Our Vintage Trailer Roof was Leaking

Finding leaks in your vintage trailer is normal. But water intrusion is enemy number one for trailers, so addressing them should be at the top of your trailer project list. We assumed Roamie, our ‘73 Avion, had them when we bought her. She was in pretty great shape, but trailers require maintenance, and we knew she sat unused for a while. It was only a (short) matter of time before we would find those leaks.

When we pulled up the carpet, we found iron plates concealing the soft spot at the door. (Insert face palm here.) A following rainstorm confirmed we still had a leak at the entry.

Then we happened to notice light water on the wall under the kitchen sink as the A/C was running (condensation was making its way into the trailer).

We were able to quickly track down the A/C condensation leak, but the leak at the door was challenging, so we decided to seal the entire trailer top down. This would help us knock out any leaks we hadn’t found, yet, too.

So we started at the top – sealing the roof first. (Follow-up projects will be sealing the aluminum side panel seams, beltline seams, window frames, and reglazing the old aluminum frame Hehr windows.)

Starting the Roof Project

We had some layers of Kool Seal to scrape off before we could clean and prep the roof for sealing. It was admittedly a pain. The total project took about 2 weeks (working 2-3 hours most days) to carefully scrape, clean, and seal. We also replaced the A/C gasket to finish off the project (and cleaned out the crazy number of old mud daubers’ nests in the A/C). We spent a couple of hours each day working together. Fortunately, we enjoy each other’s company. 😆

Below is the list of steps we followed to seal the roof. We also made a video detailing a step-by-step walk-through of our process. Video at bottom of post along with complete list of all products used in our process.