Laurie Mustard / Winnipeg Free Press
The original interior is neat as a pin and in near perfect condition.
I bought a house — and it has wheels!
Some call it a camper trailer, but with the way the world is going these days, some day it might be my home. For a few months of the year anyway. This baby does not have the insulation to keep you cosy at minus 40, even with the furnace on.
However, if a friend had a farm, or if a few folks got together and bought a bit of an acreage, it may be that this could be backed into an insulated shipping container for the winter, the container heated with a regular furnace, so our little trailer home on the prairie would be warm as toast.
Then you could live in your tiny home trailer all year round. Summer outside, and mobile to travel with, winter all tucked in out of the weather.
Yeah but who wants to live in a shipping container? So dark and closed in...
True, but that’s why before you have it spray foamed, maybe both inside and out, you install three big triple pane windows on each side of the container so you have beautiful sun all day long, and star gazing at night. You might even put in a good sized skylight you could sit back in the patio area and enjoy those northern lights.
But wouldn’t that be kind of a lonely existence?
Not if you have a few friends with their own shipping containers in a circle, and maybe construct a communal hallway like the hub of a wheel so you can go visit without going outside, and in the middle of the open air hub, leave a space big enough so on any winter night, protected from the wind, you could all get together for a big bonfire.
My trailer is a 30 foot Argosy by Airstream, essentially a painted Airstream — manufactured from 1974 to 1979, with another version re-introduced in about 1986.
Many people, in climates that allow, live in these year round. I have a buddy who lived many years in his classy Airstream in the Vancouver area.
Compared to buying a home and paying taxes, upkeep etc., his Airstream dream cost him practically nothing. Such a relaxing lifestyle. SO affordable, even in Vancouver.
I’m entertaining ideas like Airstreams and tiny houses and such, because when the time comes to sell my home with its two acres with deer, rabbits and raccoons wandering through, I don’t want to move to a condo. I definitely do not want a suite in an apartment somewhere — I need space, and air, and at least somehow, the feel of rural life.
Do not want to be warehoused. However, these are all thoughts for down the road a piece — I hope.
In the meantime I’ve got some work to do on my vintage Argosy, even, perhaps, to get it ready for a little camping. I’m not a big fan of camping. I love the nature part, just not being sardined in with a whack of campfire karaoke crazies howling into the night.
My baby is in good original condition, and I’m even OK with the 1979 decor, sort of. I do want to keep it original.
But the first must do is to get the fridge rebuilt or replaced. It’s leaking ammonia inside, which I found out by opening the fridge door and nearly going to the moon with the fumes. Wham, it blasted the last two hairs off my head!
Comments and feedback always welcome!
lmustard1948@gmail.com
