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How to Enjoy (RV) Home Improvement

Farmington, NM. My goodness, how long has it been since I had a paintbrush in my hand? Seventeen years, perhaps? But there I was in Home Depot, actually looking at color charts. I smiled, reminiscing about seeing women looking at these charts. They were transfixed -- it was some kind of religious experience for them.

You know what? It was kind of fun. The color shade of "Navajo Sand" caught my eye. But say, which earth-tone color should a traveler be loyal to? Think of the reddish tones tones of Utah sandstone, the pallid calcareous tones of West Texas and New Mexico, and all the colors in the geology of our travels. Which one was best?

Who thinks up all these names that are used in the color charts? What was their college major? You'd think they would run out of words. I'm not sure the words are even that accurate. 

Now then, what color is best for the floor of my new cargo trailer? Forget 'pretty'! Some sort of buff color, resembling dirt and sand, is best.

You know, it was actually fun to paint the plywood floor. The truth is that I always liked to paint when I had a fixer-upper house. It was the thankless drudgery of surface preparation that got tiresome. There are several techniques that make the difference between loving home improvement and hating it. 

I sometimes wonder if seasonal house renovation wouldn't be a good sideline for an independent person who retired early, but not if it crowded everything else out, and that is exactly what it tends to do.

Comments

Jim and Gayle said…
I always got satisfaction out of painting but hated the prep work. Wonder if the stuff Glenn put on the exterior of his VW would have worked on your floor? Seems like it would be very durable.
Gayle
John V said…
Painting a plywood flor that is heavily exposed to outside dirt/water when boondocking and the click, click, click of doggie claws? I would never hire you as my contractor. :-)

How about some durable, easy to clean, linoleum-type of flooring product. If you plan on doing this for another ten years or so, that will be much more cost effective and practical than a paint job!
Glenn's paint job is the best I've ever seen. But we have different remodeling philosophies: he is a craftsman and perfectionist, in the best sense of the word. I am a brutal utilitarian, tightwad, and ruthless unsentimentalist, albeit a safety-oriented one.
Chris said…
And will you be sharing photos of the progress - and especially of the finished product with your loyal readers?

Chris
Bon vivant said…
Try the flooring section at Home Depot and look for the Allure vinyl plank products. The "Ultra" versions are thicker albeit a little more per foot. They're a cinch to install, fast too, with just a knife. Just take your time tho' once they stick together you can't really detach them. Likely could do your floor (exposed sections) for less than $200 and it would make a HUGE difference in appearance.
edlfrey said…
If you want additional durability and long-term good looks to that painted floor cover it with three coats of clear urethane. That will probably have it looking as good after 10 years as any linoleum-type flooring.
edlfrey said…
Boonie,
If that porch paint enamel then forget my previous comment. Sorry, was not thinking.
edlfrey said…
Bonnie,
More suggestions that you may not want. Rather than have a above floor holding tank with a discharge out the side of the trailer what about a cassette toilet. Tetford makes one as does Tek Tanks. The two rigs that I saw while at Tombstone Territories (pictured on 22 Feb 2014 at my website) were so equipped.
The Tek model is described as: A more sophisticated system consists of a plastic floor mounted toilet with an integral tank which requires a trap door behind the toilet to enable the full cassette to be removed and emptied. This trap door access from the outside what the European rigs had. The German fellow that I talked to thought our hose dumping system was strange and loved how simple it was to deal with the cassette.
John V said…
I'll compare a quality lightweight tile to your porch paint after 3 years of more than twice as much use (we weigh more than you and there are twice as many of us in our rig) and the tile will outperform the paint. We'll do a comparison of our pretty tile to your pizza-face paint job in Yuma this winter. :-)
Have you challenged me to a duel? Very well then, I never shrink from affairs of Honor.

Who cares about wear and appearance? Trifles. What really counts is the condensation between the vinyl and the wood trailer floor. How could there be condensation if the the vinyl is glued down to the wood?

And furthermore, my paint cost all of $24.

But how many trailers use glue? That costs money. (I've never tried to resurface or remove a vinyl floor that had been glued down. Maybe it's not as dreadful as it sounds.) I'll bet most just slap down a rectangle of vinyl and staple it around the perimeter. Condensation DOES happen. Bad.

You are comparing apples and oranges. An RV trailer floor is part of the structural box. The box is bolted to the frame rails.

Not so with a cargo trailer floor; it is NON-STRUCTURAL. It's easy to replace -- it's just a couple sheets of exterior grade plywood. You could cut a hole in it if you wanted and go ice-fishing through it.
Thanks Chris. I will try to be informative without putting out the sort of information that is available on CheapRVLiving.com or tnttt.com, then go to the cargo trailer section.

The scourge of RV blogs is minutiae and "practical" blow-by-blow descriptions that are painful to read. We'll see if I can avoid that.
I promised one of the Holy Prophets of the Desert that I was going to be loyal to Occam's (Ockham) Razor. So I'll just go with a porta-pottie at first. I'm not even familiar with "cassette" toilets. Thanks for the suggestion.
John V said…
Then a duel it is. I'll take Coffee Girl as my second.

You're right about the unequal comparison. In our rig the 3/8" plywood flooring is glued and screwed down with R-25 insulation in the floor. Our flooring tiles are glued down as well (they are surprisingly easy to remove with a heat gun).

We'll be working on our cargo trailer in a month or so. I'll be emailing you to find out what kind of paint you used!
Bob Giddings said…
Occam's Razor has been known to slit a throat.