It doesn’t have to be pretty, just…better.

Over the last week we have been focused on the next phase of our winter preparedness. Now the woodshed is completed, our next major task is insulating the camper and creating a build out room on the side of it to house the woodstove. While these may sound like simple tasks, they require a lot of planning as well as physical labour.

We managed to find a farmer in Marketplace who would deliver bales of straw. The plan was to stuff the underside of the camper with a straw barrier to help hold heat in under the floor. Last year we lost a ton of heat because the camper underside was open and therefore quite drafty.

The kind seller drive further than agreed and we offloaded the bales right at the road near the property. From there, it took 13 trips with the wheelbarrow of about 1000ft each way to haul them in to the camper. It took a little over two hours across the bumpy, and sometimes night terrain, with Sandy doing the bulk of the work. It was nice to have the woodshed to temporarily store them in.

In the days that have followed, we have been measuring out pallets and cutting them to size (by hand as we have now power saws) and carefully fitting them on the inner perimeter of the camper, on top of a heavy duty canvas tarp. The tarp is then secured to the pallet, and pressed up tight against the camper wall.

In some areas this has proved challenging, especially where things like the jacks are positioned, in that the brackets are in the way of the campers’ walls, and so we’ve had to work around those, the wheels and axles, stairs and water pipes.

Once each section has been palleted and tarped, a bale is stuffed against that created wall as close to the edge as possible, and feed bags stuffed with straw have been pushed in to close up any gaps.

It’s been difficult work, cramped in the small space below the camper, shifting dusty, scratchy straw. Sandy has taken on the brunt of the contortionist act of working under the camper. The first day of straw placement triggered Sandy’s allergies, which in such a camper awkward environment made the task difficult, but he soldiered through.

It’s now been a few days of the same process: measure, cut pallets, fit them in place, secure the tarp, stuff with straw, plug holes with straw bales, repeat.

As I write this, we are a few hours of work on this project away from completion. It isn’t pretty. And it certainly isn’t perfect. But it is going to be a vast improvement over the attempts we made last year. In an idea world, we would now add insulated panels around the outside, but that’s just not in our (non-existent) budget. So all going well, the perimeter will instead be covered with logs to secure it more, provide a smaller extra later of insulation and to boost the aesthetics.

We definitely hope that this will improve the heat retention in the camper itself, sleciunser the floor. And once this is done, we. An move on to the build out room, which will be another new challenge for us both.

One happy occurrence is that we have managed by some miracle, to get the furnace working. We didn’t actually do anything to it. But it would appear that the “on/off” switch itself doesn’t always turn on property. And, once we had it running, so long as we didn’t use the actual on/off switch, it seems to be working just fine. This has been exceptionally helpful on some of the very colder nights we’ve started having.