A Few Hacks

I’m always on the lookout for good RV’ing ideas.  Some of the ones I come across are better than others — but some seem to me to be a waste of time and money.

I just don’t buy this as a good RV solution. But if you ARE going to do this, at least strip off the old flooring and do the job right.

For instance, there’s the idea about using stick-on flooring tiles to improve the look of your old linoleum flooring. You know, that sounds like it should be a good, cheap fix.  But, I’m here to tell you that I have used stick-on flooring tiles in the past and to me there are some real flaws to this as an RV’ing solution. They might be better in a sticks & bricks home where the temperatures are more controlled, but I don’t think it’s a great solution for the varied environments of an RV. The idea of putting your new tiles ON TOP OF the old ones is never a great idea.  For one thing if there is any other flooring material in your RV the levels of the adjacent materials will be off/different.   More importantly, you’ll never get the old material clean enough to insure a good bond. If you could get it clean enough, our old linoleum squares are textured, so if yours are like ours, you aren’t going to get a firm bond all the way across the new tiles.  Finally, given the fact that RV’s can go through pretty extreme changes in temperature our experience of flooring tiles would indicate that the bond will fail a lot sooner than you’d like to think.  Ok — enough of negativity.  Here are three more that I like — depending on your application.

Paracord hangers work quite well.

This hack to make awning hangers from paracord and short sections of aluminum or copper tubing is a good idea.  I tried it with Journey when we still had her and it works wonderfully.  The tubing slides into the spare awning track and you can make the paracord loupe any size you want depending on your project.

We’ve got one of these — which works fine for getting up on top of the coach.

but if you want to hang awning groove hangers you need something like this.

The only drawback to this approach — as we found with our new coach Serendipity is that if the awning is too high you have a hard time getting the paracord loupes into the track — we’ve given up using them as we don’t have the right kind of ladder to hang the little buggers.   C’est la vie.

I would never in a million years thought about using ID badge hangers!

When I saw this idea… using ID Badge hangers instead of the paracord loupes I thought that’s not a bad suggestion.  But now unless I stand on a picnic table I still can’t reach the awning — the newer coach has it’s awning mounted both higher on the body, as well as being a design that doesn’t extend low enough to reach from the ground.  We no longer have legs that we can walk into — but we can’t reach the end of the awning — seems with RV’ing there’s always a TRADE OFF!

One thing that has perplexed me a lot while RV’ing has been the way that wasps seem to love to crawl into the air vents for our furnaces.  We haven’t had them build a nest in there yet but Peggy is scared to bits about wasps and they aren’t fun to have flying around the RV and I have been wondering about ways to rid ourselves of them without restricting the air supply for the furnace or some other equally stupid idea.

The next buying trip we make we’re going to try this one out.  Flea Collars, are supposed to contain chemicals that will mask the propane aroma that seems to be the wasp attractant. We don’t have a lot of wasps here in the forest — so it may be a while before we know for sure if this works.  There are other camping sites where the wasps have been much more of a problem than here.  But I’m eager to know if this works.

Here’s another that looks good but I haven’t tried yet.  Window and Door Screen Repair Tape!  Even though it’s easy enough to replace the small screens on your RV, there can be times that the repair isn’t possible and you need a temporary fix (because goodness knows if you drive down the road with a damaged screen it’s going to tear before you get where you’re going!  High speed is tough on screen fabric.

There you have it,  another day in paradise looking for new ways to make paradise a little bit more paradisiacal.

Thanks for stopping by and I’ll be here to chat tomorrow.