The Beginning of the New Paint Job

Before we even committed to buying a vintage trailer, I knew that I needed to know how to paint one.  I've painted a lot of things before, but never a vintage travel trailer.  We did do some research about professional painters where we would drop off the trailer to have it powder-coated, or painted in their paint garage, but the sheer cost of this made it really unrealistic for us.  We are renovating on a budget afterall.

So, I turned to Mr, Google, because that is what one does, when you need information these days, and I found this guy from the Vintage Shasta travel trailer forums.  This video was a bit of a game changer for us.  Rustoleum spray paint?  Really, to refinish a vintage trailer.  So, we rolled the dice and gave it a try.

As my husband, Adam, said, "in a million years, you could not have convinced me that spray painting a vintage trailer would make it look that good, but it does!"  Yup, it does.  We decided, too, that we wanted the yellow stripe to go around the entire middle of the trailer, instead of skipping down to the bottom in the front.  And look at it.  You never would have known that there was yellow under that!

Before

After

And it covered that LAYTON sign that was put 

on during a previous attempted renovation like a boss!

Look at that -- spray painted on the right, not yet on the left.  Unreal.











And so fast.  My oldest daughter and I, (who was absolutely invaluable in this process, by the way), made fast work of it.  We were able to tape, cover, and paint all of the white in about six hours.  My husband finished up another project, and gave us some additional help towards the end, but honestly, it was so fast.



Tomorrow we peel the tape, and start on the yellow, weather permitting.  Yay!

Oh, and for those following along with the idea that they might refinish a trailer -- we used 13 cans of Rustoleum spray paint in white.  Our trailer is 15 feet long, so that's not quite a can per foot for our main color.  We bought 14 cans, so I have one left over for touch ups tomorrow.  We bought 6 cans of yellow, so we'll see if that does all of the yellow.  We decided to take it to one tone yellow from the current two tone.