Day 13, A great day

Today started off nice and lazy with the usual Saturday morning tasks, laundry, winding clocks and cleaning up around the house. I love waking up at my own speed, with nothing pushing me to get up, or to hurry me out the door. I had my bowl of cereal on the back deck with my two cats Scrappy and Harris, don’t ask me about the name Scrappy, I inherited him.  As I finished my bowl, the chickens were just starting to get up (8am) clucking and squawking as they came out of the coop. This would meen they would want to be fed and I should check to make sure they had what they needed.

Fresh mowed lawn

Having just mowed the lawn the night before the yard looked pretty amazing, I love it when a lawn is perfectly green and for the first time this summer, mine was. I did my usual stroll through the yard picking weeds and did a rather major weeding in the garden around the corn, lettuce and tomatoes. It was also time to fertilize the garden again, especially the pumpkins, which have finally decided to takeoff with a major growth spurt.

As I finished with the pumpkins the cornish hen was standing at the doorway to the coop making a huge ruckous and I turned and walked in. I went to look for an egg, but nothing. I decided to sit in the folding canvas chairs by the coop and see what happens. There was a lot of singing and squawking going on in the coop and then it got quiet for a few minutes. After about a total of 20 minutes, out came the cornish hen singing up a storm. I jumped up to look and sure enough there was an egg. This brought the egg count up to 8. I’m getting close to the magic number of one dozen and then I can make an omelet. I texted the usual interested few about the egg and thought this is turning out to be an excellent morning.

Doug hard at work, a little more to the left....

I was now ready to start on the trailer and I planned on just scraping on the trim and around the windows to remove silicone, when Doug showed up and he brought Sonics, Yum! The trailer could wait; there was a Sonics burger and tots calling my name.

So with full stomachs, Doug and I went to work on the trailer. We decided to start stripping paint and see how that would go. We started at the back of the trailer and the paint bubbled and came off.  It took about three applications, or about one per layer of paint. As we stripped the paint back we learned that the trailers original paint scheme was green then red finally blue. In no time at all we stripped the paint off the back and we quickly moved around to the side. I don’t know if you have ever used paint stripper before, whatever you don’t get any on you, man that stuff burns.

Doug and I both got a brush and started painting on the gelatinous goo that bubbled paint almost as fast as we could put it on. After removing a few feet of paint you could see the old green paint under the red and blue. With additional scraping the original green paint start to reveal a pattern and to my surprise it was the stair stepped, or bird wing pattern as I like to call it. It wasn’t as thick as I had envisioned, but the pattern was definitely there.  The metal under the original green paint was much brighter and more reflective, so the pattern was easy to see. I stopped to take a picture of it to see if I could preserve the pattern just in case I want to reproduce it.

Removing the paint from the side went very fast and we were excited about our progress.  When we finished removing paint from the side, we gave the trailer a quick scrubbing with SOS soap pads and it really started shine. The soap pads removed the last remnant of paint and made the trailer really start to look better.   Doug then moved around to the front and went to work on removing the propane tanks, while I kept scrubbing. We were however, out of stripper and I was down to the last SOS pad.

Doug still working hard, not the three shiney lines.

At this point it was starting to get close to 5 pm and Doug was going to a baseball game and I needed to run to the Expo Center to break down our booth from the FMCA event and take the brochures back to the office.  I could then stop at Lowes and buy more stripper, gloves and scouring pads.

It took me a little more than an hour and a half to break down the booth, load the truck, say good bye to the FMCA crew and unload my truck at the office.  I then swung by Lowes for the gloves and stripper, but they didn’t have the scouring pads.  So with a quick stop at Fred’s I was on my way home.  I got home and changed quickly back into my grimy clothes and I was ready for more work on the trailer. 

Before I got started scrubbing with a new box of SOS, I decided I should check on the chickens, since they had been running around the yard most of the day.  I quickly accounted for all of them, and I gave one more check of the coop for eggs.  Surprise, it was another double header, two in one day and the egg count was now at 9.

Paint removed, removed and scrubbed should buff to a nice shine.

I gave the side of the trailer another good going over and had most of the side done, when I decided to take the drip rail from above the windows off.  This would let me clean around the window better and clean the drip rails much easier.  The drip rails were covered in calking and were going to take a major effort to remove.  With the screws out, I gently losened them and removed them from the trailer.  I then covered the drip rails in paint remover and set them aside.  Using my putty knife, Goof Off and steel wool, I was able to remove the residue from the side of the trailer.  I then gave it a scrubbing with the SOS and it shined like new. 

It was now getting dark and approaching 9 o'clock, so it was time to clean up, but I still had to scrape the caulking off the drip rails.  Having soaked in paint remover for almost 40 minutes the caulking came off relatively easy and after about 30 minutes they looked pretty good and I was done.

What a fun day!