Dreams With Wheels

I’ve been busy.  Busy planning, purging, selling, donating, packing, and choosing an RV.  It feels good to be busy again; to have direction, a plan.  And, there is some sort of plan:  a big change.  We’re moving into a motorhome, and it’ll be sooner rather than later.  I can conceive of any good reason to wait.  I’m not completely nuts; I won’t do it tomorrow, but maybe over the next few months.  I should start now.  Check out A Comprehensive Collection, Mobile Minimalism and Living Arrangements in the Zombie Apocalypse

As I see it, the best option is a 28 to 31 foot class C somewhere in the vicinity of $10,000 to $30,000.  That’ll get us something about 1995 to 2003 or so.  Now, in Pennsylvania or anywhere else where road salt is routinely used to de-ice the roads, I might be of leery of buying a rig that’s 15 years old, but here in Portland the older vehicles on the road are often in very good shape body wise.  This compared to Pennsylvania where a 2005 is rotting to pieces.  Another reason to get an older one is because we’re going to remodel it anyway, so why pay for a more modern interior.  Sure, some of the 2009s I’ve seen are a bit more pleasing to the eye, I won’t pay for that though.  I want this thing paid off as quickly as possible.  So long as the roof is good, there’s no history of leaks, the drivetrain is alright, and the basic systems function.  I’ll take care of the rest.

Before I pick up a motorhome, I’m looking for an enclosed trailer.  Something like a dual axle, 7 feet wide by 14 feet long with an aluminum skin with ramp door in the rear and a man door on the side.  They’re about $4,000-$5,000.  I’d like to equip the thing with a workbench, shelving, storage racks, and a place to store two bicycles.  Before I do, I figure it needs some sort of flooring to protect the plywood base floor.  I want something cheap, but durable.  Vinyl flooring is an option.  Then again, no.  Vinyl is a horrible, endocrine disrupting material and I want no part of it.  Linoleum is available in rolls, I think.  It’s made of natural materials like linseed oil, pine resin, sawdust, and cork.  I may very well put glue down tiles in.  They’re fairly cheap, durable and available in a wide variety of colors.  I want to cover the whole floor as well as the ramp and then I can build the shop!

Once I have the trailer worked out, and we’ve seriously downsized our furniture in the house, that should make the move into a motorhome much easier.  There’s going to be a minimum of work to do on the rig we buy before we can say goodbye to our current rental (and get our $1,200 dollar security deposit back.  Yeah, $1,200!).

The sleeping quarters will have to be arranged, but that’ll mostly be seeing if our current mattress will fit over the cab.  Otherwise, we’ll get a featherbed or something.  The marine toilet and blackwater tank are getting ripped out and replaced with a homebuilt composting toilet.  I was going to wait on that project and use the existing facilities.  I really don’t want to even screw with all that and I might as well just rip it out before we move in so there is less disruption.  The rear bedroom needs to be modified for additional storage space which may just initially be some dressers and makeshift closet rods anchored to the wall.  The freshwater tank will need moved from under the bed, relocated to a more convenient location and then re-plumbed.  The couch in the front of the rig is going to get tossed and replaced with kitchen storage and additional counter space, although that may be a project postponed until we’ve moved in.  The biggest modification will be the removal of the carpet throughout the rig and replacing it with some sort of hardwood laminate flooring.  I want to have ripped out almost everything we plan to before doing that so we don’t end up with a bare spot in the near future.

It’s all a rather large undertaking, but it’s going to be worth it.  I plan to have it done in a few weeks from purchase.  At least to the point where we can move in and additional alterations will be minor things like cabinets, shelves, painting and the like that aren’t a huge inconvenience.  If I apply my time and energy well, and feel that I will, we’ll be out of our current rental and on to owning our first home within two years.  So many projects!

-M.C. Pletcher