What now?

[Zoe Unruh]

Hi guys,

We just purchased our first airstream about a week and a half ago. It's a 1990's 34' Excella1000. On the walkthrough it appeared to be in good shape, except for the bathroom. After bringing it home and lifting the flooring, I started to notice more rot and eventually ended up just gutting the whole interior.

The result is, I now have an empty interior (minus the water tank that refuses to leave). The subfloor is rotten almost all the way around the edge of the airstream. I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed and unsure if I should drop the belly pan at this point, or start removing the wall panels... I would really appreciate some advice or resources from someone with more experience. I was planning to leave the frame on, but now I'm feeling like it might be better to take the frame off.

I want to make sure it's well insulated underneath for our Canadian climate, and has a solid subfloor and frame. We have to live in it while we work on slowly building our forever home.

Thanks for any help! ♥️ Zoe

[Belegedhel]

Welcome to the Forums.

Yours is a very familiar story--we innocently buy the vintage trailer thinking a few months of sprucing up will put us out on the road to freedom, etc., etc... Then we poke at it a bit and discover the rotting subfloor and rear end separation, and next, we find ourselves in a massive project.

The subfloor is sandwiched in between the frame and the shell. as a result, you will have to remove at least the lower interior skins to expose the fasteners that go through the C-channel into the frame outriggers. Also, you will eventually need to remove the belly skin, in order to access the other side of those fasteners.

There are plenty of folks who replace their subfloor with the shell on the frame, but I think this is the hardest way to do it. I would recommend building the ubiquitous gantries and lifting the shell off the frame so that the frame can be repaired, the new subfloor installed, and the insulation and belly pan reinstalled.

It sounds daunting, but there are many threads here showing how someone else did it. Do a search for "gantry," "full monty" and "shell-off" and you should see plenty of threads.

good luck!

[Sylvain]

If the floor is rotted and you have already gutted the trailer of any furniture, then it is not much more work to remove the walls and the belly pan to see the extend of the work that needs to be done. Rot on the floor might mean corrosion on the frame.



In any case, don't get discouraged or overwhelmed! Almost anything can be renewed, repaired or replaced with a bit of will and/or money. I bought my trailer without looking at everything, partly because I did not know and partly because that was a good deal. I ended having more work than I thought but it is getting there one step at a time. I do everything alone and did not have major troubles. The floor can be replaced without removing the shell. I did it a couple of months ago, it is not complicated. However, as mentioned in the previous post, if you want to replace the floor and not just do some patch work, then you need to remove the walls and the belly pan.



I record the entire process on my trailer. Leaving you the link so that you can get an idea. However, I want to be clear that it is my first Airstream and the biggest project I started so there are a lot of things I don't know, I just learn as I go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGqv...eV4kmG8NheX7tJ

[Zoe Unruh]

Thanks for the words of encouragement guys 🙂 took the plunge and started taking down the wall panels today. Just going to take it one step at a time.

[Sylvain]

Good Luck and have fun!
Most important part of it is to have fun, even if some things are a pain in the butt and nasty
One advice would be not to set hard deadlines to have things done, just estimated goal dates.



Taking the walls down will also allow you to check and most likely change the insulation. Wear a full-face mask, I did not have one at the time but I wish I had as you might get surprises in there. Plus fiber glass isn't really good to breath