Friday, June 8, 2012

1997 Jayco 10 UD: Our New Home Away From Home!

It’s no secret that I’ve been looking for a pop up camper for a long, LONG time.  One that was big enough for the five of us (plus puppy, now) and fits inside our tight budget.

Last weekend, I saw the perfect camper listed on Craig’s List priced well within our budget.  Unfortunately, I had very little hope of getting a response when I emailed for two reasons.  First off, it seemed too good to be true, a sign of a scam, for sure.  And second, the ad was already two hours old.  if you have ever looked for a hot item on Craig’s list, you know that it can sell in minutes. 

But I emailed anyway, and told the boys not to get their hopes up. 

Imagine our surprise when 4 hours later we got a call!  I think I nearly screamed in the man’s ear!  Lol!  He said he had been out of town and when he got home there were thirty some emails in his inbox.  However, he thought that my email was the most compelling!!  Thus, he wanted to give us a chance to come see it.

How totally cool is that??

We set up a time to meet the following evening.  By the time we got there, the man had turned down several requests by folks who wanted to pay more and beat us there.  People are crazy! 

But what a NICE guy! 

My husband and I are convinced that God was totally in the details.  This camper was just exactly what we were looking for.  Here are a few pictures of it set up in our back yard.

ntu camper

It even came with the add-a-room screen room which attaches to the awning!  Here’s a picture with the sides down.  It is going to be nice in rainy weather!

DSC_0033

Plus, it has air conditioning!  Come on inside and I’ll show you around. :)

DSC_0034

This will be my kitchen.  The dinette table and the stove can go inside or out.  We’ll probably use it like this.  There is another portable table with folding legs that we’ll also probably use in this screen room.  But it can also be used inside, as well.

DSC_0036

This will be the boys side. There is room for two on the bed, and the third will sleep on the couch area.  The puppy will no doubt sleep on that side, too.  :)  The man even cut a piece of nice carpet for the floor. 

DSC_0037

This will be our side.  There is plenty of room for our queen mattress topper up there and we’ll still be able to lay our bags along the sides.  :) I guess that is a king bed.

There are a few repairs we need to get done.  However, we are fairly confident we can tackle them.  There are a few small holes in the canvas, we need to replace the tires and have a new seal installed for the AC unit, and it needs a new license plate holder.

But nothing leaked in the rain we had this week, so we are thinking we can get away with taking it on vacation and repairing it when we get home.  Hopefully, we won’t face more rain than it can handle!  Lol!

If I have time before I go, I’ll show you some of the things we’ve added to make it nicer for our first outing.  :) It has been super fun to play around with different ideas!

We are just SO thankful God blessed us with the chance to finally purchase one of these!  Seriously.  It’s a dream of mine come true. 

I guess we’ll be adding lots more posts to my camping category, now, lol!

Do you camp?  

3 comments:

Christina said...

Oh, this is SO nice! I'm SO happy for you. :D We've done a little tent camping (yellowstone on our honeymoon is the most memorable!), but with three littles right now, it's hard to do. We recently found out, though, that we can rent forest service cabins for $25/night, and the nearest one is less than half an hour away! So we might have more camping in our near future.

Mari said...

I'm ao happy for you! It's really nice. :)
We used to have one when our kids were young and we loved camping in it. We still say we would like to go camping, but no camper anymore!

Christine said...

I'm so glad it worked out for you. Totally worth missing the second half of the boys' game! It was so nice to meet up with you over the weekend. Such a nice family. Have fun in the camper!