Last November I found this Avion 34' (Airstream-esque) travel trailer on Craigslist for $3,300. I was in Houston and couldn’t pick it up, but my buddies Hunter and Brandon took the reigns and not only did they go pick it up but also talked him down to $2,200 + a new AC, porcelain toilet and left over remodeling supplies from the previous owner’s attempt to do it himself.

Brandon’s Denali HD 2500 pulling the RV from Conway, AR to North Little Rock, AR

To give you some background, my buddy Hunter owns his own business called “Hunters Fix-it-All.” Before I pulled the trigger on the purchase, we had been discussing our plan of attack. We agreed to a time frame of about a month and $5,000 in labor costs… and man was that an undershot of the time it took to get this thing into shape. It ended up actually taking about 6 to 8 months and $9,000 in labor cost. Also, a huge thanks to Hunter’s wife, Olivia, who was so kind to let us park it outside their house so he could have access to his tools and shop right outside their garage.

Avion nestled tightly in Hunters drive-way. *NOTICE the difficulty of its parking and it where it is in relation to the house.

Another look at the parked RV during renovation.

The RV was a great shell but that’s about all it was. You’ll see from some of the initial photos we had to completely rebuild the back part of the RV’s sub floor. We had to pull out the stationary tanks that hold all the drinking, gray and black water. (FYI, for those of you who don’t know what that means: drinking water is your drinking water, obviously; gray water is your shower water and leftover sink water; and black water is your toilet water) You can see a lot of the electrical lines hanging everywhere that had to be made into some sort of light fixture, plug in or hid in some way. The only parts of the RV that we kept were the cabinets w/o the doors and the windows. Everything else was custom designed to fit the small home look we were going for.

RV shell. The very beginnings.

*FYI* the ‘Avion’s’ build is actually superior to that of its competitor, the Airstream. Not only are the walls fully insulated with THICK insulating foam but the floors are made up of two sheets of plywood that sandwich 3/16" polystyrene standard foam sheet. Needless to say, this thing is built to last. Unlike your standard box-y RV, an Avion/Airstream & its aerodynamic attributes allow it to haul down the road and across the country. In the pictures below you can see Hunter sealing the pipes and then adding additional insulation to their build. As if the RV’s build wasn’t robust enough… Hunter was sure to take it up a notch throughout the remodel.