I had the realization today that our year of mobile living doesn’t have to be limited to travelling by RV. Trish and I have talked about doing a family bike tour a few times, so why not start our year with a bike tour? I’d much rather bike tour the Desert Southwest than the Northeast, but doing the tour at the beginning has the advantage of not having to take all the camping gear, etc. in the RV. Not to mention that there’s nothing like tent living for a few weeks to make a person appreciate the palace on wheels that is our 26-foot RV.
Another thing do ponder while I’m prepping the RV or triaging my filing cabinet…
While cleaning out the filing cabinet, I came across the folder marked “maps”, and found a map for canoeing the Minnesota Boundry Waters. I was about to put it back in the folder with all the other “someday” maps, when I realized that “someday” is only 28 weeks away! We could do that too!
Not exactly a profound realization, but there was wonderful sense of freedom when I understood that anything is possible, and everything is on the table.
Having moved one of the seats from the dinette to the sofa’s former location, I had to reframe the seat to accommodate the RV’s furnace which was now underneath it, as well as redo the front face of the seat since the old version of the seat was built into the wheel well on the right side of its face. Fortunately, I had some veneer to spare, as the platform that supported the sofa had the same veneer as its upper surface.
Here’s the completed bench:
Trish also mentioned that she would like the drawers under the sink removed in favor of more cabinet space, so I pulled out the shelves to take a look:
I visited the website to check the countdown, and accidentally typed in “workbeforeyoulive.com”. I’m so glad that’s not my reality for much longer!
I spent most of yesterday working in the RV. Our largest storage area in the RV is under the last 30 inches of the bed. The forward majority of the bed rests on an elevated “floor” which is the roof of the forward pass-through compartment which is accessed by a pair of hatches on either side of the outside of the RV. The foot of the bed rests atop a toy chest-sized enclosure. Lifting the toy chest’s lid is really hard, as the matresses are being bent up as the lid is lifted. Getting stuff in and out is accomplished by resting your knees on the floor, lifting the lid with both hands, resting the lid on your shoulder, and quickly loading and unloading before your shoulder starts to bruise. I used a fish scale to measure the force necessary to lift the lid, and I exceeded the scale’s 60 pound limit.
This problem is a thing of the past thanks to a pair of 120lb gas struts. Now the lid lifts with one hand and stays up. The lid also goes down with just a few pounds of pressure.
Now all I have to do is find some kind of trim for the leading edge of the lid, as its rough wood edge catches on the underside of the matresses. Once that’s solved, it should be perfect!
When we’re on the road, we need to have access to critical documents. Also, I don’t want to pack up the four-drawer filing cabinet that’s full of the last 20 years of our “important” papers. We recently purchased the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300, a high speed scanner that scans both sides of the page as it feeds it through. The software can be set to treat each page as a separate document, or treat multiple scans as one large document. When done scanning, the document is rendered to PDF and uploaded to Google Drive. The PDFs are scanned for text before uploading, so they can be searched by phrase in Google Drive. I then manually title the documents and place them into folders for easy retrieval later. The Google Drive PC application then downloads the documents back to my PC, preserving the directory structure I’ve set up in Google Drive. The end result is searchable digital documents sorted into folders, stored on my PC and backed up in the cloud. Our daughter mans (girls?) the shredder and the papers go out the door.
I’ve already reduced the amount of paper in the filing cabinet by half, and now my documents are available anywhere, anytime!
Facebook
Instagram
Email