From start to finish, it took us 10 months total to renovate Silvia into the beauty she is today. We were working weekends only from October-April and then anywhere from 3-6 days a week starting in May. I am just going to blog the basics of what we did but if you have more questions you can always email us at shop@rollingrunway.com! Our biggest resources were airforums.com, airstreamguy.com & just learning as we went. We used Pinterest for the design process.
Part 1: Gut/Clean Interior
We started the process by gutting/cleaning the interior. Since the airstream was mostly gutted, this part wasn't too hard but very satisfying. There was a ton of trash inside including a bag of dog food & random playing cards everywhere. We did have to get Kendall's dad to cut out the pipes that we didn't need & sink/toilet. He also helped with pretty much EVERYTHING and I think he loves Silvia as much as we do. After we finished cleaning up the inside we used a mixture of bleach & water to wash the interior walls. Silvia had been sitting in the woods for 15 years, with 3 of the windows broken, there was dirt & mold all on the inside.
Part 2: Strip Exterior
This was probably the worst, most boring part. In the earlier years of Airstream, once they aluminum was polished to a shine, a clear coat was put on to preserve the sine. Sounds nice, right? Wrong. If you don't maintain it, it "burns" in the sun & turns white and/or dingy. Which basically defeats the purpose of aluminum making it not shiny. We followed airstream guy's recommendation of "stripping" the clear coat with furniture/wood stripper from home depot. Basically you brush on the stripper, wait 15 minutes & then rinse/scrub/scrape it off. We did this in the dead of winter. Not fun. You also have to do it 2 or 3 times on each area for it to be effective. Side note: we did this part second because honestly we had no idea how to start on the inside since our floor was rotted through in the back, wiring had to be redone & we had leaks. After we finished, we originally thought maybe we should have saved this part for last because it's only cosmetic. But looking back, we were kind of glad we did this step first since honestly it's hard & not fun but once we finished the inside (the most rewarding part) we were basically done because we did the outside first.
We also filmed the first few weeks of our renovations & put it on YouTube!