RV Renovation Update

Okay, so we are almost two weeks in to working on the RV and I thought it was time for an update. So many of you guys are interested, even those of you who do not camp love watching a good DIY project. My number one question I am getting is why? Why would I take all my time and energy doing this renovation (while pregnant) when I could go out and buy a new one? Well my answer is I really love DIY projects, and I really do like the physical work. It beats the same old working out routine in the gym. I have always wanted to do a project like this, but have never had the time or been in one place long enough to actually do it. Thanks to quarantine, I have the time now and I am at my parents house which gives me access to my dad’s shop full of tools. So I went for it and I am loving the process. I have the help of my mom, working on this with her has been fun and I have also recruited my nephew to help with some of the grunt work. Now that you understand my “why”, let’s get into the process.

What We Bought: We got a 2008 29 foot Keystone Cougar. Overall, it was in pretty decent shape so this felt like a manageable project to take on without the hubby around to help.

Demolition Process: Everything was going to have to come out for a nice coat of white paint. This was not too bad, taking off the cabinets and hardware was tedious, but the only real hard work was pulling up the carpet. It seems like someone goes in to these RVs and just goes crazy with a staple gun. There were staples all over EVERYTHING!

Everything went pretty smoothly, for the most part, until we pulled up the carpet in the tip out and came across some water damage on the floor. I was not surprised by this at all, I have watched a least one hundred you tube videos on RV remodelling and I would say at least 75% come across this exact problem. We put this to the side at the time and continued to get ready to paint. We are now to the point where we are ready to address this issue. I had been hoping that since my parents own a fire and flood restoration company they would be able to fix this with no problem, but as I am learning, RV’s are completely different than houses, so they were not sure how to go about fixing this. I took to YouTube, but there was no clear cut way to go about fixing this. There are a number of factors that make this a difficult job, especially the fact that it is in the tip out. So, we are planning on cutting out the damaged area of the floor, attempting to patch it then laying a new piece of plywood across the entire tip out to add strength and something for the patch to stick to. It is kind of confusing, but I will take you guys along on my Instagram stories as we do it.

The bench seats were a little tricky to get out because they were screwed in from the outside of the wall. We ended up having to cut through the screw to get it out.

Paint: If you know me at all, then you can probably guess the paint color I chose - WHITE! We are giving everything a fresh coat of white paint (the walls and cabinets) and then plan on adding some color to the doors and maybe add in more color later on. For now, I wanted a clean white space to start the design process. If you have ever painted anything then you know the prep is the worst part. We started with sanding all the cabinets. A few of you reached out asking why we were not using a liquid sander or something like Crud Off and that is because the two experts we spoke to about this told us that nothing beats old fashioned sanding. We are not trying to take any short cuts, so if sanding was going to give us the best results then sanding it was.

After all the sanding we used my dad’s air compressor to blow off everything and then gave all the cabinets and the walls a good cleaning using TSP (heavy duty cleaner). We then taped everything off (which was just about an entire day’s job) and now it was finally time to paint!! I was not able to do a lot of the painting because I did not want to be around the fumes while pregnant, so to make things easier on my mom and nephew we went ahead and bought a paint sprayer. I had a few people ask about the wallpaper and yes, we painted right over the wall paper that is throughout the RV.

We are letting all the paint sit and cure before we start the putting-everything-back-together process. I saw on YouTube that a lot of people keep track and label where everything went, we did not do that so this could be interesting, haha.

Now that the painting is done, we can focus on getting the water damage on the floor of the tip out fixed. Then, once our flooring comes in and we get that laid, we get to start with the fun decorating! For any decorating project I start with a mood board that I just throw together using Pages on my Mac. This is what I have going for the RV:

Decor Plans:

We are replacing the sofa bed with a futon style couch that we found at Walmart. Finding a small enough couch without losing the extra sleeping room is not easy, especially when trying to stay within a certain budget. Walmart was actually our best resource and had the most options.

For the flooring, I absolutely fell in love with the flooring Tosh Interiors used when she posted her RV remodel. Come to find out, they ended up being a company out of Montreal! So, we went with Vinyl Plank floors from 1867 Flooring and Wall Coverings. They are stunning and I cannot wait to see them in the RV.

That’s about where we are at for now, but I am really happy with the progress! Keep checking Instagram for more RV updates in my stories!

Much Love,