Good Morning Friends! If you can remember back to last June- Ian and I started renovation on our 2011 Jayco Jay Flight Travel trailer. Check out the start of that renovation here in case you missed it. Over the past year I’ve been instagram-ing bits and pieces of our renovation, but not revealing the entire thing, and I’m happy to say it’s finally here! I feel like I owe you guys an apology for making you wait SO Long! BUT, filming weddings every weekend that we aren’t camping and filling all the non-wedding weekends with camping- It’s been HARD to finish anything! Then to find time to photograph the camper in it’s perfectly clean not-being-used condition with two boys always in tow? Forget it.

Without making you wait any longer- grab your coffee and read on!

We started out in 2011 with a stock Jayco Jayflight 26BH. We bought it brand new, and it was perfect. Except- you know the brown. All that brown. Its basically everywhere.  If it all matches it’s perfect right? Not so much.

We started with just the bedroom, and then, we quickly learned that the rest of the camper just looked bad. I mean- I don’t even want to look at that side of the camper bad. Here’s a little glimpse into the new room from the old room.

It all had to go. Now. We started with our least favorite thing- That couch.  It turns into a bed, and adds sleeping room- but we really don’t ever have that many extra guests, and if we do- we can shuffle the boys around. Getting to our room required walking through a tiny path next to that couch. It’s ugly and it’s in the way. So we voted it out. But then- That wall- It was still in the way, and looked out of place now. So that had to go too.

We weren’t really aware of what was under the couch, but we knew we wanted to build some sort of bench in that corner so we figured we could work around the electrical/heat in the corner. Ian removed the old box, built a new frame for a bench, and then we covered it and added a hole for ventilation. After paint, it almost looked like it had always been there, and left us much more room!

After the bench was built, we started to paint. Painting took forever. Painting camper walls without priming is a huge NO. Don’t do it. It’s not worth the skipped step and you will be re-painting. We started with Zinsser Cover Stain Primer. This gave the walls a good base coat and a sticky surface for the paint to hold. After the primer was dry, we went with a neutral grey. We wanted the camper to feel light and airy but not be completely white. I used Benjamin Moore’s Stonington Grey. We’ve used this in our house as well, but to save some money, we have it color matched at Home Depot and went with Behr paint. I like it just as well and it will save a few dollars.

Painting the cabinets was going on at the same time, and is always a huge task. We removed all the hardware, primed everything in the same primer, and then covered it with a cottage white paint from Home Depot made for cabinets. We purchased new hardware, and it started looking like a brand new place!

Once the walls and cabinets were brightened up and most of the brown was gone, the floors looked really brown. Somehow more brown than they did before. We realized we were not going to be able to leave the floors if we were going to go all out with this renovation. We searched for a good flooring and went with a vinyl flooring for ease of installation, amount of wear and tear, and possible water exposure. We wanted to use this all the way throughout the trailer, and I didn’t want any type of wood in the bathroom or around the sink. The floor went in pretty easily once Ian got the hang of it and it is just beautiful. All credit goes to Ian on this one. I didn’t do a single piece of it. (I was still painting)

We wanted to add a litlle something to make the kitchen “pop”. We decided to go with a backsplash around the entire area. We found 12×12 square stick backsplash at Home Depot. I’ve seen this stuff popping up in travel trailers a lot, and for good reason. It’s super easy to cut, and easy to install. It’s also light, which is ideal for a trailer.

The bathroom in this (and most) travel trailers is tiny. There is a mirror with medicine cabinet, which takes up basically all of the space in the bathroom area. We don’t bring a ton of bathroom items with us while camping, and we have plenty of storage under the sink, so we decided to do away with the cabinet portion. Instead of buying a new mirror, we took the mirror off the cabinet, painted it, and re-mounted it on the wall.

After all of this, we did a lot of touch up paint, more paint, and more painting. There was some trial and error- I thought I’d paint the fridge with chalkboard paint, but it just looked like a black fridge in the middle of a nice white kitchen, so that got re-painted white to match the cabinets.

There was a lot of shopping at Target of course for new bedding, and little touches to make it cozy. Almost all of the signs and little pieces throughout the trailer are either Target or Hobby Lobby.

I made my own cushions for the new bench, and covered the old cushions at the dinette. I found a sweet pretty grey fabric with white arrows at Hobby Lobby that just seemed perfect. I used a duck fabric so it was durable.

Once we could finally put all of the fun accents in the rooms, make the beds, and put it all together, I started to see my vision for this space come to life, and it was beautiful.

I did the boys bunks in Pillowfort by Target. Target continues to come out with great kids bedding, and this stuff is no exception. Ethan wanted sharks, and Nolan wanted woodsy animals, and I think they actually go together well!

Around the bottom of the beds there was an ugly (surprise) brown which we covered with wood just as we did around the master bed. We also did the headboard of the master bed this way. See this post on the bedroom for how we cut and stained these boards.

Last but not least- those decals on the outside had to go. I’m not going to lie, we’ve only gotten two sides off. This stuff is not fun to remove, and it takes forever. It’s literally the worst. I’d rather paint. But- it looks amazing when finished, so we kept on keeping on. This was removed with a combination of a heat gun, goo gone, and magic erasers. Lots of magic erasers.

We’d love to add a large Ball Camp logo to the front and back when finished taking off all of the decals.

The entire process was long and daunting, but we really really love how our “tiny house” on wheels turned out.

We love that we are able to take our children anywhere. We get to be weekend warriors and explore with them on the weekends, as well as plan big trips like the one we’ll be making at the end of this week to Maine. I can’t imagine having a better little place to call home. We just love it.

I hope you’ve enjoyed checking it out! Let me know if you have any questions on anything that wasn’t detailed here!