repairs and damage

We have been working on the camper again this week. I am a bit frustrated that I cannot find more information on line about how to do repairs on old campers. I can find restoration stuff and repairs on newer campers (some of which has been helpful) but not what I have wanted with the old ones. I guess because so many just aren't around anymore. The only things I have been able to find out about the Ranch El Raes is that they were manufactured mostly in Nephi, Utah from the 1960's- 1980's. The only pictures I can find are a few on complete restorations but they haven't been particularly helpful to me. It has been frustrating. I know virtually nothing about how to maintain/care and fix our camper (affectionately referred to as Motel 4) and I want to know more. We have picked a few brains and that has been helpful but mostly we have been on our own and that is why I decided to make this blog. Maybe I can find out what I need from comments on here and maybe there are others in our same boat. If nothing else, it is a way to share our journey.

I was excited to find out that my cousin has a Rancho El Rae that is only two years newer than ours and he was kind enough to let us come and check it out. We want to get our top bunk functional and so I wanted to look at his. We got some ideas and he mentioned several little helpful things and the most helpful was he introduced us to putty tape! We caulked all the windows and "stopped" some of the leaks or at least slowed them down, for now. I have though to myself that there had to be a better way but I haven't been able to find anything helpful online before now. My cousin told us the windows were not bad at all to pull out and put back so I got a bee in my bonnet and did just that. I started with one of the smaller windows because I knew it would go faster and I was more comfortable with starting small. I made a wild guess that it would take me about two hours to do it and I was right on the mark. It was harder to take out than I thought it would be though. I initially started this project on my own since my hubby was working on our truck at the time. I had to interrupt him to come help me though. The window was stuck fast and it took some deep scraping with a box cutter and some pushing and pulling to get it out. I scraped all the old seal and layers of caulk off the siding and the window, cleaned it up and put the putty tape on the frame and put it all back in. Hubby came and helped me put all the screws back in. It rained good today and there were no leaks from that window, hurray!

unfortunately we are still leaking from the big window. Luckily it seems to be staying in the track of the window and not coming down the side anymore so we have at least slowed things down with the caulk. We are hoping to fix the big window on Saturday.

you can't see it very well but there is water in the track. You can also see some of the old water damage done because this window has been leaking for a couple of years. I am worried about the rot damage. I guess we will see when we pull the window. It could be pretty ugly.

This is the second worst part of water damage to the camper, that we have found. The worst is under the bathroom sink.

This is where is was leaking the worst when we got it. Hubby had to replace two fittings and a hose.

 There are a few other spots that used to leak, and have been fixed by my dad.

The more we mess around the more damage we find but not enough to make us too nervous. I have seen pictures of much, much worse.

One of the things we have really wanted to do was get the upper bunk functioning as a bed again. It has always been broken (since Dad has owned it) but we want to see if we can get it working. The biggest problem is that the support beam by the door would not hold any weight, the screws would just come right out of the wall. I messed around and decided that they were stripped out. I had read somewhere (probably my handyman magazine) that you can break toothpicks off into the holes that are stripped out and then the screw will fasten tightly so that is what I did. Most of the holes took 3 toothpicks to fill in but once we did that the bunk held the weight of me and my daughter which is about 200 lbs.

I sure hope that takes care of it but I am not sure there isn't a bigger problem. I guess we will find out in time. The next concern I have with the bunk is that when my daughter and I were up there the hinges bulged a little bit.This picture is looking up at the bunk from the lower bunk. There is the obvious hinge on the left but there is also one on the right just before the light.

I do not know if that is normal or not. My cousin says he has never noticed his bulging when his two boys are in the top bunk but their hinges are a little different than ours. I did notice they had a board under the mattress so we are going to give that a try and see if it will divide the weight up a bit. We do not have a mattress for the top bunk but we have some foam egg crate stuff that we threw up there with the intention of making it work as a mattress but then we were concerned our daughter would pick and it and eat it. We remembered we have an old futon mattress in the basement and think we will see how that works out.

I guess we won't know for sure if the top bunk really is working until next summer but we will keep working on it in the next few weeks.

We have drained the water out of the tank and ran the pump with the taps open but we still need to blow it out with the compressor. I also realized we may need to do something with the water heater so I checked out youtube yesterday and figured out how to do that.

We checked out State Trailer Supply and decided it was a big toy store, much like Home Depot, and we could spend a lot of money there. We already have a wish list for the next year or two lol. We will have to be careful there for sure.

I would like to figure out how to hook up this old camper to city water. My cousin showed me where I am supposed to but the threading is too small and won't accept a standard hose.

I will have to look into it more and may have to replace the valve that is there. I also want to get a different hook up to where we fill the fresh water tank so we can hook a hose up to it directly and not just shove it in the open pull out. We have several projects to keep us busy in the next few weeks. I am also in debate about tarping it for the winter or just trusting that the rubber roof will be good. Decisions decisions.