Making things warm

As mentioned in the wall framing post, we decided to insulate the trailer to try and give us some barrier to the elements and allow us to extend the camping season as long as possible.  Using the 1x2 pine boards for the framing gave us a ¾” space to insulate.  After some searching, we found ¾” thick polystyrene rigid foam insulation at Home Depot.  At R-4, it was the highest r-value we found for that thickness in any of the local stores.  It also came in 2’ x 8’ sheets so we only needed to get two sheets for the whole trailer!

Since we were also planning on insulation the roof and hatch, we decided to only insulate the areas of the walls that were going to be inside the cabin.  Cutting the insulation was super easy and the only tricky part was notching around the spars.  Both walls were finished in half a day!

After insulating the walls we were on a role so we decided to try cutting out one of the interior walls.  This was a time consuming process, but relatively easy.  We clipped a 4’x8’ sheet of ¼” birch veneer plywood to the exterior wall and simply traced the outline of the trailer and the door.  Instead of trying to notch out all of the spars, we decided to simply offset the outline of the trailer 1 ½” so that it would run flush to the underside of the spars.  This was done by taking a ruler and simply marking 1 ½” down from the outline we traced and connecting the dots.  Then we used the Jig saw to cut everything out.

The pictures only show the interior walls clamped on, but we ended up using 1” ring shank panel board nails to attach them permanently.  Conveniently they even came in beige so they don’t stand out too much.