Caravan all trussed up to keep wind and rain out and to allow me to put a fan heater in and start the drying out process off. I dont know how quickly this is going to come together, but it is going to be a pain covering all this up every night!

Day dawns. Out I go and uncover the caravan. The fan heater has been busy and dried out a lot of the wet wood, although it has a lot to go yet. Sunshine is out and fairly warm so that will help. Now that I can see the screwheads that hold the inner front panel on I can get to work and strip the thing out. Unfortunately the heads of all the screws bar two are really rusty.

Taking into account that the little blocks they are screwed in to are damp and rotten in varying degrees, I decide to chisel them out. That lets me pop the panel out. Sounds like a quick job, but it wasn't. I had to go slowly to avoid doing any more damage to the now fairly fragile frame that the window fits in to. But eventually it looks like this.

Now that I have that lot opened out I can get a good look at that area of floor...not looking good from here.

Looks worse from here...

This picture shows the full extent of the damage...luckily there is a beam that runs across the van and that has stopped the rot.

The rest of the day is taken up with cleaning this area up and assessing the full extent of the damage of the window framing. When it is your first visit to the innards of a caravan there is a fair amount of head-scratching while you come to terms with the layout. Towards the end of the afternoon I am actually starting to reconstruct a little, but that is mainly to strengthen the front frame.

Tomorrow will see me reconstructing the rotten parts of the frame and then the corner timbers that run up the front of the side panels will have to be attended to. I need to put a new area of flooring in. I also need to pop out the side windows at the front to make sure that there is no more rotten framing. Once I have done all of that I can start to rebuild.

Earlier on you may have read that I didn't believe the last owner knew the extent of the problem. Well, when I felt how wet the carpet was this morning, tied to the fact that he had just fitted a new one, I now know that he knew alright. So, Andy, if you get to read these pages give yourself a big pat on the back. You suckered me good!

I used some strapping to hold everything together and covered her up again for the evening. Fan heater...do your worst! See you tomorrow.