Will it be worth it? Renovating our abandoned caravan park

welcome back to camping in the west if you are new here we are John and Emily, we recently sold our house and all our belongings to buy this old derelict Caravan Park which used to be home to the coal miners who worked in the neck. the road the mine closed in 1989 and the Caravan

park

was completely overgrown, so now that we are the new owners we have been working hard to clear away all the excess rubbish. We hope you enjoy watching today's episode as we continue with our renovations and prepare the ground to build our own tiny house.

Welcome back to Combat West. If you watched the last video, you would have seen us finishing taking down the last of those three

caravan

s, which is a big milestone for us, yes. It took so long to come and we can't believe they are finally gone and we have removed so much trash and recycling from the side and we actually didn't realize how much more recycling and trash we would still have. He left once the Caravans left. This is the area where the three Caravans used to be. We didn't realize until we removed them how much rubbish had been stored and was hiding underneath an interesting fact we discovered about the miners who used to live here.

Along with their salary they used to receive a coal allowance, this explains the large pile we found along with everything else, so the first thing we need to do is filter all the leftover garbage and separate what can be separated for recycling. I wonder what this is. It's like a blue barrel with random holes in it, so it's inside. I mean, it's obviously connected to a concrete slab. Ah, so it's another base. Everything is cracked there. That's funny, so yeah, the platform only made it this far, so this. it's just a concrete door, oh really yeah, I thought it was going to have more platforms, it's actually concrete, how funny, so I'm just going through and picking up bits of foam or, well, that's kind of a lie if you ask me. you do.

You're in the ground and I thought it was just on the surface like this, let's look at this, it's buried, there's a lot under here, it's pretty deep, everything under here, yeah, it's not ideal, laughs, our next big job on the ground is Hire an excavator. and help us level all the land ready to build our little house, but before we can start we need to remove all the excess rubbish, so John

will

start work tearing down the old shed while I tear up all the old Caravan platform that is left . because stable this looked like he put all his rubbish in this shed like all the cigarette packets candy packets tablets a couple of tools for the wheelchair washing machine I imagine it stinks like the old carpet from the Caravan More carpet down there Since our trailer was full of wood recycling, we decided to start another job in the afternoon, so I started working on the transmission in the back of our field, so while John was transmitting right behind me, I was breaking all the deck boards and I'm almost done, I'll show you what I've done.

I'm going to end this part here, but it's so satisfying. Now that we've collected all the old deck boards, let's sort through the wood to find out what's

worth

having ready for future projects. Thanks thanks. We are very happy with the amount of wood we can reuse again and simply store. The weather shed on the deck used to be completely rotted so we loaded it onto the trailer ready to go. our local recycling center before we can take the excavator to the site, we need to clear out the piles of firewood we have been storing in the driveway, so the plan is that we are going to do a wood storage using all the reclaimed wood recycling we have.

We got it from the Caravan and the deck and just booted it first. We need to clear the area where we want to place our wood storage. Thank you. We're just raking up everything we cut out of the bush and found. more stuff buried is like a fitted sheet that's completely buried up to here, but we think there's some kind of rough sanding going on here because we must like splinters and Diane is here to help say hello to Dan, we just finished trimming. In the hedge now I think we've gotten to the border maybe like two or three equal feet all the way and we've raked out all the little bits and all the debris, so now we're going to use all the little bits. our leaf blower just to clean everything up before we can start log storage.

A special thanks to our friends Lively, who kindly gave us one of their battery-powered leaf blowers. We've had this for a few months. It is powerful, super lightweight and long lasting rechargeable lithium-ion battery. It's been a great tool to have around the lot, so now that we've cleared the area, it's time to gather up the old deck boards that we want to use for wood storage. All the boards were covered with old wood. screws and nails, so we have to make sure we remove them all before cutting them to size with the outside saw. We're just taking a little break from building lumber storage because John's parents are on their way to our land with their trailer.

