The Hobo Camp Fire Is going well #VI.. Stop In!!!

[Running Bear]

Good morning. It's 59° with 100% humidity with patchy fog. The high will be 75° and it'll be cloudy.


I'm sore and stiff this morning. I can only imagine how the guy who helped me yesterday must be feeling. I say helped. He did most of the work! All I did was hold the aluminum wall panels back while he squatted in behind them pulling out pieces of broken boards and putting in new ones. Sorry, no photos. There wasn't much to see anyway. He didn't want any photos taken of him, not even of his squatted legs which was all that was visible while he was working. I just held the outer wall so it didn't push against him and I passed a board to him once in a while. At the end of the day there was only a small pile of broken studs and a couple of guys with aching arms and legs, a couple of empty sandwich wrappers and a few empty beer cans and a bunch of empty spray foam cans. In all there were six broken studs, the tops of which are still in the wall. The new ones were pushed up into the wall against what's left of the existing top plate and levered into place on the new bottom plate using a hydraulic jack and secured with screws at the bottom. I guarantee that someone like Mike Holmes would look at it and say that it's not done right. And it's not. To do it right would mean taking the whole back of the trailer apart and rebuilding it roof and all. That's not gonna happen. The goal was to increase the structural integrity of the wall. Are the outer panels still bent and buckled? Yes. Is the wall still on the verge of falling down? No. Will the warped window frame be replaced? No. Why didn't the window break? It's polycarbonate and it was filled in with foam from the inside years ago. Probably the only reason the frame didn't collapse. The existing roof of the trailer won't be messed with as the seams don't appear to be split. The over-roof however is a different story. Two of the galvanized corrugated steel sheets are badly damaged, a third one is bent but can be saved. Those other two will have to be replaced and that means two people on ladders. Oh joy. Part of the wood frame has to be repaired also. That's the easy part though.

Well that's enough for now.