Half Done?

We arrived at Alliance Coach on Sunday to an entirely full campground and RV's everywhere!  Business is booming here.  Or lots of broken coaches.  Our service writer, Robbie came out promptly Monday morning, discussed what our needs were and was quickly followed by our tech, John.  We find out that they have never actually done a changeout from Carefree slide toppers to Girard slide toppers before.  John is a meticulous perfectionist, and although it appeared as if he was going very slowly, he was doing an excellent job and learning the ins and outs of this exchange at the same time.  Now it is Wednesday morning, we will be heading back to the shop at 7am, and we have 2 of the 4 toppers installed, 4 of the 5 window and door awning fabrics replaced, so today we expect to get the remaining 2 slide toppers exchanged, the final window awning fabric replaced, and if we are real lucky, the 2 main patio awning fabrics replaced, then it's on the paint shop tomorrow to paint the new toppers.

Hoped to be out of here midweek, but it's looking like Friday, and that's okay as they are doing a great job so far.

More developments

We had a pretty quiet week.  We did a lot of prep work for my mother's memorial service that we held yesterday.  It was quiet and nice, just what she wanted.

On the motorhome front, a few more unexpected items.  We have to be ready to move on Sunday as we are going up to Alliance Coach Sunday through.......Friday maybe to get all new Girard slide topper awnings installed and our Carefrees removed, and all new awning fabric for our 2 patio awnings, door awning and all of our window awnings.  We may have them repair our front driver's side wheel well that is a bit torn at the top from touching the tire in a very sharp turn in a precarious slope we encountered.  Time will tell as our patience grows thin sitting and waiting and waiting.  To the issue of moving, we needed to get the refrigerator hooked back up to water and secure it in its cubby prior to our trip.  Come to find out with all the in and out and jostling, we were unable to get it back out!  So had to grab the tools once again, cut some more tile, chip it out and then roll it out.  Well when we hook up the water, guess what, the hose connections leak.  Big surprise, right?  Off to the hardware store, new fittings, oh great they don't fit, back to the store, then another store, new fittings, more leaks, recut the tubing, clean it all up, put it back together, and.......no leaks!  But to be sure we left the refrig unsecured and will pull it out again this morning and do our final check, then button it up for good.  Now makes us wonder if there was possibly a leak from the frig to add to our floor problems????  It sure seemed to be dry when we pulled it out to begin with, but who knows?

I got the new switch for our power cord reel woes.  Good to go right?  No!  Put in the brand new switch, and it still only runs in one direction.  Man, this is killing me.  Troubleshoot some more, call the manufacturer and together we decide that one of the two limit switches is probably bad.  There is one limit switch to shut off power when the cord is entirely run out, and one limit switch that shuts it down when the cord comes all the way in.  Okay no problem, we never utilize the limit switches anyway so I am just going to wire around them.  So in a few minutes through contortions to get to the wiring, I get them both bypassed, ask Jan to hit the switch and....it still only runs in one direction!  Bad, bad words ensued.  So I do continuity checks on the wires from the switch to the motor, and by the way I had done this several times before, and find out there is no continuity in one wire, huh?  So I track it down pull out the wire looms to follow the wire and what do we have here?  Monaco, the coach manufacturer, for some absolutely unknown reason has buried an in-line fuse in only one of the legs to the motor!!!!  And it is blown.  Replace the fuse, all is well, then remove that fuse and its assembly, as the entire unit is already protected with a circuit breaker, and now finally it is working fine and I have an extra switch, yippee, for a measly $40 that I don't need.  Live and learn.

Also along with our upcoming remodel of the coach we have been trying to decide what to do with our fabric couch.  It is showing some wear and we thought to replace it with a loveseat and a custom table, but through trial and error and some ideas from the RV show, we decided to replace the couch with a Stressless chair which we ordered, and a cherry filing cabinet that we have in storage.  So in a month or so when the chair arrives we will get that done.

Quite a week

First of all, Karen had to bug out to College Station, TX to help our friend Rachel, as she had a skiing accident and injured her knee.  So Karen is helping her out and is expected back tonight.  The good news is they don't expect she will need surgery, just physical therapy.

Next I want to show you how fickle Jan and I are.  The tile guy showed up to take a look at our floor, said he could do it no problem, but it might be a couple months.  Now Jan and I have decided not to do the tile, and just stick with the new wood throughout the coach except for the toilet compartment where we will just stick with our existing tile.  What can I say??

We went to the Tampa Super Show, one of the largest RV shows in the country.  We aren't looking for a motorhome or anything, it's just fun to look and see what's new.  Last year we were very disappointed and not impressed with anything, but this year we found a couple coaches that were very nice and innovative.  We saw the new Dynasty by Monaco.  It's a big deal as it has been quite a road for Monaco, the original manufacturer of our coach, they went bankrupt and after a bit Navistar, a big truck company bought them, but didn't do too much with the company.  In fact they produced only a few motorhomes and they weren't too popular.  Then Navistar decided to get out of the motorhome business and ASV, the parent of Fleetwood bought them, ditched the very desirable Monaco Roadmaster chassis, and has just built the "new" Dynasty on a Freightliner chassis.  It is getting mixed reviews and Jan and I can add to the not impressed group.  Too tight inside, the slide comes in over the kitchen sink, windows don't open except for a tiny bit at the bottom, a second tier hydronic hot water and heating system, a bath and a half design which doesn't appeal to us, and a $650,000 price tag!

