Arctic Egg: A Walk in the Swamp (i.e. Rotten Floor)

Did you say that the floor felt squishy?

The Casita had pergo flooring in it. Tracie thought that it felt a bit squishy by the door, so we pulled up a piece by the door. We've never owned a Casita before, let alone renovated one. The fiberglass coating on the floor looked discolored... and felt soft. Peter pushed a scraper into it and lo and behold, compost.

Suddenly our thoughts on renovation of the Casita began to change. We stayed optimistic. The benefit of finding something like this is that you do need to do a more thorough renovation, and in the end will know exactly how everything is put together... and ideally, that you know it's done right. It also ensures that you know what you'll need to do to maintain it when you're done. For example, ensuring that all penetrations from the inside to the outside of the Casita are well and fully sealed.

At this point and time, we knew that we'd be taking out the entire floor of the lower level (our 16' SD has the back end that steps up)... so Peter started on removing everything from the inside.

But before we get to that...

The Casita is in our garage. Peter calculated that it was about 3" too tall to fit into the garage. We backed it close to the garage so he could have a look, and then he began to deflate the tires and look how things were. We realized that deflating the tires would work, if we removed the antenna (which came unglued surprisingly easy), the vents at the front, and the main air vent. We know that people speak about drilling out rivets, but Peter discovered that a robust scraper with a beveled edge could be bit with a sharp tap to shear the aluminum rivets between the shell and the flange of the vent.