During October, Tom and I had some unexpected expenses with regard to our RV. In the future we will keep costs down better with regularly scheduled maintenance, but you can’t schedule when your brake actuator will stop working or your wheel bearings will lock up. Our plan was to hire someone to fix some minor issues on the inside of the RV when we got back to Ohio. But after all the expenses and outside issues in October, we decided to do some things ourselves. So here are a few minor RV repairs and modifications we made in the last couple of months.
The first of our minor RV repairs: we had another water leak. You might remember a blog post about replacing our water heater last year. This leak was minor compared to that and only seemed to happen when we ran water in the kitchen sink. After some detective work by Tom, he found a crack in the flexible tubing connecting the sink to the grey tank.
Replacing the tubing wasn’t a big deal but it required cleaning out everything under the kitchen sink several times, crawling under, and getting knocked on the head. Tom sacrificed his body to do this. I am glad to say the replacement tube is working so far. Because this tube moves whenever the slide moves in and out, it may break again. We will keep an eye on it.
The second of our minor RV repairs: we had a window shade that wouldn’t go up anymore. Our shades are manufactured by MCD shades and we were sure we would need to replace it. Unfortunately MCD only sells them as a set with a sunshade, and the set is more than we wanted to spend. We had been living with the broken shade for a while because it isn’t a window we want to see out of very often. But we decided, after everything else that happened in October, to make repairs as soon as we could.
I emailed the company, asking if I couldn’t just buy one of the shades. We got a very nice response from a technician suggesting we work with him to diagnose the problem before ordering a new shade. He sent us instructions on taking the shade apart, which we did, and found out the spring on the shade had sheared off. Everything these days is a cheap, plastic part and those are more prone to breaking.
After the diagnosis, we paid for a new spring – 1/4 the cost of a new shade – and the technician shipped it along with instructions for installing it. Within 15 minutes of the spring’s arrival, we had the shade working again. Thank you MCD and technician Nick!
The last of our minor RV repairs (for now): one of our recliners. We have a comfortable sofa and two recliners in the RV. I sit on the recliner. Tom uses the sofa. The other recliner had defaulted into a storage shelf. So we couldn’t sit on it and the clutter on the chair was unsightly. In the small space of an RV, it is better if everything is stored out of sight.
Tom and I decided to take out the recliner (now living in John and Jackie’s basement) and replace it with some storage. Jackie took a day off work to help us visit furniture stores in Columbus. We went to Costco, Lazy Boy, Value City Furniture, the Container Store, and Crate and Barrel. We looked at end tables, coffee tables, storage cubes, boxes and desks. Finally we settled on some upholstered storage cubes from the Container Store. Our stuff can be out of sight but still accessible and the storage cubes are lighter than the recliner. Plus, the cubes are strong enough to sit on – Bonus!
Living in an RV is just like living in a house. There is always something that needs to be fixed or updated. We still have some more minor RV repairs to make, but we are waiting until we get to warmer weather in Georgia to tackle them.