It’s FLIPPIN’ FRIDAY! A series on Creating Chrissy featuring some of our DIY and renovation projects!
This week is about our first season of improvements at our seasonal campsite in Old Orchard Beach, Maine!
The awning just had to go!
Labor Day Weekend 2016 was the first weekend we spent at our campsite. The campground closed mid-October of that year, so we only got to use it for the last 2 months of the season–but it was still exciting nonetheless to have our own place at the beach!
A week or so after closing up our site, Mr. Geek proposed! Now it was time to plan our small wedding at the beach.
Knowing we would be hosting guests at our camp for our wedding, we knew it needed to be spruced up a bit, updated, and needed a bit more space.
Sunroom
Over winter 2016-2017, one of our longtime campground friends tipped us off to a used sunroom for sale that was taken from another campsite–yes, please! We were able to pick up this sun room at a fraction of the cost of a brand new one. Our trailer already had the roof, beams, and a deck. We just needed the walls.
Mr. Geek and my father tirelessly worked to retrofit the walls to our roof and deck. This was NOT easy. Sunrooms are easy to put together (or at least that’s what my father told me) when they are built for the space, but retrofitting the room to a space that was already made was much more difficult.
For flooring, I rushed into purchasing indoor outdoor carpet. My mom and I used the double sided adhesive to put it down just days before the wedding. Although it is a bit thinner than I anticipated–it will be very easy and cheap to replace if something does happen to it. You get what you pay for, I guess!
I’m so grateful for everyone’s time and energy because the sunroom is just what we needed for a bit more space. We were able to move the crowded living room/dining room out onto the porch and free up more space inside the trailer for the dining room table.
Check out that stud to the left!
Front Deck
Seriously…what would we do without our friends and family?
Our friends at another campground had two decks that needed to be removed. No one claimed them. No one else needed them…so we took them! We took one and my dad took the other.
Moving these decks was quite the sight rolling through the “rotary” in Old Orchard Beach. Strapped across my father’s landscape trailer, we slowing rolled across to our campground and over to our campsites. The deck was a perfect fit for the front of our new sunroom and allowed for steps to wrap around to the side of the camp to head out to the backyard and new fire pit. I picked a grey stain that I also continued around to the bottom of the sunroom. I will be painting the picnic table to match this season!
Fire Pit
My dad and I updated the original fire pit by removing the cinder blocks surrounding the laundry barrel.
We made a frame around the laundry barrel and staked it in. We filled the frame with rock and refreshed the rock in the fire pit area.
Exterior
I will admit that the poo-poo brown awning was the first to go! However, I liked seeing the tag on the inside saying it was made by a business in our hometown in Massachusetts.
Mr. Geek and I both split our time painting the trim from poo poo brown to a marine blue.
We also placed wood along the edges of our driveway to prevent the rock from spreading. We added more rock (seriously, there was so much rock to spread!) to freshen up the driveway.
Improvements to Come
April 2018 — Opening our seasonal campsite in Old Orchard Beach, Maine with snow and sleet.
This April marked the second full season with our campsite!Of course we will always find our projects! Here is the wish list:
- Railings on the porch
- Swap out one of the exterior trailer doors for a sliding door
- Cover the exterior wall of the trailer/inside of sunroom
- Maybe a small bedroom off the back?
- Washer and dryer (because right now one set is sharing the load of five adults, two children, and four dogs—yikes!)
- Pitched roof instead of the rounded original roof
- Siding
Some of these items on the wish list may seem ridiculous. Others might not take the time to update an 1989 park model trailer. As my father always says, “Remember, at the end of the day it’s just a camp in Maine.” Sure, I agree. But how can you stop yourself from making your “happy place” the most comfortable and cozy place for relaxation without a little bit of work?
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