloor framing in my makeshift backyard woodshop

Framing under the subfloor, view from back of trailer.

Framing of the subfloor, view from front of trailer.

After the framing was completed, we cut and attached the ply to the framing. This also took us much more time, wood and trips to home depot than anticipated for a myriad of different reasons, none of which are worth noting. It was mostly just a lot of trial and error and stupid cutting mistakes. The whole subfloor process was super frustrating and I am SO glad we're done with it.

Attaching the plywood to the framing and wheel wells.

Completed subfloor, view from street side.

Now that the subfloor was completed, all we had to do was attaching the framing of the trailer that we had built back in March. Before we tore down the trailer, we made a replica of the frame and stored it in our garage. However, a few days ago we went to pull out all of the frame pieces and multiple large pieces were missing. And not just like a little piece of wood here and there - I mean, pieces that look like a window frame or an entire wall of the trailer. They had just vanished. We had never taken them out or moved them since we built them, and we were certain that we had built them. This was the weirdest, most frustrating part of the whole process because the whole time we were doing the subfloor, we kept saying, "well the next step is going to be so easy because we already built the frame!" and then realizing we had to rebuild a large portion of the frame.

So, after taking a much needed break for a few days, we got back to work on the frame. It actually didn't take nearly as long as we had anticipated, and we got most of the front of the trailer up in one day! This has definitely been the most satisfying part of the whole process so far because it's finally starting to resemble a trailer again!! Finally!