There are bricks sitting on my roof right now, holding it down. They’ve been there a while.

This is the story of how a forklift I never saw, driven by someone I’ve never met, before I ever owned this trailer, ended up dictating five years of my life.

When I bought this ex-refrigerated semi-trailer there was visible damage to the ceiling. I didn’t understand what I was looking at. What had happened was delamination — the outer fibreglass skin had been separated from the foam core, and once that bond is broken the panel can’t hold its span anymore. It sags. What looked like a cosmetic dent was a structural failure, and everything that followed came from it.

In this video I go through the whole saga honestly: the purchase, why delamination matters so much in a semi-trailer build, the $8,000 fix I couldn’t afford at the time and can no longer do at all now that the house is built up to the roof, the leaking skylight, the resin advice that made everything dramatically worse, the rebuild that finally worked, and where it all stands four and a half years later.

If you’re thinking about building in a semi-trailer, this is the single most important thing I can tell you: do not buy one with internal roof damage. And if you do, fix the roof before you build anything inside it!

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