As we have been cleaning out all the

caravan

s we have found old gas bottles and bottles and many of them are empty and we don't use them so we are struggling to know what to do with them because we couldn't recycle them and our venue was taking them away, but at £25 a bottle, so getting rid of all the gas bottles that have been left on earth over the years is very expensive and last night John's parents tagged us. Facebook on something they saw and it's a local gas supplier that is accepting old bottles that they recycle, so we're going to load all our bottles onto John's French trailer so they can take them away and it's not going to cost them. us a penny, this is where we found all the gas bottles buried here, so there's five bottles and two minis, so that saved us 150.

We're just tying them up. I didn't expect so many, that's good, thank you, look how clean it is. The wood is after we pressure washed it last night. It looks like new wood. Then we started working on the roof. We first removed all the nails and screws before we could start cutting and adding the roof boards. Thank you. Alright. We're already getting to that point. the log storage has all of our boards on top, so I'm just going to line them all up in this square and then screw them into the first board, that's all of those, we just need to quickly screw them together and then "We're going to put roofing felt on the top. top just because it's something we have for free, so that's what we're going to put on top.

Well, John is finishing up nailing the roof tacks into the wood saw and it's there." I'm going to rake the road and try to remove the top layer of mud because it's a tough situation down here. We did the top a few weeks ago and now I'm going to continue doing the trail. bottom outside with these little galvanized nails and I'm just going along this front edge now folding it down. I left about the right amount so there's a little bit of overlap, just go in about a hand's width, I think it's like about 100 mil and Then we're almost done, we're getting to the end of the lumber store construction and We have some wood left, so we thought we'd put in a shelf because we're going to have all kinds of wood in here, some that hasn't been cut or processed, some that are ready to be stored to dry.

I thought it makes sense to have a little space up here to light, so a lot of the smaller pieces of wood are closer under the uh. the roof, so hopefully they stay a little bit drier, but yeah, it's gone pretty well, thanks. We just hired our first container for our project, which is why it is taking us so long to get a container. Everything else until now. We have carefully selected it, put it in the van and then taken it to the recycling center. That means that so far everything has been recycled, but we've gotten to the point where now that we've taken the caravans down, we've removed all the big chunks of material, we're left with like little bits of glass and bits of plastic that you could spend months kneeling on. picking them up, but we're literally going to break the surface and then shovel them. all in this jump, um just to get it off the site even though we have other materials here, like this leftover wood from our wood storage, um, as tempting and easy as it would be to just throw it all in the general trash.

We're still going to collect this, put it in the van and take it to recycling because that's something that's really important to us. Now that we finally get our wood storage built, we can go through all the wood stacks we have. I've been cutting all over the place and actually started processing them into firewood to store and season, so I have this piece of oak that I knew I would keep and I cut it nice and straight now so we can use it. he used it as our cutting board and um, when we were on the other part of the lot where there's a shed, we actually found an axe.

I don't think it's a splitting axe, it's sitting on it like a failed axe, but an axe is. better than the ox, so let's sharpen it a little bit because it's very dull and see if this helps us cut wood and miss. Video take one, have you done this before? No, it wasn't very central. a natural dye hello yes, the first wood that goes to your lumber yard dying, how does it feel? Majestic Majestic, honey, you're living a long-lived dream, it'll cut your own wood. M's first attempt at chopping firewood. I'm going to wear glasses, okay?

Which one is yours? feet, that's all I can do, yeah, I have steel toes, so I don't think I can do this right, we have some firewood, nice, okay, I'm basically shredding it. interested in M's sculptures okay third try yeah in DMs here goes The Punisher wow from that piece of wood we got about 60 firewood on my first try and I cut it into six pieces instead of two on the next, okay, okay? That's really good, okay, that was better. I can actually use an axe. Punisher hits again. Come on, I'm super happy with how our wood storage turned out.

We were able to do it all from the old Caravan and the terraces. The wood has meant that it has cost us almost nothing more. than the price of a few nails and screws, so that's the end of today's episode. We hope you enjoy watching it. You can't wait for the next video as we have some new tenants coming onto the land in Campbell West so let us know. in the comments who or what you think we have coming to earth and don't forget you can also follow us on Instagram at campoutwest for more behind the scenes content.

See you next time. See you next time. In fact, I can. I don't think you built this lumber yard, it looks nice and we are cutting our own wood from our own trees, happy, yeah, a little strange.