By Jon | November 10
In 2015 and 2016, my family and I embarked on 16 months of living on the road. We spent the first 9 months in a 34ft 5th wheel, but soon realized it was far too large for the kind of off-the-grid camping we wanted to do. So we sold it and opted to buy something older to fix up. While this post is a few years old, the ideas (and gear!) involved still hold up.
Here’s the original post…
We recently sold our 34’ 5th wheel and opted for a smaller and cheaper alternative. So we found a great deal on a 27’ travel trailer in San Diego, but she’s a 2006 and needed some updating. But we were lucky that she was used lightly and taken good care of. No systems needed to be replaced or fixed – she just needed a facelift.
Our outdated walls and cabinets got the first round of love. I removed the cabinets (the trailer was in storage) and brought them back to Erin’s parents house to get painted. Sanding went pretty quick with an electric palm sander Erin’s dad had. We opted for a Behr paint and primer in one and the cabinets took the paint pretty well. It required a little touch-up after the fact, but not bad at all.
We also opted to keep the hardware from the cabinets and paint those as well. We stripped them as best as we could and used a Rust-o-leum metallic spray paint. The results were decent, but we decided to go ahead with “good enough”.
The only snag I hit painting was in a few spots under the cabinets. The paint decided to instantly separate once it was applied. My best guess was that there was some oil in the wood in these spots that was leeching out. I tried over-painting it, which worked in most places, but not in all. File this one under “good enough”, too.
We originally put “flooring” on the long-term list, but after seeing the state of the carpet in the bedroom – and the fact that we wanted to paint the walls all the way to the floor – we opted to tack it on.
To be honest, I had nightmares about flooring for about 2 weeks before starting the project. Every video I watched on YouTube showed a guy putting down laminate wood flooring in a nice, square room. Start in one corner and work your way out. But my floor had obstacles in it every few feet – a dinette, a wall, a bed, a cabinet. None of these could be moved, so I knew I’d be cutting a lot of planks to fit.
We bought some laminate flooring from Costco and I bought a mitre saw off Craigslist for $40 (cheaper than a day rental from Home Depot). I started by laying down the underlayment, then got to work laying the first and second rows. These went down pretty easy because of where I chose to start – along the passenger side wall by the front door. Nothing was easy after that. I probably spent as much time trying to visualize cuts and problem solve than I actually did laying anything down. It required some mental gymnastics, but I got it done over 3 nights at the trailer. There are a few parts I wish I could re-do, but … “good enough”.
A great option for portable solar. Park in the shade, but deploy the suitcase to power your gear during the day.
This is the project I was most looking forward to. Well, I wasn’t excited about putting holes in my roof, but I was excited about the end result. We spent the first 6 months on the road with a single 100W Renogy suitcase solar panel and charger. It worked ok for the most part, but I had to get up each morning and deploy it (I pakced it up at night to prevent theft) and at only 100W, we rarely ever got back up to full charge. So strapping 300W to the roof was a big step up for us.
We’ve heard amazing things about AM Solar in Oregon. Their solar kits are top-notch and they provide excellent support if you opt to install yourself. But the dream kit we want weighs in at around $2,000 and we were on a budget. So instead, we opted for a cheaper 300W MPPT Renogy kit.
Everything you need for a powerful RV solar setup: panels, cable, charger, Bluetooth monitor.
The biggest issue was how to run the cables from the roof, to the charger, then out to the batteries. I opted to mount the charger in the front storage area underneath the master bed on the driver side. I cut a small piece of plywood and mounted the controller to that. I was able to run the thick 8-gauge cable from the controller to the battery by popping a small hole in the black covering below the front diamond plate behind the batteries. Not the cleanest way to run the cable, but … good enough. Now the fun part – a hole in the roof. The length of cable provided to me for this run was pretty short, so running the cable down the fridge vent wasn’t an option unless I wanted to buy a bunch more cable and deal with running the cable from the back near the fridge all the way to the front where the controller was. So I opted to drill a hole inside my closet (driver side) and up to the roof. I have a long history of drilling and missing. My past is littered with bad patch jobs from trying to drill into studs. I’m not proud of it and drilling up and into the roof scared the heck out of me. But after measuring and re-measuring a few times, I managed to drill up and out the top of the roof in the right spot.
I grabbed an outdoor metal wiring box to run the cable down and through the hole. In retrospect, I wish I had installed a slightly larger box because the wire only barely fit through the box. I sealed the hole with a ton of Dicor and moved on to the panels.
My mistake here was to attach the panels to the roof before wiring them together. Once they were screwed down, I only had about a half inch of clearance underneath them – not quite enough to get the wires to come together. So I unscrewed the middle one to get them wired up. And behold! The sun shown down and gave us electricity!
Not a lot to tell here, but yeah … mattress. The ones that the trailer came with were old spring mattresses that sucked. So we decided to throw down for an upgrade. This 10-inch memory foam mattress fit the bill. Ironically, it’s kind of heavy and makes lifting the bed to get at the underneath storage a bit of a pain. I’ll fix that later. Every time I go into the bedroom to fix it, I decide instead to take a nap. It’s that comfortable.
Worth every penny for a good night's sleep. These gel memory foam mattresses are infinitely more comfortable than the crappy mattresses that come with most RV's.
Finally, “repack the axles” came up on the TODO list. I read a few blog posts and watched a handful of videos and decided I was very much done being handy. And I didn’t want to screw this up. I found a RV repair 5 minutes from the RV storage place that had a 4 star review on Google. They charged me $270 to repack all 4 wheels. Not bad for the peace of mind.
Drum roollllllll… the numbers!
TOTAL: $2,884.47
Yeah, that “misc” category was no joke. Every trip to Home Depot was $80 here, $60 there. I lost track of all the different tiny things I had to buy: finish nails, plywood, new saw blade, flooring install kit, spackle, and on and on. If you’re gonna do a project like this, make sure to set aside a good chunk for these odds and ends – especially if you’re on the road and your tool set is limited.