I will get better at this I swear....

It appears that I did it again. I managed to go a month with no updates. However, I have something of an excuse this time. I’ve been really busy at work and at home so spare time has been at a real premium.

That will be changing as of this next week. My boss has been harping at me about carrying too much vacation time so I half-jokingly said, Ok, I’ll take the month of May off. He not jokingly said ok. Well, work issues had me stay at work the first week of May but I will be taking the rest of May off. First vacation in three years I think. Gonna be weird for sure!

House (the renovation)

It’s still moving along and finishing up the last of the work in the bedrooms. I’ve now got all three bedrooms essentially completed.

The only work left to do in the bedrooms is the flooring edges and baseboards in the closets. I just can’t bring myself to cut up perfectly good (and expensive) pieces of wood flooring just so I can get a small edge piece. That’s a huge waste of not cheap wood. So I’ve been keeping scrap pieces and using them up as I can. The upside is that I have very little scrap. The downside is the spots that need the little edge pieces (like closets) get done last.

To do the bedrooms I bought a whole pallet of flooring which is 480 square feet. Out of all the flooring, I came up about 5 square feet short. That’s about a 1% error in my calculations. Wow, how could I be so completely off in my numbers?? I should be beaten with a slide rule for getting it so wrong.

Next up is the hall bathroom. This one is going to be ugly. It will be a complete and total gut-out. When I get done demoing, the only thing left original will be the tub. Not even the drywall will survive this one. Except for the kitchen, this will be the most aggressive demo of the whole house. I’ll be sure to take pictures of this one. It should be interesting.

House (un-stuffing)

Really have it cut down pretty good now. I finally got through Jess’s room and about 98% of it has been gone through. Good thing, her old room got more of a gut-out than I had planned. It turned out the paint on her walls hadn’t stuck either so I had to peal those walls just like the master bathroom. Ugh….

So all I have left is the kitchen, family room, and garage. The kitchen and garage have been gone through once but only lightly. I'll do a second sweep shortly at a much deeper level. I’ve already given the family room a couple of deep sweeps and most of everything is gone. Couch, lazy boy chair and TV is about what's left. I really pity the poor idiot that breaks into this house. They won’t get much of anything as it’s already gone.

RV Search

A lot of behind the scenes stuff in the last month or two. Researching truck towing capacities, RV construction methods, plusses and minuses of each, and doing a ton of reading and believe it or not YouTube videos. Who knew YouTube would have so much stuff on RV construction, walkthrough reviews, and tips on things to look for during an inspection.

Still waiting on Lazy Days to get in the 293RK. Evidently it’s a real hot seller and even used ones aren’t lasting on the market very long. This is a very good sign as most people that buy RVs don’t impulse buy and do at least minimal research on the units they want. So if 293RK is popular, there’s a reason.

I’m extremely tempted to make a vacation trip up north where these are built and take the factory tour at least once, possibly several times. With three weeks of vacation to burn, a trip up north to really scrutinize their plant and assembly line might be prudent.

You must remember, this isn’t like buying a new car, boat, or weekend warrior RV. This will be my home for the foreseeable future and I could conceivably be living in this rig for a bunch of years. So it really needs to either be ready to roll right out of the factory, or have a good percentage of the basic building blocks in place that I can customize without completely overhauling the rig.

I’ve read many blogs where a person or a couple buys a rig and then proceeds to tear it apart and basically rebuild it (on the road) to fit what they want. It seems to me that a good bit of forethought and research would have negated the need to very drastically overhaul a brand new unit while trying to live in it.

Don’t get me wrong, even this unit will need significant changes to fit my full-timing lifestyle. I’ll be adding additional batteries, solar panels, a generator, double pane windows, a very involved charging system, tank cleanouts, rear backing up camera, washer/dryer, possibly even replace the axles to get additional weight margin and disc brakes. I’ll probably even replace the bed mattress and shower head (yep, even researched that) to get exactly what I want/need. I’ve got a long list of things that will need addressing right after I buy it.

So you can start to see that this isn’t a knee-jerk decision. I don’t think I’ve researched anything to this level of detail. I really feel that this is what is needed to make sure that if I decide to dry-camp for 2 or 3 weeks at a time (and I will be doing that often), my rig can support that and I know every system in that rig from stem to stern. I need to know that if I’m out somewhere, something breaks down, and the nearest RV shop is several hundred miles away, I can deal with it on the spot. That doesn’t happen by chance, at least not with me.

So that’s where I’m at right now. I’ll post pictures of the bathroom demo as it happens. It should be great fun to the casual observer. I on the other hand will be cussing the whole way. Just to prove that I intend to do a better job of keeping up, I'm already working on the next blog installment (bathroom demo) and should have it up in the next day or two. Stay tuned!