Stealth House

     The other day I bought a cargo trailer. It's a 6 x 12 round-nosed, single-axle with an RV door on the passenger side and a ramp door out the back. The guy I bought it from had it tucked away in his back yard and had used it to transport various toys to and from the dunes at Dumont. He installed faux marble vinyl floor tiles and faux cherry-wood vinyl planking on the walls. The adhesive of the vinyl tiles proved to be ineffective and he had remedied this by nailing all of them in place (floors and walls) with carpet tacks. To say it was tacky would be both the pun and the understatement of the month. He also installed a basic two-piece cabinet in the nose of the trailer and child-proofed the drawers and doors to keep them from opening during travel - except for the one nearest the door that presented the greatest injury hazard. In the three days it took me to get around to removing it, I'd bet I smacked an elbow or snagged myself in some way on that damned drawer a thousand times, minimum. I've since removed all of the above and curb-cycled the cabinet to a guy who'd just bought a passenger van and was converting it for use a mobile car-wash -- within ten minutes of posting it on Craigslist! Let's get back to my trailer though. It is now a basic cargo trailer without any interior accoutrements - yet, and a very sticky floor.
I've been studying the design and construction of "Tiny Homes" for several years now and am approaching this little project as a practical starter into that realm. One of the first things recommended when building a tiny house is to remove all but the necessary planking to support the sub-floor and cover it with metal flashing to effectively seal it against intrusion from weather, road debris or pests. In the stealth trailer this is somewhat different but the same protective measures need to be taken. In my particular trailer, and I suspect this is common to them, the floor is comprised of "S"-channel steel that runs laterally across the trailer which supports 3/4" plywood cut to shape and screwed into place. The odd part is that the walls are constructed around the base, rather than on top of it, as would typically be the case in "Tiny House" construction. This presents a slight problem to the cause of effectively sealing the underside of the floor from intrusion. Even if I were to essentially replace the current plywood with flashing and then build the sub-floor atop it, there would still be a clear path into the trailer from beneath it via the wall cavities that extend below the floor (I'm guessing that a photo is worth a thousand words here). Essentially, if the trailer were flooded with water, it'd run across the floor to the edges of the walls, run down and pour out between the two. That seems to be a likely design intent, however it makes preventing things getting in that way difficult. Possible solutions are:

• Make a "c-channel" out of some sort of mesh to fit over the end of the foam insulation and somehow affix it to the bottom most edge of the wall, extending on the "in" side up and into the floor of the trailer. This would, in theory, be the same method used when siding walls with wood and protecting the air-gap between the exterior wall and the siding from insects.
• Lots of flashing and silicone?
• Learn to weld?

Clearly, I need to do some additional thinking on this, however it's holding up progress on the rest of the build and delaying the conclusion of my time spent living with relatives. Just in case the name of the blog and the opening paragraph on all of my posts doesn't make it clear enough, I cannot overstate how much "staying" with relatives unsettles me. Consequently, I'm obsessing on how to resolve this problem and this blog post is the result of that. Of course, I could just plow forward and not worry about thoroughly sealing the floor. After all, this is just a starter into a larger field, however that doesn't quite sit well with me; I greatly dislike half-assing anything. I think I'm going to go stare at it some more and see if my subconscious can work out a better solution while I'm attending to minor details like removing all of the wall paneling in preparation for insulation.

Sovereignty eventually...