Summer RV Repairs

In between our various travels this summer and spending time with family we did find time to do some needed maintenance and repairs on the RV!  Here's a quick summary of our activities.

We took the washing machine out of its housing to try to figure out why it was overheating while drying.  After removing the housing and reaching our hands into narrow awkward parts of the exhaust, we found a significant sopping wet lint buildup in the steam vent from the washing machine.  Unfortunately, this is in a part of the washing machine that you can't reach without extracting the unit and removing the cover (not like the convenient removable lint screens on a standard dryer), so I'm not sure what regular maintenance I could do to keep this buildup from happening again.  I have high hopes that it has never been cleaned since the machine was installed and thus will keep until we're ready to sell the RV...we'll see!  We're hopeful this will fix the dryer issue but we'll see for sure once I try to do some laundry on the road.

Dissecting the washing machine

Next up was our regular annual maintenance - changing oil and filters and lubricating grease fittings.  We get a little better at this every year!

Annual maintenance always involves lots of fun time for 
Aaron under the RV!

That's all we had time for before heading to Europe - after we got back, the first order of business was trying to fix the dangerous cloudy driver side window.  Aaron bought a kit for this that came with instructions on removing and taking apart the window, along with new seals with desiccant to put the window back together.  This was a scary prospect, but after we broke through the excessive caulk sealing the window to the RV itself (which apparently shouldn't have been there), it was actually pretty straightforward.  The result was a crystal clear window...which, spoiler alert, clouded up the day we left West Virginia in cold near-freezing temperatures, but cleared up again as soon as we moved south to warmer temperatures.  So it doesn't seem 100% fixed, but hopefully it'll at least hold while we're in warmer Florida for the winter!

No window!

Taking the window apart

As a side note and completely unrelated, we decided to clear a bit of stuff out of my mom's house, and so I went through my stuffed lion collection once more.  I had given away about half of the collection when we moved to Europe in 2007, and decided I really needed to pare it down again.  I kept about 15 animals and donated the rest to the Teddy Bear Brigade at Gleaning for the World, which seemed like a worthy cause.

These are the lions I donated

Next up: the muck at Sunshine Holiday Daytona destroyed one of our theoretically indestructible jack pads, so Aaron sawed it off and drilled some holes in the remaining bit so he could reattach the bottom of it so that the same buffer would exist on this jack as the others that still have intact jack pads.  Unfortunately, the other jack pads are still well and permanently attached and can't be removed without extreme effort, so it was easier to rig this up than to remove the other two.  At this point we regret putting the pads on in the first place, because aside from horrible muck they are quite nonremovable and we don't really see the benefit that was promised.

Not so indestructible!

Attaching the remaining pad with wires

Our next job was pretty straightforward - we wanted a better way to attach our waste tote to the car so we could drive it to the dump station without the effort we went through to rig things on the road.  Dad gave us a decent sized carabiner that should do the job nicely!

Waste tote hauling apparatus

Our next big planned project was to repaint the RV roof.  After some research we decided to repaint it with Bus-Kote, which is the white paint you commonly see on school buses and delivery vans.  It has microbeads in it that theoretically provide additional insulation, and it is bright white to reflect the sun.  We immediately noticed a difference in our ability just to walk on the roof barefoot without burning ourselves - time will tell if there is significant insulation value in terms of reducing our air conditioning need.  This involved constructing quite a scaffolding around the roof as Aaron did not trust me to paint the roof without falling off!

We used ladders on one side and leftover steel beams from 
our basement reconstruction on the other to form the verticals 
of the scaffolding.

We ran boards between the vertical segments to make a sort of railing

Painting the roof

Our last big - and completely unplanned - project was to replace the spring in the slide cover over the living room slide.  While we were working on other things Aaron happened to notice that the slide cover no longer had tension on it - thank goodness he noticed it before we left!  We took the apparatus off and discovered the spring that holds tension on the cover had completely snapped.  We had to replace the spring and, since we had everything taken apart anyway, decided to replace the slide cover as well.  This was another daunting task that actually turned out to be much easier than we anticipated.  The old cover had many holes in it, so we are also hoping this will fix some of the leakage problems we had during intense rains!

That's not supposed to be in two parts...

Hanging the new slide cover

That sums up our summer RV activities!  All ready to get back on the road!

 

Fun at Sherwood Forest and a Broken Dryer!

We just wrapped up another two weeks at Sherwood Forest RV Resort.  You'll find this one featuring prominently in the remainder of our time in Orlando, as it ended up having the availability we needed and it's super close to Disney.  This time around we were placed in a pull-through site we actually fit into, so that's an improvement over last time!  

Much more appropriate location for our RV!

We took advantage of our proximity to Disney to continue to enjoy Epcot's Festival of the Arts.  We completed their cuisine stroll to earn our 'free' cookie and slushie!  We enjoyed a couple of the best part of the festival - 3D Chalk Art!  Unfortunately the time of day and sunny days worked against us so we didn't get the best pictures with the shadows on the art.  We went to see the Disney on Broadway concert for the first time - I thought it was very fun, though Aaron isn't all that crazy about concerts.  They had the original singers for Mary Poppins and Tarzan on Broadway and they sang songs from those shows and a few others.  We also made it to Hollywood Studios but didn't end up going to the other parks as every time we checked the Disney app the lines were crazy long.  The bloggers we follow have commented several times that there is no longer an 'off' season at Disney, and we tend to agree.  This has us rethinking our plans for next winter, but we haven't decided anything just yet...

Rewards of our (eating) labor.

I'm supposed to be taking a flower 
from Groot

And here Aaron is rescuing Hei Hei 
(his favorite character from Moana) - 
unfortunately on this one in addition to the
shadows a storm had washed away 
the intensity of the colors

For a change of pace we decided to go to Gatorland one day - we had purchased annual passes last year while babysitting my sister's kids, and figured we should make better use of them (we hadn't been since then)!  They were doing their gator feeding show again (it was not running last year due to COVID), so we enjoyed seeing that and visiting the more remote areas of the park we hadn't seen with the kids.

The birds were very bold around the 
well-fed alligators!  

Obviously not a real gator...

As I hinted in my last post, the itinerary for our rescheduled cruise (which we were supposed to go on during our second week at Sherwood Forest this time) was changed again.  At least this time they told us on Monday instead of Thursday, so we had a little more time to NOT prepare to be on a cruise.  Aaron was sorely disappointed (I mean, I was too, but he was more so), but we decided to cancel the cruise.  It just wasn't worth paying the extra money for an itinerary they weren't doing, and we figured it was just going to keep getting changed until this phase of COVID passes, so we'll try again next year.  I've set Aaron to looking for a cruise for our anniversary in May, but in the meantime the good news on this was that we'd be in Florida for our twin nephews' birthday.  We joined them for a fun day of games - arcade and board games - good times!

Playing 7 Wonders with my sister and the twins

The bad news this trip is that the dryer part of my washer/dryer combo seems to have died.  Every time I try to run the dryer it spouts an error that apparently indicates it thinks it's overheating.  Unfortunately the unit is so deeply wedged in the RV we don't really think we can do much troubleshooting until we get back to the farm in Princeton where we have a place to do work and lots more tools.  From googling the error, it may be that something hidden just needs lint/dust cleaned, or that some part of a circuit board needs replacing, but we don't have access to any of that without disassembling the cabinet that holds the unit.  So, bummer that I won't be able to dry laundry in the RV anymore, but at least the washing feature still works!  We had some nice sunny windy days that allowed the clothes to dry quite quickly when I hung them outside.  We'll take a closer look when we get back to the farm in West Virginia in the spring.