mods

by

The Mods Keep Coming

We went ahead and purchased the remaining handles needed to replace all the knobs and handles in the trailer with new nickel ones. Here is the bedroom dresser to give you an idea of the handles and knobs in use at the same time. For the whole trailer, we ended up using 13 handles and 34 knobs.

The other big project, quite literally, was replacing the uncomfortable king mattress with a very comfortable queen one. This involved some sawing of the base to remove about eight inches from the sides, to bring it just inside the outside frame edge. The bed frame is still about 3 inches wider than the mattress, but not worth trying to deconstruct and re-construct. Here’s the sawing in progress.

Here’s the finished result. Note there is now several inches of open space inside the slide area, making the bed much easier to make. It also gained us a precious several inches of floor space on either side of the bed, especially Malcolm’s side (closest to the camera). The mattress is a memory foam topped tall queen mattress from Costco. A bit pricey, but very comfortable. We’ll see how it sleeps here in a few minutes, since it is almost bedtime.

One more big change is coming soon, waiting on the debit card to cool off a bit.

On another note, we paid off our last of our debts today, so we will be able to travel debt free.

Advertisement
by

Yet More Mods

The mods roll on. Today, Malcolm installed a couple of things that we had purchased at Camping World yesterday. First, step covers:

In the background, you can see one of the jacks we bought to see if the middle of the frame could be supported and reduce bounce in the middle of the trailer. Seems to do OK. The step covers really make the steps a lot nicer. Plus, when Malcolm is wearing his flip-flops, he won’t scrape the tops of his toes on the sharp undersides of the metal steps now.

Just aft of the steps and jack are the new X-chocks (one for each side) between the tires.

Those should help keep the rig from wanting to roll on unlevel ground and help to stabilize it just that much more. Not sure if we needed two of them, but felt it would be best anyway.

Finally, more changes inside to swap out the dark bronze hardware. Not cabinet hardware this trip, but door handles on the bathroom and bedroom doors. We found that standard home locksets work just fine on the thinner trailer doors.

Here is a before picture:

And the after picture:

Besides looking fancier, the handles are actually quite a bit sturdier feeling, as well. Just a couple more items to help make our trailer our own.

by

More Bathroom Mods

Time for some more mods in the bathroom. We wanted to replace the cabinet knobs with something in a nickel color and found these cool t-shaped ones at Home Depot. Before and after pics shown below.

Before (pardon the color cast in the first picture):

After:

After seeing the results, we decided we would like to replace the cabinet hardware in the rest of the trailer. We found 25 knobs and 13 pulls. The remaining updates may be spread over a couple pay checks.

Next up were a couple of Command hooks for the bathroom wall, to hold clothes and such while we shower (or to hold a towel for a guest, etc.):

We took a day trip to Birmingham today. First stop was to visit some friends after their practice for the Over the Mountain Festival, a concert event put on each February in Birmingham, Alabama. We sang the last two years, but decided to sit this year out. We had lunch with the contingent that had driven up from our church, then stopped at Camping World on the way home.

At Camping World, we picked up some step covers, a couple of items for the sewer drain parts box, a pair of X chocks (wedge between the tires to keep the trailer from rolling and to stabilize it a bit more), and a few other miscellaneous supplies.

We also walked through a couple of Heartland travel trailers just for fun. A Heartland representative (sorry, didn’t remember his name) was there and we chatted with him for a while. We also saw some really nice cabinetry in a Big Country and they were using nickel colored hardware in that unit. We might ask the factory if we can buy a couple of sets of nickel door hardware from them to replace our dark bronze ones.

Oh, update on the other project, here’s our completed refrigerator magnet/chalk board project in use: