Thursday we should be getting the transmission fixed. The mechanic is doing it for a steal, so I owe him big. He lives in the corner of the Alabama/Georgia/Tennessee junction and is full time in his travel trailer with his wife and invited us to stay with them for a couple of days on our way down to Florida. I’m not sure we’ll be able to right away, but since he also said he’d hook us up and help us get the RV engine in tip top condition, we are going to make sure we find a way to stop by when we have some more income to replace things like hoses and gaskets. He also said he’d be on the lookout for a tankless water heater, so if he can find one cheap, we can install that as well. That should help a lot so we can start having hot water for dish washing and such. We’ll probably continue to use the campground showers since they are so much larger than our RV’s shower and they have an unlimited supply of hot water, but it’ll be nice to have anyway.
So what else do we need or want? There are a few things that can wait until spring when we get our tax return. For starters, I’d still like to pull out the carpet, the dinette, and paint inside. The dinette table is gone, has been for awhile, but right now its dead space. We have the litter box where it used to be, but its mainly just storage for stuff we haven’t found a place for yet. I’d lie to build a desk there, which shouldn’t be too terribly hard, I just need to do it somewhere we have the space to cut wood and lay everything out. I think I might buy a couple kitchen cabinets for the bottom and figure something out for the top, while leaving in the back bench seat for us to sit on. At some point I’d like to get an iMac for our heavy video processing, and that could sit on that desk, but somehow be able to slide back and out of the way so we can work on other stuff. At some point, I’ll be buying Warhammer 40K miniatures to paint and sell online and I’ll need space to do that at. Tiffany also has her school work and jewelry, so she can use that space as well.
In the kitchen, I’d like to get peel and stick tile for the backsplash. I did the math, and about $60 worth of tile will cover the whole kitchen area and make it look a lot nicer. I’d like to also paint the countertop with a granite-looking paint, but that isn’t expensive either. Then we’ll paint the cabinets in the whole RV as well as the remaining walls to give it a nice, modern look.
Eventually, I’d also like to tear out the carpet and put down laminate tile or wood. There are several options that are thin and don’t weigh much, so we could just stick that to the floor and be good. The only problem I’m concerned about is up front around the doghouse, but we may just leave carpet under our feet while driving. I’m also concerned about cold floors, so we may have to put down insulation under the flooring so the floor doesn’t get too cold in the winter months. I had looked into a subfloor heating, but I don’t think that would be best or affordable in our RV.
The bathroom will likely get an overhaul as well. The faucet leaks into the sink, so that needs to be replaced. The toilet and shower work fine though, so those can stay. The walls though, they are ugly. A nice 80s floral pattern. I might just get more peel and stick tile and cover the whole walls with subway tile that is simple and all white. It would brighten up the whole room and make it look a lot cleaner. The floor could also be done with something complimentary for a low cost that would liven it up.
The bed I have talked about before, but I still think the best bet is to get upper cabinets and use them on the floor. Tear out the passenger side bed, leave the water tank where it is, and have storage space underneath the bed. This wouldn’t be too hard to do, except we have limited space to move around. We also need a new bed as we are sleeping one a 15 year old mattress and could easily get one for a couple hundred dollars that would probably save us a lot of back and neck pain.
The final thing, and one I’m really not sure what to do about, is the closet opposite the bathroom. Its pretty big, but right now its wasted space. There is stuff in there, but it needs a shelf system set up so we can better use it. We could probably make part of it into a pantry and maybe get away with a washer and dryer for laundry, or at least a washer and figure out how to dry by hanging stuff in the RV. We have done many loads in the campground laundry, and while it works, it gets expensive. Just now we came back from the laundromat and the dryers hadn’t dried everything, so we have it hanging in the RV with the heat on to finish the drying process. If we can get in the habit of doing a small load every day and figure out some way to hang it in the shower to dry, that would be ideal.
Beyond that, I’d still like to add solar. If we get the Thousand Trails membership where we can go from one campground to the next without waiting in between though, we won’t really need it as we’ll almost always be on shore power. If we plan to travel out west though, we might have to add some so we don’t have to run our generator all the time. That’s down the road though, for now it can wait while we do the little things inside to make it more homey and comfortable, and more “ours”.
Other things to buy include a Cell booster. There is one specifically for RVs that is supposed to increase a cell signal by 32x and from reviews I’ve read and watched, it does that. But it is $500, plus extra if we want a better antennae. Since we are at a campground now where we barely have any signal, I’ll assume that it will come up again so that is something we really need to get this winter when we can afford it.
So there it is. We should have everything mechanically set by January and then onto the cosmetics of making this our home. Its fine now as it is, but it could use some personalization and some minor things to make living in it full time even better.
