Angie Marie We’ve been full-timing in our fifth wheel toy hauler for nearly a year now, and have avoided renovating our RV the majority of it mostly due to time and money, but also because we are stationary at an RV park so using power tools and making a mess outside isn’t ideal. The only renovating we accomplished before we moved in it full time was to turn the toy hauler into a bedroom for our girls, which involved building custom bed frames, adding new trim and a few other odds and ends. Now that we’ve nearly reached the one year mark, we’ve had the itch to make the RV suit our family a little more. Below are our reasons for renovating our RV, and maybe it will inspire you to do the same.
After living in our RV full-time for a year, we realized that it would be best to customize the RV to our family’s wants and needs.
Renovating Our RV to Customize the Space
One area we’ve recently renovated is our bathroom. There was very limited space for towels, toilet paper and so many other things. We hung up our own towel rack and added another cabinet to the bathroom to give us more space. In addition, we also replaced the bathroom sink faucet. We are considering redoing the sink and cabinetry altogether in the future. We also recently decided to completely redo our living room because the set up makes it rough for watching movies and eating together. This involves taking out our dining room table and TV entertainment stand, and putting them across from us on the other slide and side of the RV, so we can put in a new residential couch. Which brings me to my next bullet point.
Our recent project that I will make a new blog post for once it’s complete. We are rearranging our living room setup and replacing furniture. This whole slide will have our new couch plus our refrigerator. The opposite slide will have our TV, fireplace and entertainment stand. Then the extra space where we had another love seat will feature our dining room table that my husband is going to custom build as booth seating for us.
Renovating Our RV for Better Quality
Since RVs are built with the cheapest and lightest materials possible, things break and fall apart easily. Our RV couches starting peeling and flaking everywhere within a month of us living in it. We wanted to cover them, but then the heating elements quit working on them and one of the lock buttons also fell off. We’ve been super frustrated by them lately. Not to mention that they are such a unique size that it was hard to find small enough furniture to replace them with that wasn’t crazy expensive, which lead us to getting a bigger and nicer residential couch and redoing our living room so that it made more sense to us. Other items we plan to address are the window blinds, removing the valances, and replacing some trim. Renovating our RV with quality materials means that it will last longer.
The benefit of having a toy hauler is that we can move large pieces of furniture into and out of our camper with ease. This is our new couch that will go in our living room soon. The challenge of living in the camper full time is that we have to work on it while we live in it, and the small space makes it tricky.
Renovating Our RV to Personalize It
Our RV is our home on wheels while we wait to build our house, and we want it to feel more like a home to us. Adding shelving, hanging up pictures, laying down rugs, and painting the cabinets and walls are all on our to-do list to make it feel more like a home. When you renovate your RV, you get to make fun design and decor choices. We are hoping to take the dark and bland look that our RV came from the factory with and add pops of color, light fixtures and so much more so that our RV feels more like home to us.
It was important to us that we could customize our girls’ bedroom so that they enjoyed it. They were hesitant about moving into the RV, but once they saw how fun their new room was, they were very excited. This is one of the main reasons why we held off renovating the rest of the RV. We really wanted them to have their space personalized and customized, and that took a lot of time and planning.
These are the three main reasons why we are renovating our RV. I didn’t want to put in additional money or time, but since we are full timing for at least two more years, we really need to make our RV last longer, feel more like our space and make everything as functional as possible. Be sure to follow us over on Instagram to keep up with our full-time RV adventure as well as our homesteading one.
