Lisa finished the valances

Not much has happened the last couple of days, work has a way of interfering with my projects. One thing of interest though is Lisa finished recovering our valances for the camper. It cost us $30.05 in material, but look at the pictures and you will see it was worth it.

This is really and easy upgrade, the valances are usually held on by one or two screws in the ends. Take them off, buy enough fabric to wrap around them, covering up only the sections that are already covered. Then pull the fabric around and staple in the back. It took her about 2 and 1/2 hours to cover the four we had to recover.
Have fun and Happy Rving.

Another lesson learned

Well today we learned another lesson about living in an RV. Most parks in Florida require you to skirt your RV, if you are there long term. While the length of time varies by park, the averages are longer than 3 to 6 months. While this is not a major expense, the skirts can be anything from lattice up so long as it hides the area underneath the camper, it is another expense in both time and money. So plan accordingly, of coarse you can always move to another park every 3 to 6 months, but you loose the discounts on the rates this way.
Have fun and Happy Rving.

Photo showing valances over window before we started

Photos of rear bedroom before we started

Here are some photos of the Front bedroom before we started work.

Work finally begins

Today we started work on our camper. We purchased a 36 foot Wildwood camper manufactured by Forest River. Our camper is a 1993 model, so there are some things it needs, but we purchased it for $4200.00. We are hoping that we can finish all the work it needs and still be under $7500.00, saving us $2500.00 of our budget.
Our camper had a bedroom on each end. This was perfect for us, because we are going to make the front bedroom into a home office and extra storage space. Today we took our the bed frame in the front room, removed all the valances over the windows, removed the top of the bed in the rear bedroom as well as checked the awning. The bed frame was pretty easy to remove, most are only installed with a few screws. I removed the top of the bed in the rear room because I am going to build a new top out of plywood and hinge it in the middle to allow for underbed storage. My wife Lisa is going to recover the valances with new fabric to give them a face life without breaking the bank. The big suprise today was the awning, Piece of advice, do not by a camper without checking the awning. The canvas on ours will need to be replaced. We also made a list of things we need and where off to the store for supplies.
We purchased the material to replace the top and hinge the rear bed, the material to recover the valances, and some misc. hardware (screws, a couple of bolts, touchup paint, weather stripping, new locks for the outside storage compartments, etc. for $90.03)
This is one of the main motivations for this blog. I hope that our experiences will help others, who may be thinking about or already living in an RV, save some money. I plan on showing you how to do many of the repairs and upgrades yourself. Which will save lots of money over the cost of paying someone else. Most repairs are really simple with some basic instruction and know-how.
I planned on posting some pictures of our progress today, but we left the camera. Will do better next week.

Still learing

I am still learning to use the blog page, as soon as I figure out how to post pictures I will. I will also be making changes to the page as we go. Sorry for this inconvenience.

Getting started

What to say, well myself and my wife decided to life in an RV full-time. This decision was based on many things, not least of which was cost. The cost of lot rent in an RV park is substancially lower than rent on a home or even an apartment. This coupled with the relaxing lifestyle where the main reasons. After the decision was made, the planning began. We figured a budget, this has to include cost of camper, moving expenses, and misc. Next we had to decide what we needed. Our requirements where, at least one seperate bedroom, enough living space for ourselves and our mini pincher, storage for all the things we couldn't live without, and lastly a seperate space for a home office. The office space was the hardest, it had to have room for two desks and two desktop PCs. To top it off we only had ten thousand dollars to spend on an RV. With these requirements in mind we where off to find our new home. We chose an older, but larger camper, that needed some work. And our adventure began.