First up: recaulking the windows and awnings on our driver's side and installing gutters on the main awning.
Window awning recaulking
Aaron had actually built the gutters way back in the fall when we were first getting ready to start this adventure, but he didn't get them installed before we left. We figured we'd install them on the road, only to figure out that we didn't have a tall enough ladder with us to really do so safely. So they made a trip untouched in our cabinets until we got back on the farm! Some glue and a couple zip ties later and they're up on the awning and *hopefully* will help keep the running water off the side of the RV.
New gutters before and after painting
Installing the new gutters
We also reglued the facing to one of our basement doors. Aaron banged the doors pretty strongly getting the facing back in place and accidentally broke one of the door strut attachments (these things were falling like flies in the fall when he was doing repairs, so no big surprise there). Our next sunny day he fixed this with a new steel plate, epoxy, and a few rivets.
Adding rivets to the new metal plate
All done! The gray is JB Weld epoxy, Aaron's go-to for small gluing jobs
Our final and MAJOR project was lubricating the 40ish lubrication points underneath the RV. This took a LOT longer than we expected, mostly because it took forever to locate all the grease fittings. Fortunately we had a list of what we were looking for...as Aaron lubricated the various points, we discovered that the ones that were easy to find appeared to be well lubricated...but the ones that were harder to find seemed like they hadn't been lubricated in a LONG time...which suggested to us that the previous owners did NOT have this list and just lubricated what they could see. Everything should be in good shape now though! One of the lubrication points was a two person job - you had to hold a finger over a release hole while pumping grease into a fitting so it would go out the other end of the joint - so I even had to get up under the RV to help! Unfortunately we don't have a picture of that rare event.
Trying to locate grease fittings
Aaron and (mostly) my dad have a slowly ongoing project of trying to figure out how to straighten or support our front hydraulic jack. It's at a bit of an angle - we think the previous owners ran over something - and when the jack is extended a lot it just looks precarious. My dad has fabricated an impressive looking bracket out of steel, and we went to a Fastenal location to get some extra long threaded rods to support the process. So far we're still in the preparation phase for that so I'll have more details later, but in my ongoing reporting on the impacts of coronavirus on our lives, I thought I'd share this picture from shopping at Fastenal.
Social distancing
That's Aaron in the neon yellow shirt. They wouldn't let you in the shop except to pay - an employee met you at the door, noted what you were looking for, and went inside the shop to try to find it. Social distancing was going great with just us and this guy, but then another person walked up and stood right at the door and encroached on everyone's space. So it was halfway working?
Finally...it's our 20th anniversary today! Staying home/staying safe this rainy (and sleety??) day in Blacksburg is a far cry from our planned 2 month cruising trip in Europe, but we're doing our best to celebrate nonetheless. I made Disney's Chocolate, Peanut Butter, Banana French Toast this morning for breakfast, which was quite a hit.
We finally got 3 consecutive days of sun, warmth, and low winds on the family farm! We were able to get some work done on several RV projects.
We have a pretty great view from inside the RV on the farm.
With rain ever on the horizon, Aaron decided patching the skylight over our shower was top priority.
View from inside the shower
The skylight is a 2-layer deal with an inner clear flexible layer (you're looking through it in the image above) and an outer semi-opaque harder plastic layer. Both are shaped (a shallow hump along an irregular edge), so replacing the whole shebang wasn't an easy option. The outer layer had numerous cracks and leaks in the seal. Aaron managed to delicately extract the shell without damaging it further, scrape off all the gunk resulting from various individuals' various attempts to patch the cracks, fix the cracks, and reattach the skylight with fresh sealant. Whew!
Patching the cracked edge
Adding foam between the inner and outer layers
The inner layer surrounded by cleaned up foam and a new bead of sealant
All done!
While he was on the roof he also added fresh sealant to many of the seams - this is a regular maintenance activity for RV owners. Over time the sealant cracks and lets water in. Our favorite sealant for the roof is Self-Leveling Dicor.
Fun on the roof
We attempted to get our ice maker working - we'd never really tried to before so we weren't sure whether it worked or not, but we had to cut the feeder line while fixing the refrigerator, so at a minimum THAT needed to be fixed.
Installing the feeder line extension
Re-installed
After hooking everything up properly and waiting several hours for the freezer to cool back down, we still had no ice. It took some creative searching but I finally found the manual for our ice maker in our Norcold 1200LRIM refrigerator. We ran all the tests except the one that had to be run while everything was warm and dry, and so far everything has checked out. We managed to accidentally turn off the water pump after re-securing the wiring, so after we got everything put back together we didn't end up actually testing it out. Fingers crossed it will work soon!
Next up: fixing the damage to the engine compartment from when we accidentally backed over a post. At the time we thought we had only bent a bit of the back grille, but when Aaron pulled it off to repair it we discovered things were a bit worse...we had broken the sunken bolt holes in the plastic case around some kind of wiring box.
Those four screws were supposed to be holding the plastic box on...
Close up of the plastic box with the mounting holes sheared off
Neither of us was very surprised at the damage - it seemed miraculous at the time that we hadn't done any more damage than the grille - and we were lucky that even this damage wasn't very major. Aaron fixed this by running longer bolts through the apparatus and using washers on the outside of the plastic box.
So what was I doing during all of this you might ask? Well, a lot of the time I was monitoring the ladder, grabbing tools, etc. But my one main accomplishment for this time was to staple up insulation inside many of the cabinets at the ceiling of the RV.
Insulation installed
As you can kind of see, many of these cabinets act as a pantry for us, and got unhappily hot when we got any kind of sun. We've seen from other RV channels that adding insulation like this can help, hope they're right!
One thing I don't have a picture of but did want to mention because it took us FOREVER to find this video...we have a Winegard Togo Roadlink to provide internet via AT&T. It has been a fairly constant headache for us, though when it's working it's great. Our latest error was a "no SIM installed" error, and no amount of restarting was working for us. Aaron found this video on YouTube.
This actually worked! I'm linking it here just in case it can help someone else... Now, unfortunately, about 12 hours later the same error popped up, but we did it again and again it worked immediately and lasted until we left the farm the second time. If nothing else this gives us something that seems to be reliable that we can do when we get these errors on the device.
And FINALLY...since it is Star Wars Day … once we finished working on the RV I went back to the kitchen and baked up some fun sugar cookies!
