So we’ve been delayed by a few days with setting off on our first extended journey. We’re waiting on a few “we-owe” items from the dealer, along with a service date for the new LP tank.
Work – both regular projects, and getting ourselves well set to take the office on the road, along with getting the farm and house ready – really mowing the lawn, has kept us at home a few days longer as well. I mow about 5 acres of lawn with my hard working, trusty John Deere. The lawn is getting a nice short cut this week in anticipation of a few weeks of growth. While our adult kids and in-laws will still be at the homestead, the lawn is “my” baby and I am kind of particular on how it gets maintained and cut. It’s been an ongoing project since 2005, and I take great pride in the way it looks versus how it looked when we bought the property.
We’re hoping to head off to the dealer by mid-week and then off for a few weeks of travel.
We’ve been keeping ourselves busy with getting the MotorHome ready with packing it up, fixing minor things that were missed by the dealer, making updates and enhancements to suit our needs and more.
A few projects that got completed this week include:
– moving the trailer brake controller to a better location: The dealer installed this for us prior to delivery, but it wasn’t really in the best of locations for me … to the left of the steering wheel, where it was blocked by the wheel and too close to my left knee.
While moving the controller, I took the time to take the instrument panel out to fix some squeaks and rattles. I found a few dash pieces that were broken away from their other riveted/screwed together parts, drilled a few new holes, set some new rivets and screws and it made a noticeable difference on my drive over to the DMV for a VIN Verification. I’m thinking about adding a few strategic pieces of dynamat sound deadening material to the plastic parts of the dash and overhead console bottom to give the pieces some weight and cut down on the rattling and resonance.
– Moving the inverter in the bedroom: While we have great closet and shoe storage in the bedroom, we don’t have any drawer space. So now that the inverter has been moved out of the small closet space, we can make better use of that space for clothes and maybe some wood, plastic or fabric drawers.
We kind of lucked into this modification. The original tube TV was in the bedroom when we looked at the MH, but during dealer inspection they discovered it did not work properly and replaced it with a 19″ LCD HD TV with built in DVD. So not only did we lose some weight, we gained space to take the inverter out of the small closet. While I appreciate the newly gained storage space, I do think that I’ll make a cover to hide the invertor when its not in use.
Next up … adding two wall mounted folding tables/desks to the bedsides for our laptops. We stream our home office TV’s to our laptops and phones using Slingboxes at home and Verizon 3G/4G on the road, and with HDMI out of the laptops and into the TV, we can stream to the TV as well.