Then the next day we went to Sebring, FL to meet our friends John and Diane to go to an expo for ultralight aircraft.  We had a very nice evening visiting, and then on to the expo.  John is looking to buy an airplane, with me, if he had his way, but it doesn't work for us right now to his chagrin.  We had a good time looking at a huge variety of aircraft from powered parachutes to gyrocopters to amphibians.  And had the added pleasure of watching Formula One racers going around the Sebring racetrack at incredible speeds!  John and Diane got a demo ride in the Air Cam, the plane John is contemplating.  They were very impressed.

Then today Jan went to a craft show to sell her photographic wares, and I tackled getting our floor done so we could put everything away and live normally again.  After a few surprises and Jan getting back to help, we can finally say we are ready to live with it until we can get the wood floor installed in December.  It turned out well and the slide even works!

TaDa!

So now we have to call the tile guy back and tell him we've changed our minds.  He's so busy I think he will be relieved.  Then on to our other projects.  Oh yeah, one more thing.  We are planning to go to Alaska this summer, and had planned to take the ferry up to Alaska from Prince Rupert, BC and then back from Haines to Bellingham, WA, a long return trip, 3 1/2 days.  Well we intend to have a LOT of fish in our freezer on the way back and were concerned about it making it back frozen as you have to turn off everything on the motorhomes while on the ferry.  Unfortunately in the midst of our floor repair crawling in and out of the basements we accidentally knocked the plug out of the freezer.  When we discovered it only 1 1/2 days later everything was thawed and had to be thrown out.  That was bad enough but then it dawned on us there was no way the fish would remain frozen for our ferry ride.  That prompted a big pow wow with us and Karen to figure out what to do.  Well, we solved it!  We are now taking the ferry from Bellingham, WA to Juneau, AK, getting off for several days, then getting back on the ferry from Juneau to Haines, AK, and then we will drive back with our freezers full of fish.  We have our reservations all made and paid for.  This way we can head back south whenever we want to rather than coordinating for a southbound ferry.  And plan to have our freezers empty for the trip north.  So Alaska, here we come.

Lots more progress

We have reached a stopping point in our floor project since my last post.  We hit it hard and got the final plywood down and we now have a livable floor until we complete the demolition later this year to install the hardwood floors.

First piece of plywood installed
below the offending panel that is
completely sealed now.

A good view of where it all began.  This piece of plywood was a real struggle getting in.  The narrow wall on the right side hangs just off the floor, in fact exactly 1/2" by design, but with the moisture that had gotten in that dimension was probably closer to 3/8", so it took some effort to "slide" the 1/2" plywood under the wall into position.  

A good view of our mess and
the next sheet of plywood
standing by.

This shot is before we covered the rest of the subfloor with the black plastic membrane and installed the full sheet of plywood.  That went pretty well, we were able to use the entire sheet as a template for cutting the top 1/2" OSB so it would fit properly.  I need all the help I can get cutting.  My normal motto is cut twice, still too short:-)

All in and looking good!

But the real "piece de resistance" was getting the refrigerator back in its cubby!

Back in its home.

Which made Jan very, very happy!  We have decided to tile just in front of the galley and in the toilet compartment, and I am encouraged that the guy we called to possibly do it is coming next week to take a look.  We were afraid he'd just say no, he was too busy, as the building trade is firing back up again in this area of Florida.  We'll see.  I'd be a lot happier if he did the install instead of me.  The rest will wait until December when we redo the rest of the floor.

Now in case you think we didn't have enough to do, we just replaced the big front TV, yeah, again.  The Toshiba we had installed was acting up, not turning on, quitting, and a HDMI input went bad.  So all that coupled with the fact that neither Jan and I were completely pleased with it, we yanked it out and installed a new Samsung 46" HDTV.  And wow, what a picture!  Now we have a repairman coming to fix the Toshiba and some lucky person on eBay will get to buy a refurbished good as new TV.

So now we get to move on to other projects.  Our new Girard slide topper awnings have been ordered for our scheduled install the last week of the month.  We are also going to replace all the window awning, door awning, and both large patio awnings with new fabric at the same time.  We still have an AC unit to install and a air compressor to replace, and who knows maybe we can get Jason to pop down and help out?

We just had a nice lunch and a great birthday dinner with some good friends, Dick and Ann, Jan, Harvey and Jean, and have seen a lot of our regular Florida friends here at the park.  It is almost completely full, it seems that this year the season is starting early.  

Progress on our disaster, and thankfully not as bad as it looked!

