Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Calliope, Part II: The Beginning

Faced with the challenge of our new little fixer-upper project, I jumped right into doing one of my favorite things – looking up stuff on the interwebs. Stuff like: Can the rips be repaired? If so, how? Can we simply replace the canvas parts? How much would that cost? Ect., ect., etc.
The results of my initial research suggested that replacing or repairing the tent-parts of a pop-up camper from the 70’s was going to be prohibitively expensive, or a huge pain in the ass, most likely both.
To distract myself from this depressing prospect, I began to think about the other major repairs that were necessary – namely the interior cabinetry. Dore had already declared that he could build new cabinets, no problem.
So now I got to think about fun stuff like: Since we’re totally redoing the interior, what’s it going to look like inside? Immediately, I had a vision of a sumptuous, richly-colored, ornately-decorated bohemian lair.
This was a very fun thought.
I did some more poking around on the internet and found several sites dedicated to gypsy wagons (a.k.a. vardos, a.k.a. caravans) – those (originally horse-drawn), beautifully carved, colorfully painted mobile homes of the wandering bohemians of the 1800’s.
LOVE LOVE LOVE!!!
Possibilities swirling around. Really cool ones!!
Now I was getting excited about this fixer-upper project!
I emailed Dore some links to some photos of the beautiful interiors of these gypsy wagons, suggesting that we might be able to do something along those lines with the interior of our poor little broken camper.
Later that day, Dore emailed me back: “Why don’t we just demolish the old pop-up, except for the trailer base, and build a whole gypsy wagon from scratch?”.
“You can DO that???” I asked.
Please note that we’d been married a mere 2 years or so at this time – I was aware of some of his mad skillz (and suitably impressed), but had yet to witness the full range of his powers.
“No problem!” he replied.
Just one reason why my husband is AWESOME.
(Continued in Part III...)

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