Ok, after a week of contemplation, and a maiden voyage that involved hitching/unhitching and setting it up once to load the fridge and, a second time to unload the fridge after the trip, I'm back to figuring out how to leave this bad boy up in between trips.
With my renewed desire, I re-measured and found that I'm 9" short of putting up the camper because of the A/C and 1" short of putting it up because of the 3 additional roof vent bubbles.
I see a couple options.
1) I could try to raise the ceiling by putting in a couple of steel beams, and reconfiguring the joists, but I've got a nice storage room above this area of the garage and it would involve more hassle and expense than I'm ready to tackle.
2) Another option would be to find a way to lower the trailer to the floor. There's about 9.5" of clearance before the campers lowest points, the leveling scissor jacks, would touch down. So I believe that this option could work, but I could use any reverse lift suggestions that you might have to offer. I've come up with the following but am open to any other suggestions.
2a) One thought would be to install an automotive post lift below the floor surface so that I could place the lift arms under the tires and drop the trailer down. My issue with this is that I don't like the thought of a post being in the middle of the garage all of the time.
2b) Another thought is to cut out a section of the garage floor concrete, 2' long by 7' wide and install a bridge jack below the floor surface so that I could lower the trailer down. The only real problem I see with this solution, besides the cost and effort, is that the jacks I can find are not wide enough. But I think that adding a wider cap plate to fit the hole in the floor is in order anyway . I like this option because it's reasonably clean in appearance, could be retrofit as a car lift when selling the house, and it would still allow me to easily roll the camper into place.
Any other ideas?