With no offense to the Winnebago Corporation and the gold marble wallpaper they install, “grandma’s living room” wasn’t the design vibe we were going for in our home. Add in white tiles with just enough faint gray marbling to make them look constantly dirty, orange boxy window valences, plus an uncomfortable couch all to reinforce to the “this vehicle was not made in this decade” design. While travel plans remain on hold, it seemed like a good time to give Alice a facelift.
First to go was the awful gold wallpaper. Since it’s part of the wallboard, other RVers recommended an oil based primer prior to painting. What they failed to mention was that before painting can take place, there’s full days of applying painters tape to every tiny curve, corner, and edge, of which there are a shocking number in the main cabin. If you ever wondered if oil paint fumes and 90+ degree temps in a small space was a fun way to spend a weekend, let me save you the cost of a gallon of Kilz and assure you that it sucks. But like the color on a 1970s Polaroid, the memory of overheated days has been replaced by a coat of the ever popular Sherwin Williams Agreeable Gray in the main cabin and the Caribbean-evoking Manitou Blue in the bathroom.
Since painting was so much fun, surely ripping the flooring up and replacing it with plank vinyl would be easier, right? Glue down plank vinyl. Glue turned out to be the sticky part of the project, no pun intended. It is our deeply held belief that the installer of the “it’s not dirty, it just looks it” tile was paid by number of gallons of glue used to attach it to the subfloor. Of particular torment was a small carpet pad thickly rubber cemented directly to the metal base of the passengers chair. Cleaning that 12″ square area took longer than the rest of the entire RV. After a brief and unanimous discussion, the decision was made to leave the carpet under the driver’s side chair.
A buyer picked up the old couch and a new one is on order. The final step was to pull off the window valences, which are being replaced with day/night cellular shades. They will not be the pumpkin orange color of the ones they replaced.
