At the end of last year when we moved into the apartment, the RV had a lot of little annoying things wrong with it that we kept saying “we’ll fix that before we head out again next year.” They were like paper cuts, individually not show stoppers, but certainly annoying especially in large number.

So since we need to be out of here in a week, we figured we better get started. I wish I had more pictures but we really just wanted to get the work done as fast as possible.

• Had a welder fix a bracket on the frame that had been broken since we bought it.

• Replaced the water pipe that goes from the outside of the RV to the water tank. The old pipe had a 2 inch crack in it and would always leave many gallons of water on the ground when we filled up. Unfortunately, fixing that required basically disassembling a ton of furniture in the back room so we had to unload everything before we could even get access to it. That was why we didn’t do it last year despite it being a pretty serious problem.
• Replaced one of the skylights. I had broken the original when shoveling snow off the roof this winter.
• Installed the interior trim around the skylight. We just never got around to it before.

• Added additional support to a folding mirror/table. It fell out of the wall 3 times last year so I finally sucked it up and opened up the wall to add some real support to it.

• Added a battery balancer. Any time you have batteries wired in series, you can end up with one battery getting worn down faster than the other which can lead to improper charging. A battery balancer will re-route power around the higher voltage battery to the lower voltage battery in order to keep them balanced and hopefully extend their life.

• Removed the step. The big metal step for the side door rusted out one of the bolts the first month we had the RV. It made it really unsafe to use. We had always planned to drill new holes and add some bolts to fix it, but in the meantime we had just picked up a folding step stool that we love (we got ours from Ace Hardware but the one in the link is even nicer and cheaper). So we decided to just ditch the metal step instead of fixing it in order to save the weight.

• Fixed the window latch for one of the windows over the cab so it could close again. Last November when it was getting really cold at night we realized that our feet kept freezing at night and it was because the window down there wouldn’t close all the way.

While I was doing all of those little projects, Allison was really busy moving stuff into the RV. We got just about everything in except for some clothes and some whitewater gear we’ll be using this weekend.

We’re headed to the Ruby Horsethief section of the Colorado with some friends for 3 days. We’ll be back on Sunday but then need to be moved out of our apartment by Monday evening so we’ll have a hectic 24 hours of washing clothes, cleaning the apartment and packing the last things into the RV before we drive down to Denver to start year two of full timing! We still have a few more projects to finish down there (sanitizing the water system and we think we have a propane leak somewhere that we need to fix before we can use the fridge) but I can’t wait to get started!