Meg Roussos / The BulletinAnna and Justin Scribner, of Bend, inside their Flyte Camp garage where they restore different models of RVís in Bend, Oregon.

The notion that there must be a better way finally occurred to Anna Scribner on Halloween night 2009.

Her husband, Justin Scribner, had spent hours in the driveway at their Bend home packing wheel bearings in a vintage travel trailer in the cold. The trailer was the latest in a string of vintage RVs that Justin had renovated and then sold, one after another, to make ends meet.

In better times, Justin fixed up a 1958 Shasta Airflyte for family vacations. Then the Bend housing market collapsed in 2007 and Justin, a flooring contractor, went from steady work to one or two $100 repair jobs a week, he said.

“We started selling everything we owned,” Anna said Tuesday. “Motorcycle went, car went, pretty soon it was time for the trailer to go. When the trailer drove off, I think I broke down.”

Her husband kept at it, dragging home the leftovers of vintage travel trailers, one after another, intending to fix them up for their own use, only to sell them off when the bills came due. Then came that Halloween night. It finally dawned on them that they should lease a shop somewhere and start a business rebuilding vintage travel trailers.

“All of these trailers were always going to be our trailers. We didn’t intend on starting a business,” he said. “I was sitting there that night and Anna comes out and she’s like, ‘You have got to get a shop to do this.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that’d be nice.’”

From that husband-and-wife exchange came Flyte Camp Vintage Travel Trailers LLC, a restoration firm that went in five years from a driveway necessity to a 12-person shop with its own reality TV show. “Flippin’ RVs” premiered Sept. 3 on Great American Country, a Scripps Networks cable channel. The third episode airs 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. Wednesday, according to the series website at gactv.com.

The Scribners took their business name from the brand of that first travel trailer, the one that Anna tearfully watched being towed away . She had developed an affinity for the thing, decorating it with 1950s-era knick-knacks picked up from antique shops during their trips to the Oregon coast, Justin said.

“And she loved it,” he said. “She actually loved the design sense of the trailers more than staying in the trailer.”

Restoring old travel trailers has turned the Scribners into walking encyclopedias of RV knowledge. They’ve scoured salvage yards, barns and fields looking for any of the thousands of varieties of travel trailers built between 1930 and 1965: the Almas, Kozy Coaches and Spartans, among others.

They scoured the Internet and museums, like the RV Hall of Fame in Elkhart, Indiana, for rare catalogs and manuals that detail trailer construction down to the smallest cabinet pull and rare appliance. Justin Scribner said Flyte Camp has rehabilitated between 50 and 60 vintage trailers in the five years it’s been in business.

“People either buy something and ship it to us, or something that just struck them that they loved and just had to bring back, or maybe it’s a family trailer,” Anna said. “And then, the other half, we go out and find trailers for them.”

The genesis of “Flippin’ RVs” was an appearance in spring on another reality show, “Extreme RVs,” created by the same production company, Brentwood Communications International, of North Hills, California. BCII produces other shows in a similar vein, including “Rock My RV,” and “Celebrity Rides.” At their own expense, the Scribners overhauled a vintage trailer for an episode that included a spotlight on former “American Idol” judge Simon Cowell’s mobile-home mansion.

“It just looks funny when you’re watching it, our little thing. … (The show) accenting that I’m putting on a porch light, a little vintage porch light. ‘Look, it even has a porch light,” Justin said. “And then they clip to Simon Cowell’s three-tiered whatever…”

That appearance led to further interest in a show devoted strictly to restoring vintage RVs. Bud Brutsman, “Flippin’ RVs” executive producer, said anything vintage or collectible makes great TV these days. “Antiques Roadshow,” “Pawn Stars,” and “American Pickers” all tap that vein, he wrote Wednesday in an email.

“With ‘Flippin’ RVs,’ we’re not only watching Justin and Anna Scribner hunt down these incredible vintage trailers, but also restore them and share their passion for the RV lifestyle,” Brutsman wrote. “We’re plugged into several very popular lifestyle areas — vintage, collectibles, restoration and RV living. We have a great audience.”

The show is based around what projects are underway in the Flyte Camp shop, and follows the Scribners as they hunt the back roads for old trailers, attend trailer rallies and resolve trailer problems for their clients. The episodes are not scripted, but not left to chance, either. They also make characters of the Scribners through their interactions with family members, employees and each other. The episodes, they said, focus on the work at hand and not on personal drama.

“They’re just filming,” Anna said. “We’re not, like, acting. But when I saw the show two weeks ago, the first one, I was like, ‘I’m in that a lot.’”

Justin at the start didn’t believe his job as shop boss would prove very interesting to a TV audience, he said. He soon got over it. “It wouldn’t be interesting if it was just, like, a camera sitting there watching a wall being built. This is actually how our shop functions and its decisions and the reality of her and I working together. … You’ve got a lot of different days, emotions and things going on in all those episodes.”

The Scribners labored for a dozen years finding and restoring vintage trailers before they realized that a community of aficionados similar to classic car or motorcycle enthusiasts even existed, they said. Even during the Great Recession, they found enthusiastic buyers for their renovated trailers.

“It was the weirdest thing, because no matter how bad things got, … there was no problem with people in different states buying toys,” Justin said. “There were people still out there … paying good money for these recreational-type things.”

The trailer “builds” the Scribners and their team undertake are not cheap, the price depending on the extent of the renovation. They’ve rebuilt classic trailers from an original scrap of wood, Anna said, “but you can’t do that with every trailer because somebody’s got to be backing that.”

Flyte Camp employs craftsmen to re-create the vintage trailers as accurately as possible, they said. But they sometimes add updated features such as on-demand hot water heaters, hidden flat-screen TVs and sound systems and upgraded electrical systems.

“They are as functional and as beautiful as any brand new trailer on the market right now,” Justin said.

When they look back on the five years since that bone-chilling day packing bearings in the driveway, the Scribners said they try to appreciate where they are today, and the hard work that brought them here.

“It’s been a whirlwind of working really hard for a really long time,” Anna said.

“Myself, I think about it every day,” Justin said. “When I wake up in the morning, I think, ‘Huh? How did this exactly happen?’”

— Reporter: 541-617-7815, 
jditzler@bendbulletin.com