Airstream Globetrotter - New Floor & Gaucho Install

Sunday turned out to be anything but a rest day.  It was a day off the bike (legs were a little heavy after 3 days in a row on the singlespeed).

It was a slow start to the day until the weather warmed up enough to get moving and get things done.  The main agenda item for me yesterday was to try to make significant progress on the Airstream considering that the weather was going to turn cold.  The impetus was to get the floor in and start putting things back into the Globetrotter.  The floor went in easily enough although it took some time to cut templates out and cut around closets, rounded sides, etc.  We chose the bamboo vinyl planks.  My theory was they would be easy to install and easy to keep clean.

I also re-installed the frames/screens on the window (after painting the frames the dark brown color).  The rest of the painting/staining/sealing is also completed:

It is all coming together pretty nicely and the big chunks of work are done although I suspect that the last list of to-do's will take a while as there is still a pretty long list.
After the floor went in, I started to re-install the gauchos.  The pre-work (which I did earlier in the summer) on the gauchos included a couple coats of the dark brown on the front, and some serious scrubbing on the metal components to get rid of the anodized copper color and get it down to the stainless color.  I learned a trick on our fireplace grate last year where if you apply oven cleaner and let is sit for a while, you can scrub down the metal to the nickel/stainless look.  It takes about 3 rounds of serious scrubbing with steel wool / scrub pads, etc...but the results are pretty good (you can see the original color on the metal on top of the gaucho and the scrubbed down steel look after).

Notice the pile of stuff that was ripped out of the Globetrotter above...it was certainly a little daunting at first but it was all worth it....The picture above also shows the screens before they were painted.  A lot of things just took time to get through...lots and lots of paints...tons of nooks and crannies in the Airstream which does not exactly provide you with easy angles or spaces so you end up contorting yourself to try to reach into places that need paint (while not getting paint on other things that you are not looking to paint).

After putting in some serious elbow grease it was time to paint the non-metal part of the gauchos:

After re-installing the gauchos in the Globetrotter, things start to take shape a little bit:

All of the trim work now matches with a dark brown color.

The big things left to do are to get fabric and maybe even new foam for the beds/couches...as well as re-build the table so that it matches the counter top.  Things are definitely coming together though and it certainly feels much closer than it did a few months ago.  I need to spend a little time taking more photos to make some before/after comparisons.  It really feel totally different.  The nice thing is that most of the work now is stuff that is 'visual' so the work makes an immediate visual difference - it is good to feel that gratification of all those months of work....slowly but surely...