Building a Home on Wheels

There is nothing glamorous about sanding aluminum in a parking lot at 6am while your toddler screams from the car seat. Millie was teething. Calvin was "helping" by organizing bolts into piles that made sense only to him. And I was covered in a fine layer of oxidation dust, questioning every decision that had led to this moment.

But that was the deal we made with ourselves: build this thing, and everything changes.

Starting at VAR

We bought Colletta from Vintage Airstream Restorations in Heber. VAR had pulled her out of the Arizona desert, where she'd been sitting for more than thirty years, and they specialized in exactly what we needed: taking old Airstreams apart and putting them back together properly. They know the bones of these trailers better than anyone, and we needed that expertise before we could start making her ours.

Heber is a small mountain town about an hour southeast of Salt Lake City, the kind of place where you can hear yourself think and the nearest Home Depot is a proper drive. VAR helped us assess the structural condition, strip what needed stripping, and get the shell to a state where we could take over. It was like getting a professional diagnosis before starting surgery. Expensive, but worth every penny for the peace of mind.

James spent weekends driving up to Heber to check on progress and learn from the guys there. Calvin came along sometimes, fascinated by the tools and the sparks and the general chaos of a professional shop. I stayed home with Millie, who was still small enough that "going anywhere" required an act of Congress.

Moving to Camper Reparadise

When the structural work at VAR was done, we moved Colletta to Camper Reparadise in West Valley City. Reparadise is closer to home, which mattered a lot when you're making daily trips with two little kids. It's a community of builders and dreamers working on their rigs, and the energy there is infectious. Everyone is in some stage of tearing something apart or putting something together, and there's a camaraderie to it that we loved immediately.

This is where the real work happened. This is where the Airstream went from a structural shell to a home.

Finalizing the design

Fitting a family of four into 31 feet of aluminum requires a kind of spatial thinking that I did not previously possess. Every inch matters. Every cabinet has to serve at least two purposes. The couch is also a bed is also a play area is also school.

I redesigned the layout probably fifteen times. James built mock-ups out of cardboard so we could physically walk through the space and see if it worked. Calvin tested whether he could reach his bookshelf from the dinette. (He could.) We argued about whether we needed a full oven or could survive with a toaster oven. (Toaster oven won. I've since made challah in it, so I stand by the decision.)

The washer-dryer debate nearly ended us. With two little kids, one of whom was in diapers, we decided the Splendide washer-dryer combo was worth the square footage it would take from storage. We have never once regretted this decision.

The electrical system

This was James's domain, and honestly, I'm glad it was. He rebuilt the entire system from scratch: 940 watts of solar on the roof, 800 amp-hours of lithium batteries, a 3,000-watt inverter, and enough wiring to make the whole thing run off-grid indefinitely. He wanted us to be able to park anywhere, no hookups needed, and still run the air conditioning.

The first time he flipped the main breaker and everything came on, he did a little victory dance in the parking lot at Reparadise. Calvin joined in. Millie slept through it.

I won't pretend I understood the technical details. I understood the outcome: we could live anywhere. That was the whole point.

What we got wrong

A lot. The first countertop was the wrong size. The flooring buckled. Twice. Calvin drew on the freshly painted walls with permanent marker during one of those five-minute stretches where both parents are focused on something else and a four-year-old is left to his own devices. We kept the marker. It's still there, behind a cabinet. Our first piece of art.

We over-planned some things and under-planned others. We installed a vent fan that was too small. The first curtains I made were the wrong length because I measured from the wrong side of the rod. Twice. The biggest mistake was thinking we'd be done in six months. The build took closer to a year, and by the end we were so tired of the process that we almost forgot why we were doing it in the first place.

Almost.

Bringing it all together

There was no single moment when Colletta was "done." It happened gradually, and then all at once. One week the plumbing was working. The next week the beds were made. Then the bookshelf was stocked and the kitchen was functional and the bathroom had hot water and suddenly we were standing inside something that felt like a home.

Sometime in November 2020, we stood inside her and looked at each other. The lights worked. The water ran. Calvin's bookshelf was stocked. Millie's crib fit perfectly in the little nook we'd built for her. James put his arm around me and said, "We actually did this."

And we had. Not perfectly. Not efficiently. Not without fights and frustration and a truly unreasonable amount of Home Depot trips. But we had built a home. A tiny, rolling, ridiculous, beautiful home.

The day we left

December 2020. The pandemic was raging. The world felt small and scary and uncertain. And we did the most counterintuitive thing imaginable: we packed our kids into a tiny aluminum tube and drove away from everything we knew.

Calvin was five. Millie was nine months old. The truck was loaded. Colletta gleamed in the driveway, freshly polished, stocked with groceries and diapers and a truly unreasonable number of books.

I cried pulling out of the neighborhood. Not because I was sad. Because I was terrified. Terrified and thrilled and completely unsure of what came next.

We didn't know where the road went or how long we'd be on it. That's become the whole point.

If you're thinking about building out an Airstream or any RV, my biggest advice is this: start. It won't be perfect. It doesn't have to be. Start, and figure it out as you go.