Little Lampy Camper Before and After

If you're here looking for posts about working on an old house, I hate to disappoint you but once again we're talking about old campers. If you want to look at old houses, just scroll down a little bit and you've got about 7 years worth of stuff to fill your time with BUT if you want to see some photos of a really cute camper, you're in luck! 

After five months (almost to the day) of non-stop, all consuming work on our most recent camper purchase we finally finished it and rolled it out to its first event as a photo booth here in Wichita on December 16, 2017. 

If you'll recall, this was the BEFORE: 

(yeesh)

and here's the AFTER: 

It was a real process this time, folks. If you've been around these parts for the past 5 years you might remember us fixing up our first camper, "Lampy" to put a studio and darkroom inside. We eventually converted it to digital but then we had all of this extra space that we didn't need so we decided to scale down when we found this new camper for a steal at $600.

In spite of being about 6 feet shorter, this new camper was AT LEAST as challenging mostly due to the fact that there was nary a straight line on it. The first camper was much more boxy so framing wasn't as difficult. This one's "canned ham" shape meant replacing rotten wood that was bent and built in a factory 70 years ago was...difficult to say the least ; ) I would estimate that about 70% of those 5 months was spent re-framing the camper. 

All told, we ended up spending about $3,600 on renovating the camper inside and out. 

We scraped all of the old paint off using aircraft stripper (nasty stuff)...

My parents removed pretty much every piece of the skin of the camper to get to the old rotten framing and replace it. 

We started with this: 

Then came this: 

Then we lost the floor somehow: 

But eventually got things back in order and framed up: 

 And now...the back (or bedroom area) finished:

And the "dining" area before:

And after:

So, there it is - the Little "Lampy" Camper. We even had a friend of ours that is a sign painter do hand lettering on the back. It's darn cute: 

If you're in the mood, there's even more photos on the Lamphouse website here.

We learned a lot from our first attempt at this five years ago that helped us make this one even better and *hopefully* longer lasting. We're really excited to get it out in the spring and fall to some weddings around Kansas and let people enjoy it like they did the original camper. 

Who knows if we'll get back around to house projects now that this is complete. Lord knows we need to get back to painting the house like, YESTERDAY so maybe that will get some more attention when it warms up outside or who knows, maybe we'll just throw a couple of sleeping bags in the camper and take a much needed vacation...



Until next time, Keep Smiling!