the setback

Time for some real talk, you guys.

OK. So we spent a lot of weekends welding on our additional pieces to the old trailer frame to make it wider and stronger. And we did! Look at all our welding! We are welders now!

We did it. The trailer was done. Wait, WAS? Is that a past tense I see?! Yes, dear reader, it is a past tense because the trailer was done for about 20 minutes. Let me tell you a story all about how our lives were flipped, turned upside down. I’d like to take a minute so sit right there and I’ll tell you how our trailer got un-trailered.

So stay with me here, the trailer is welded together, it looks like this, we can visualize the walls and furniture and dirty dishes in the sink.

But it’s really late at night, you guys. We are so tired, we have put in three full days welding the trailer and we want to go home. But if we want to build by next weekend, we need to have the trailer painted. So, we have to haul it.

We haul it. We haul it about ten minutes down the road before it comes off the hitch and rolls silently, beautifully, unstoppably into the ditch. Not just into the ditch, into a farmer’s fence. And then into a tree.

Now, the good news: The stuff we welded onto the outside stayed squared and lovely, and our suspension is OK.

The bad news: The old trailer parts, the inside box, is all warped and bent. The impact caused it to go out of square, and now it looks (mind the technical term here) all diagonally on the inside.

If you would all turn to page 2 and look at the diagram, I will try to explain more. The blue middle square on this picture is the old trailer, and the red parts are the parts that were added on by us. This is a bit of an old drawing, since then we have an addition of a few pieces cantilevered onto the back to hold up a water tank, but I digress. So, the red parts are OK, the middle blue parts are all messed up now.

We have a couple options for fixing it.

1. We pay to have it bent back into shape: it costs about $2000 on average to bend a trailer back into shape, and it would never be QUITE the same again, but it would cost us no time or effort really.
2. We cut out the parts of our trailer that are OK, namely the outside pieces, and rebuild the inside with new, stronger metal: We have the technology. This will cost us about $800 of scrap metal and another month or two of our weekends, but we come out with a better frame and foundation for our house.
3. We cry over spilt milk, set the trailer on fire and buy ourselves a mansion to live like kings in.

Weighing our options, we went with good ol’ #2. Starting this weekend, we pull up our socks, put on our masks and some Eye of the Tiger and get this DONE (again).

It’s gonna be OK. Here’s an updated picture of the house from Trevor to make us feel better.

Ahhhh. So much better.