One drawback of purchasing a Used Airstream – as opposed to New or Vintage – is the fabric wall covering that came standard in Airstreams for many years – endearingly referred to as “mouse-fur” .

I believe the actual name/brand of the fabric is Ozite.  It’s known for its mold/mildew resistant properties – which seemingly makes a lot of sense for an RV.

However – it can quickly become the bane of an Airdreamer’s existence.

Airstream used a light cream colored fabric over aluminum.  The result being that the aluminum starts to bleed through the fabric over time – making it look dingy and dirty with black stains.

People have had mixed success cleaning the fabric – but who really wants to spend time shampooing and vacuuming the walls of their RV?

The mouse-fur on our model was in decent shape in some places, but stained and discolored in others.

We decided early on that we were going to remove it – even after reading mixed reviews on the process.

Here is one of the many great posts on Airforums about mouse-fur removal:  Mouse Fur Removal with Photos.

As many folks will note – the aluminum under the mouse-fur isn’t going to be all nice and shiny like what you find in newer models.  Airstream didn’t intend for this aluminum to be visible – so you may find marks, scratches, holes, seam-tape – and most importantly, a nice layer of super-adhesive.

The adhesive layer was not as bad as I thought it would be.  It’s relatively thin and the aluminum didn’t look all that bad even with the adhesive.  It was still better than stained carpet.

We read a lot of posts about people using extremely caustic and abrasive strippers to remove the adhesive.  I really wanted to avoid that if possible.  We would likely be living in the trailer while we worked on this part of the renovation, so I didn’t want to fill our new home with toxic fumes that might linger.

I found a post on Greenrvlife where one Airdreamer used an eco-safe stripper to remove the adhesive with great success.

We purchased a small sample to test out on our Airstream.

While Greenrvlife let the stripper sit for a few hours – I only had about an hour to test it out.  I sprayed about a one inch dot on the adhesive and let it sit while I cleaned out the fridge.

The result was fantastic!  After an hour the adhesive stripped right off with little to no effort.

While this is a very small success, this particular part of the renovation project just got a lot less intimidating.

Our trailer is currently with professionals getting some more complicated upgrades done (e.g. electric), but when we finally pick it up, we will continue the mouse-fur removal process and post more pictures.

UPDATE:  More pictures….

Here is a picture of the bedroom – the top photo is the wall with the mouse-fur still on it and the bottom shows the wall with the mouse-fur removed.  You can see that Airstream used a tan seam-tape that we will remove as we remove the adhesive.

Here is a photo of the mouse-fur removed from the wall where the dinette used to be.

Lots of work and demo ahead of us but getting more and more excited as we go.