There is so much to love about this amazing Spartan trailer renovation, it is sure to offer some inspiration for a tiny house project of your own. The Spartan Trailer Company was launched by wealthy industrialist J. Paul Getty. Getty converted the Spartan Aircraft factory in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to build high-end travel trailers for wealthy clients. They soon earned a reputation as being the Cadillac of the trailer industry, and their price tags were often as much as the cost of a small conventional house, reflecting the quality of their building materials and construction.
This 1959 Spartan Imperial Mansion is an impressive vintage trailer restoration. The Spartan Trailer company focused on high-end luxury models and paid special attention to every detail. That’s why there are still so many of the trailers today, as they were built with quality building materials, with attention to every detail. This vintage trailer restoration is a perfect example of the simple beauty that vintage mobile homes possess. The owner, Russel Logan, has done an excellent job of keeping the Spartan trailer as original as possible while still updating it for modern living convenience.
Logan’s only qualm about living in this 1959 Spartan home is a large number of windows. He says that he will surely be caught with the window blinds up one day, being as the home has 14 windows. Logan from Plains, Montana, owns the 8 foot by 39 foot vintage mobile home, and his restoration focused on updating the home for a modern full-time living while still keeping it as original as possible. In keeping these things in mind, the renovation was not an easy task to do.
Logan's grandparents lived in a 1950’s mobile home for several years, and some of his fondest memories as a child were of vacations spent with them. The grandparent's home was parked in a small trailer park in northern California. They would let the grandchildren play in the creek running along the park, pick berries and just have plenty of fun. The trailer was the epitome of home for him. Fast forward to today, and the grandparents have allowed Logan to park his trailer at the rear of their property. The trailer faces the Clark Fork River and he enjoys mountain views in all directions, as far as the eye can see. His favorite room is the den which has windows on all three exterior walls.
The biggest challenge when remodeling any vintage mobile home is in finding a location to park the tiny home. In Montana, most cities and towns limit home placement to models that were manufactured after 1995. Since this Spartan is a 1959 trailer, that posed a bit of a problem. Luckily for Logan his mother and father allowed him to place his tiny home on their property. Logan says the second biggest challenge in the renovation was with the plumbing, as all the tiny spaces between the layers of the floors were difficult to reach. The trailer home has all the original cabinetry and closets. The doors and drawers were all in great shape, but each piece of wood making up the frames had faded to a different shade. To remedy this he took one of the cabinet doors to the local hardware store to get the paint color matched.
More about this story can be found at: Mobile + Manufactured Living