Our First Camper Lesson-And Some Tiki Inspiration

So we bought our first camper and I couldn’t be more excited. We picked it up last weekend. See how excited everyone was to go pick it up in cold weather?  I guess I really couldn’t blame them, it was pretty durn cold out here in CO.

We understood when we bought this camper that it would be a fixer upper-and honestly we’re super excited about it!  Its a 1995 Fleetwood Terry 29ft fifth wheel-its a big’un.  But we’re totally OK with that and I’ll blog the whole renovation project 🙂 We also knew there was a chance as first time camper owners we’d end up learning a few hard lessons.

I can now say that it only took us 6 hours to learn that first hard lesson EHR.MA.GERD.  But before I tell that sad story here are some fun pics of the camper before we made a (nearly) fatal error.

I got this darling keychain on Etsy.

I’ll get some good interior pics next week so you know what we’re workin’ with. Suffice to say everything is a shade of light pink or baby blue or pale gray and its just godawful.

We bought this camper knowing it needed new landing gear, the small supports in the front that hold up the whole durn thing.  Our plan was to park the camper in my lot at work on Sunday so we could take it down to the RV place Monday morning for the repairs. We parked the camper, we put the supports in and let the hitch go-and the whole dang camper slid back about four feet! The hitch got stuck in the bed of our truck and squished down the bed and we could not move the truck OR the camper.  And because the landing gear we were using was pretty much just a rigged up back-up version, it was totally bent and useless-essentially nothing was holding up the front of the camper but the back end of our truck 😦 (I didn’t take a photo of this part of the fiasco because it was so so sad haha AND my hubs wasn’t really in a photography kinda mood)

We learned a hard lesson and were both so upset with ourselves for allowing the camper to roll.  We called Jason’s mom to take us to Walmart for some jacks to try to prop up the front of the camper. I swear I hate Walmart but they really did save us in this situation! We got 4 different jacks and headed back to the camper.  We ended up taking another trip to Home Depot to get some GIGANTIC pieces of wood cut to put UNDER the jacks because they didn’t lift up tall enough. It was a night of adventures.

Finally after about four hours of finagling we got the camper safely back onto the truck and re-parked.

Monday morning bright and early we dropped it to our local RV repair center for new landing gear and new brakes (both things we already knew we needed).  We picked it up this week and got it (successfully) reparked in storage. Once it warms up a bit we’ll get started on the actual renovation.

The camper needs a good cleaning FO SHO but I’ll get that accomplished next week once it warms up a bit. When we parked it yesterday it was 1 degree outside, only 1. Needless to say we haven’t bothered to work on anything yet-literally the only thing we’ve accomplished is to park the thing and measure for flooring.

I told you all in another post that we planned to do our camper in an upscale tiki style. I made an inspiration board this afternoon-yay!  I’d love feedback!