Day 25 An entire day off to work on the trailer

I started the day off by sleeping in until 7:30am, I’m not sure what it is, but those few extra minutes really make a difference. The first thing I had to do was close up the house, as I had all the windows open and it was extremely smoky from a forest fire that is burning just west of Sister. If the smoke lingered around all day it was not going to be a very nice day to spend any time outside.  Bummer!

Chicken coop and pen.

Next, the chickens deserved a break, since they had spent the entire day in the pen.  I treated them to a full day of foraging throughout the yard and I let them out around 8:30am and they were all too eager to fly the coop. It’s amazing how many of our common expressions come from chickens, which I had never stopped to think about until I owned some.  Cooped up, penned in, birds of a feather, hen pecked, pecking order, are all chicken expression related to their lives. I still haven’t figured out why we might say some someone is “chicken sh*t”??? No eggs by the way, but it's early and I’m optimistic.

I spent the morning doing some odd chores around the house and tinkering with the trailer. I ran a few errands in town, stopping at the bank to depositing a check from my birthday and stopped at Lowes. I needed more steel wool and I bought M3 sanding pads. I thought I would try them and see how they worked. I bought all three levels of coarseness, but figured I would only need the finishing pad.

Front of trailer starting to shine up, note the bondo patches.

When I got home I experimented with the pads. The coarse was too abrasive, the mid grade still a bit much and the finishing pad was just right (I felt a bit like the three bears). I was a bit nervous to scratch up the metal skin too much, not knowing how it would respond. I worked on the front of the trailer where there were some pretty heavy scuffed areas from when they had primed the trailer for painting and applying the bondo patches. I used the finishing pad and sanded directly over the scuffed area. It removed the scuffed spots, but left the metal looking like it was anodized or like stainless steel. I then tried the SOS pads and that brought the shine back.  I then used the Truck Box Polish and that really made a huge difference. Now I just needed to figure out how to do this with the electric buffers, so I didn’t have to do it all by hand.

Starting to shine up the front and working my way back.

I spent the next few hours playing with the process and ultimately I came up with four steps, hand sand, machine sand with finishing pad, buff with SOS and polish with Truck Box Polish. I would then wash with water and lightly running an SOS soap pad over any area where the polish didn’t want to come off and then dry with a towel. Hmm or is this a six step process?

By mid afternoon the smoke had cleared and it was a pretty nice day. The chickens spent the day out in the yard periodically coming up to me at the trailer checki,ng on my progress. The produced two eggs around 3pm and they were both pink. Eldorado has not laid a white egg in two days.

Starting to shine once more.

I spent the day buffing on the trailer and was pretty pleased with my progress and felt that tomorrow I would really be able to get a lot done. By sunset I was splattered from head to toe in gray SOS soap scum and tarnish and it was time to clean up.

The chickens had gone back to the coop. The small chicks have been sleeping in a cat carrier in corner of the pen; it’s been their escape from the larger chickens since they were tiny. The chicks are now large enough and the chickens except them and I thought that it was time for them to start sleeping in the coop. Amongst a flurry of peeps, I hand placed each chick in the lower empty boxes of the coop. The big chickens, all seven of them, bunch together on the top three boxes and seemed uninterested in all the commotion. Within minutes all the peeps and churps were silent and they were all asleep for the night.

I was ready for bed too and I knew after a good long shower and some scrubbing that's exactly where I would be.