Peel P50

At 6′ 5″ inches tall, my inter­est in things small might seem inex­plic­a­ble, but the fact remains — small things are cool. And there is not much cooler than a Peel P50. Check out the links at left and @ the image of the Peel P50 above for some great shots of this great lit­tle vin­tage wonder.

Isetta plus teardrop

When I was a bit shorter my father worked for Porsche Cars South­west in San Anto­nio, Texas, the south­west regional dis­trib­u­tor for Porsche (“por sha, not porsh” as he used to say.) I grew up around inter­est­ing cars and car peo­ple.
So when my young eyes first glimped a BMW Iseta, I knew that it was just about the coolest thing a car could be — small. Of course, the next log­i­cal step is to add a teardrop trailer — another grow­ing inter­est of mine. An even smaller one can be seen here on the Tales and Trails website.

The park — in the mid­dle of Naito Parkway!

One wet Port­land after­noon Lisa and I set off on one our peri­odic archi­tec­ture tours in the down­town area. I decided it was time to visit Portland’s small­est park.

Mill Ends Park

It was a per­fect, rainy Port­land after­noon, the kind that makes color sub­lime and car tires hiss. Mill Ends Park, cre­ated as a home for lep­rechauns, appears with dif­fer­ent veg­e­ta­tive scenery in every pic­ture you will find of it.
Port­land being a cen­ter of the once boom­ing lum­ber indus­try, the term Mill’s End refers to the pieces left over in the process of con­vert­ing tress to lumber. The story of the park’s cre­ation is an inter­est­ing bit of Port­land his­tory and worth inves­ti­gat­ing at the Port­land Parks and Recre­ation site.

The cur­rent theme.

Since we moved into the 5th wheel in the dri­ve­way, the loss of daily rou­tines has been among the most try­ing aspects of our daily life. The thought that you might be able to lay your hands on some­thing you once knew the likely loca­tion of, and the ensu­ing lit­tle incre­ment of frus­tra­tion that comes with the real­iza­tion that it may be lost to you until you once again move back into the house and unpack every­thing, moves you one step closer to a sort of low grade insan­ity that began with the incep­tion of the very process that has become — remodeling.

We did exten­sive research into travel trailer options after we hatched the idea of stay­ing on the prop­erty dur­ing our remodel adven­ture. For a brief time we thought maybe a trailer that could actu­ally be towed behind my Ford Ranger would be kind of inter­est­ing. But the real­ity both of the min­i­mal liv­ing space afforded by such an option and the fact that every­one and their brother is look­ing for just that lit­tle trailer at the height of travel sea­son soon put an end to that notion. Then we thought that maybe we could find some­thing big enough to accom­mo­date both of us plus Lisa’s brother who would soon be liv­ing with us. But the thought of a trailer nearly the size of our house parked in our dri­ve­way also seemed a bit improb­a­ble. Then there is the fact that my 6’5″ frame put severe con­straints upon the options avail­able to us. So ignor­ing for the moment that what we really want is a teardrop trailer small enough to pull behind our Honda Civic, I soon dis­cov­ered that the RV known as a 5th wheel (which requires hard­ware in the bed of your truck that I had no inten­tion of pur­chas­ing) has, by its very design,  more than enough head room for me. How we got the thing head first into our dri­ve­way is another story.

So into our sec­ond month in the trailer the con­verter decided to go on the fritz. The first night was incon­ve­nient since the con­verter takes the 110 volt power sup­plied via exten­sion cord and turns it into usable 12 DC power for the light­ing. But on the sec­ond night we soon real­ized that the igniter for the propane hot water heater also worked with DC power. Ooops …
On the third night we were awoken by a shrill sound ema­nat­ing from some­where in the the kitchen. I quickly real­ized it was com­ing from the LP gas leak detec­tor which was con­ve­niently designed to incor­po­rate a low volt­age alarm
By then, I was into research on what it would take to replace the defec­tive con­verter. It soon became clear (as so often it does!) that I could obtain a replace­ment online for about half what it would cost me to buy it locally. Could we stand to wait the extra time? As soon as I had placed the order the answer came when the refrig­er­a­tor stopped. Even thought it is clev­erly designed to run on either elec­tric­ity or propane gas, it still requires a small amount of elec­tric­ity even to run on gas.

I finally had enough of swim­ming through cel­lu­lose insu­la­tion. So my brother-in-law Lee and I set up our own lit­tle Hooverville in the front yard with a giant shop vac designed for suck­ing up the blown in stuff. It had a loud gas engine and used a cor­ru­gated hose with an affin­ity for clog­ging that made the job inter­est­ing. But upon reclaim­ing about 90 per­cent of the intru­sive mess, we called it good. Lots of scratches from the nails pro­trud­ing up into the attic space from below and down from above but the result is that I can now see where things need to be addressed in the attic space.

Some­time prior to the day of suc­tion, we were doing some par­tial demo in the kitchen and ran across some splen­did, pink lam­i­nate hid­den behind the droll back splash. It’s con­tin­u­ally infor­ma­tive to pull apart this lit­tle, owner-built house and after hav­ing uncov­ered the first two time cap­sules tucked within the wall cav­i­ties, it was quite amus­ing t o find this curi­ous lit­tle detail buried in the kitchen. Given the half-baked nature of the rel­a­tively recent remod­el­ing efforts, this dis­cov­ery was a treat.

A final note:
Hav­ing fully recov­ered from Blog-Spam-Shock, I have reset the com­ments func­tion on the site so that those with any inter­est in doing so may finally make their thoughts known.

Cheers,
Kurt