Our travail began with a broken tile in front of the refrigerator.  We have over the years had a couple breaks, they are inevitable in a flexing, bumping house going down the road and we had pretty much ignored it as we had an appointment to have hardwood floors installed in December.  Well, it seemed to be getting worse somehow, more breakage, and were we feeling a soft spot in the floor at the broken tile?!?  How could that be?  After all it is almost in the center of the coach?  Now that we are parked here in Florida for 4 months we decided we needed to figure it out.

So we dug up the broken tile in front of the frig and OMG, it was black and rotted underneath!

The first tile of many

We got the frig all the way out of our work area and started tearing up tiles to see how extensive the water damage was.

More removal

Still more

Area seems to be getting bigger!
You can see the water damage in the foreground

We ended up taking up about 65 square feet of tile and 1/2" underlayment.  You can see the black membrane in the pictures, that is the plastic layer that Monaco installed between the 3/4" sub or structural floor and the underlayment and the one thing that saved our butts.  It kept all the water above the 3/4" floor and under the tiles.  There were a few areas where the 3/4" was a bit damp, but that was all.  

A good shot of the plastic membrane

By now we had somewhat recovered from that absolute feeling of dread and tried to see the good side of all this.  One we found a leak that left unchecked had the potential of destroying our motorhome, it gave us an opportunity to do some demolition of tile and save some money in the upcoming floor redo, plug and seal the offending leak, and reevaluate and determine what our new floor will look like.

The culprit in this entire ordeal is a panel on the side of the motorhome that normally is installed to provide access to an RV type refrigerator, ours has a residential frig just like in a house, so we were surprised that Monaco still installed the panel, but never gave it a thought as every motorhome that we have owned has had one of these panels.  The rub is they replaced the normal plastic sealing panel with a panel fabricated out of aluminum.  It turns out that with every rain and every wash or any moisture on the side of the motorhome water poured into the coach, and it evidently went down a seam in the floor and was trapped under the tile, and since tile and grout are somewhat porous some of it would evaporate so we were never ever aware this was happening.  When we pointed a hose on the panel, it leaked so bad we might as well have just put the hose inside the coach!

The offending panel

A shot with the panel removed
You can also see the crack the water
traveled down to the foreground

I can tell you now that panel will never leak again!  I will be the first to admit we are not used to this kind of work, and also tile does not come up easily, it fights you all the way.  Even after doing several and getting the hang of it we still averaged 15-20 minutes EACH!  And just to make it interesting it shatters into small razor sharp pieces.  No fun especially with all the work on our knees getting up and down constantly.  But we kept telling ourselves it could be so much worse and that we had to get the tile up anyway for our floor redo.

My butt being kicked!

Remaining positive.

So now we have about 100 square feet of tile removed and all the bad underlayment.  We are replacing the underlayment with plywood.  Oh I should add we also took this opportunity to reinforce the main floor by installing 5 extra "joists" under the floor.  That was accomplished by removing access panels in the basements and Jan crawling in to prep and glue them in place while I drove screws in from above.  Our floor is flat and stronger than it ever was now.

Looking forward
All the tiles on the right have since been removed 

We have had several ideas come up as we have toiled away.  Originally we were just going to tear out all the tile ( the entire motorhome with the exception of most of the bedroom and one slide is tile) and replace with hardwood, then we thought, well heck since we had done all this anyway maybe we wanted to reinstall different tile in the galley, hallway, and toilet compartment, then we finally decided on our final plan to install some new tile in front of the galley and in the toilet compartment with the rest being all hardwood.  So meanwhile we are also tile shopping.

Contemplating the options in our very
cluttered workspace

So all in all we have been very busy and very sore doing all this work.  Karen has been very helpful by making us delicious dinners each evening which we crawl over to moaning with our aches and pains.  So now we are almost done, and have tile ordered and either we will install it or possibly we will have it installed, we don't know yet.  I'll keep you up to date, oh yeah, we are also just enjoying Florida and the warmth!

A glimpse of the reason for my delay in postings :-(

I know it's been awhile since I posted.  We have been very, very busy dealing with a very unexpected problem.  We are gaining on  it and I will follow up with a detailed post that will describe our discovery, repair, and recovery from it.

Under our refrigerator,
just discovering the problem

Beginning to find out how widespread
and how bad it really is

Seems we have had a leak totally unbeknownst to us for who knows how long.  Water had permeated our floor, thankfully Monaco had installed two distinct layers of floor separated by a tough plastic waterproof membrane that saved the main 3/4" floor.  But over an area of approximately 50 square feet the upper layer of 1/2" board under the existing tile was totally destroyed.  We are in process of tearing it up, fixing the leak(that was first!), repairing the floor, and figuring out how we will proceed from here.  Thankfully we have been planning to remove our tile floor and replace it with wood so we are now well on our way:-)  We are working through several different plans for our final redone floor and I will share our planning, pictures of the project, and hopefully a beautiful completed floor.