As I was preparing for and recovering from my surgery, Tom made a few tweaks to the RV.  He made a big change when he took out the dinette in May and we were very happy with the change during the summer.  That made him bold enough to try a few other things while he had some time on his hands.

When we made a list of things we wanted to have serviced on our Coachman Leprechaun 260ds, Tom decided he could tackle a few of them himself and save us some money.  He is getting bolder with the DIY and I approve.  Why pay someone else to fix it when you can take care of it yourself?

The first thing on his list was a water leak from the water heater.  It had been leaking just a bit for a while and he finally decided to check all the connections.  By tightening a few connectors, he stopped the leak.  This was the easiest of the tweaks and he should have done it a while ago, but it just didn’t occur to him it would be such a simple fix.

 

When he was working on the water heater, he noticed the drawers.  I had been mentioning the drawers for a while because they are tilted.  I didn’t know why, but it was hard to keep them open – they were closing themselves.  When Tom opened up the panel to work on the water heater, he noticed that the back of the bottom drawer was resting on the furnace.  Not the way it is supposed to work.  After looking at it for a bit, he decided the support that is supposed to hold the drawers up in the back had fallen.

In order to put in a new support, Tom had to cut out the bottom of the cupboard above the drawers.  Then he put in a new support and attached the drawers to it.  The drawers are no longer drooping or closing on their own.  He did a great job with that repair.

The final item on the tweaks list was the stove/oven.  When the mice ate our propane lines in July, we had the line to the stove/oven capped.  Then we started talking about whether or not we needed a stove or oven.  I have never used it, despite living full-time in the RV for at least six months a year for the last five years.  If I want to cook, I use the Instant Pot, microwave or an electric hot plate.  RV ovens are notoriously bad, so I had had never been tempted to bake anything in it.

We decided to take the stove/oven out and replace it with a shelf for the Instant Pot and the hot plate.  In one of the days after my surgery, Tom removed the stove/oven.  I’m sure that was a difficult job, but I wasn’t able to help.  He managed without me.  In order to make replacing it as easy as possible, Tom decided to build a box using a piece of countertop laminate from IKEA and some panel board.

Tom built the box and then built a little lip around the area to set the box on.  When he slotted the box in the area, it fit perfectly.  Well, it may not have fit perfectly the first time, but it did by the time I saw it.  Now we have a nice-sized storage shelf that we will use much more than the stove/oven.  And we didn’t need to have the propane line to the stove/oven replaced.

Right now the RV is at RCD‘s service department, where we expect it will be for a month or so.  The list of things for them to do got shorter and shorter because of Tom’s tweaks.  I appreciate his hard work on the RV.  Because of the tweaks he did, it is working better and will be more functional for us and we continue to live in it while working in the National Parks.