Prelude to the first year.
Finding Astrid, our 20 foot long home on wheels
We are Emma and Brendan, a traveling creative couple who, in July of 2018, rescued a 1977 Argosy Minuet six meter travel trailer. We say rescued because by the time she came into our life half of her original interior had been removed and what remained was in bad shape. That being said, we were pretty much smitten as soon as Emma found the trailer on Craigslist.
After a year of renting an apartment in Denver we were more and more intrigued by the thought of living in a way that allowed us to travel far more than we felt we could while renting an apartment. (Full disclosure, our end goal is to move onto a sailboat and go where the wind blows us. But at 24 years old, and being located in the middle on the North American continent, we found that motor vehicles and trailers were more realistic and would instead go wherever the road took us.) We had heard of Airstreams, and followed a number of people living full time in them on social media. We almost bought a converted 1970s Ford E250 van (big, silvery blue, and lovingly called Babe by the seller). We looked at a few other small vintage trailers but nothing was very tempting.
One day, at the end of June, Emma saw a small, vintage, white trailer for sale near by. Not a bad price, it didn’t look terrible in the pictures, our lease was ending in two months, and we were pretty sure we could tow it with our car. So like all responsible young adults we messaged the seller, made an appointment that week to check out the trailer, and immediately started dreaming of everything we would do with a trailer like that.
Remember how we say that we rescued Astrid? Like I said, she came with a long list of problems that needed attention but we saw potential and the opportunity to make something special. So we drove an hour north to see this vintage trailer, drove an hour back home, crunched numbers, watched a couple videos and read a couple articles about how to tow a trailer, drove back a week later and towed her home.
Now, the work would begin. We decided pretty quickly that we would not be saving any of the remaining interior, everything had to go. Anything that was original was filthy and slightly busted, mice had definitely taken up residence at one point and could potentially have stowed away for our trip home, and a previous owner had done some very rough welding to make very uncomfortable beds where a wardrobe and dining area would have been.
We made a list of everything we needed to do to fix up this old trailer. (This list only gets longer, we have never finished it, this is just when we started it) By our rough estimates we though that two months in Denver would be enough for us to clean her up, build out at least a rough interior and get the systems up and running just in time for the end of our lease. I will tell you now that we were wrong. Very wrong. Well maybe not terribly, we jokingly say that we only mixed up the units. We said two months, in reality it took two years. In two years that list only got longer and more complex. In two years we decided it was time to move in.
March 2020 - the COVID-19 lockdown, and conveniently the end of another lease, gave us the right motivation to get ourselves in gear and get serious about moving into Astrid. By this time we had removed all the old interior, except the bathroom, cleaned every surface, painted the interior skins, built a bed platform, repurposed an old oak tabletop as our kitchen counter, built all the cabinets and wardrobe we wanted and acquired a good number of parts and materials needed to complete the project. In short, the renovation was hilariously off schedule but we were not going to give up.
This time, by the end of our lease, we managed to pull her together enough to move in. We had a place to sleep (although we wouldn’t last more than a week on the thin foam pads that we had before ordering a new foam mattress) a fridge and place to store food, room to store all of our clothing and things we deemed necessary for a continued quality of life, and very understanding family who have all been overly kind in letting us boondock in the yards while we finished up more of the renovation.
That is how we, Emma, Brendan, and Sterling (our adventure loving cat who has already lived in four homes and logged one cross country trip from Syracuse to Denver by this time) all ended up turning a 40 year old 20 foot long Argosy trailer into a full time home. Our two month renovation turned two year project was just the beginning, our goal was to take that home on the road and see where it takes us.
