Rebuilding “Ms. Merry”, the Amerigo–The last Demo, Clearing the Bathroom–Part 1

Now, you’re all probably wondering, as I said in my last post “We’re on a Roll!”, and now we’ve moved away from finishing the cabover and moved on to other parts of the Ms. Merry.

Well, the answer is pretty simple.   In the process of completing what you’ve seen in the cabover, I successfully hurt my knee, and since I couldn’t crawl around until it healed up, I decided rather than waste time, the Gang and I would go and work on other parts of Ms. Merry that needed doing. 

So, we figured we’d move on to finish the side walls and roof, and to tackle that, we had to finish doing the last Demolition that we’d been putting off, the bathroom.

We’d put off the bathroom as long as we did because when I first started on Ms. Merry, we were racing to try and get done as fast as possible to try and make the Glacier National Park Rally with the other Truck Campers.   So, we weren’t certain if we were going to do anything with Ms. Merry’s bathroom or not, other than shove it out of the way to finish the wall behind it.

Now, that we’ve got more time and making sure we’re doing everything right, I decided that I would take a page from Old Mr. Kit and completely rebuild the bathroom.

With that decision made, the next big one was, “What do we want to save?”   Ms. Merry did have a nice one-piece fiberglass bathroom, problem was, it was just a hair too short front to back and a couple inches too narrow. 

We guess Gardner did this so that one bathroom mould could be used for all their RV models, vs having different sized ones for different models. 

So, I decided that we’d keep the bottom half of the bathroom (It was two pieces glued together), and junk the top, as the medicine cabinet wasn’t worth keeping and the roof vent was going to be redone anyway.

Now, that was decided, it was time to take the proverbial to it.

One last look at the old bathroom.

Then off came the door wall and the door:

Then Mr. Dremel really got to work, cutting out the upper bathroom walls in pieces:

You can see the water damage where it got in around the junk roof vent above the bathroom. 

It was too long before we had half a bathroom and the rest was pieces thrown out in the dumpster.

Most of the roof above the bathroom we were able to just pull out with our fingers, it just crumbled into thousands of tiny pieces.  

Now, that the upper half of Ms. Merry’s bathroom has been cleared away, we can hold off on working on the bottom half until we get the roof and ceiling done so we can start planning out the new walls. 

First up, we’re going to start reframing the roof and remove those old vents, but that’s a story for another chapter .