Progress Report – March 19th 2016

We’ve done a lot of work on the RV but none of it is impressive enough by itself (yet) for a full blog post, so we decided to just post a bunch of pictures of our progress so far.

We finished installing the dinette in the back room. We also made the storage area behind it out of plywood. It still needs to be finished (probably going to use leftover Waterlox from when we refinished our house floors) but it all looks pretty enough for a picture:

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The picture and the featured one at the top were taking by stitching together a number of shots on my phone so please excuse the tearing.

Next, Allison has been working on painting all of the wood in the front half of the RV. We don’t want to spoil the surprise of how good it looks but have a couple teaser shots:

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Priming with the doors still on didn’t work as well as we hoped so we took all of them down for the actual paint (Crisp Linen White)

Next, I’ve done a lot of prep work for the electrical system and started installing components. Inverter/charger is in place and the batteries go in tomorrow.

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I know the cables should be in a conduit. It’s all going to be enclosed in the box so don’t worry. The black thing is a tray to put the batteries in. It’s just some plywood and 2x4s, but they have been coated with approximately twelve coats of rubberized, acid-resistant spray paint. There will be four 1/2 inch bolts to keep the tray from sliding and to anchor the seat belts that will hold the batteries down.

Besides construction, we’ve been slowly selling/giving away/throwing away things. A long way to go, but our wardrobes are starting to get under control and the back room is emptying out as we move parts of the Lab into the RV.

Other random things, we’ve hired a management company for the house ($1700/month btw if you’re interested). We’ve set up our mail forwarding with RV Mail Forwarding Services. The solar panels themselves have been delivered. We’ve decided to return the laminate flooring we had purchased and go with some nice vinyl wood-looking thing that we picked up this past week. Lastly, Allison is going to make new covers for the dinette cushions and we picked up the fabric for that.

Overall we’re a little behind where we want to be, but we’re still on track to be on the road by mid-May. The schedule we made 2 months ago had us done with the electrical (not including the solar panels) and all of the painting by tomorrow, not to mention “the box” which should have been done last weekend. After those things get done, we’ll be moving on to the flooring and starting to install the new curtains my grandmother is making for us (THANK YOU!!!)

That’s all for now though, see you next week.

P.S. We just realized that this WordPress theme doesn’t play nice with the “Enter your email address” text field if you’d like to follow us by email. We changed the text to make it clear that you just need to click on the line to be given a text box at least until we can figure out how to change the styling of the page to make it obviously a text box. So now, feel free to follow us! We generally post once a week so don’t worry about a flooded inbox 🙂

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