As we get closer to leaving I just want to be done with the interior. This wont actually happen but at least I finally finished the pom-pom border around ceiling/wall corner.
It’s not hard and you can do it just about anywhere. On my first car I glued them around the edges of the interior and made my piece of junk Ford LTD into a chola-mobile. Gotta love the dingle balls.
The RV is not big, 19 feet. Pretty much the smallest livable, full featured motorhome you can find. This means there isn’t much space for anything. It is meant to sleep about 6 people on a camping trip but living in it is something else completely. Everything I own is in this RV and most of what I own is art/photography supplies. I also have my dog, her things, my cameras, laptop, monitor, blankets, folding mattress, pillow top and clothes.. and that’s the bare minimum I can’t live without. Ross owns even less, way less actually. Even still, he’s not sharing the space yet and it is already crowded at times between me, Chena and my myriad of art and decorating projects.
One of the best solutions I could come up with to make a little space was to alter part of the RV design itself. It was quite possibly the most foolish design I can imagine them including in an RV- the unusably small bench like couch that turns into a “double bed”. When the bed is fully pulled out, it takes up the entire back part of the RV and completely blocks the door. The door may open outwards, meaning they haven’t exactly blocked a fire exit but really.. they have. In a panic who isn’t going to stumble and fall and flail in flames trying to clear a bed to get to the door?
The couch consists of 2 pillows. One very long “single bed” wide pillow and one completely idiotic folding in half foam piece of garbage for the back. Folded it was about 15 inches wide (good for setting plants in the window but bad for everything else). After several attempts at sleeping on it, in my search for the ideal sleeping situation, it was far too irritating to get out of the RV and I now use the front bed. If a person was anything but young and agile, it would be especially annoying – and with the 3 foot drop off waiting on the other side, dangerous too.
I realized through my sleep experiments that when the pillow was still folded and next to the “single bed” width pillow it totaled about the size of a twin bed. Obvious option – cut the back folding pillow at its ugly useless fold and throw half of it away.What I didn’t realize would happen, in addition to a bed that doesn’t block a main emergency exit, was that an amazingly wide and comfortable couch would rear its much needed head. I expected something acceptable to sit upon but what I got was a space saving miracle. This might not mean much to most of you but when you plan to share a home, smaller than most of your bedrooms, this is NICE. As the worthless bench it was before, I couldn’t get guests to sit on it for 3 minutes without feeling like they were visiting a kids tree house.
I think the main reason for the idiotic design of the back bed was so they could call the RV a 6 person model. They blocked an emergency exit to make a few bucks. I’m sure of it.
Now with the bed extended as a twin, you have may hit your knee on some wood once in a while, but at least wont burn to death.
After I painstakingly cut the foam devil in half, I reupholstered the bottom cushion with some couch cushion covers we bought in the “broke junk and stuff no one wants” section of Ikea (it’s by the front doors). We got enough covers to do all the bottom cushions of the RV couches for $30. All the covers are a high quality thick weaved upholstery in dark gray. Most of them didn’t need any modification. We got several sizes, small couch pillow (pillow on the left) , medium and large. I cut these ones (the other couch was made to fit), one end off each side then zipped up. The one in the middle had to be cut like a tube and slipped over. They look fine for now and one day I’ll meet someone with a heavy duty sewing machine and do it up right.
Now that that dreadfully interesting segment is over (assuming you made it this far) – The Next space saving idea…
We bought a Cabin Tent.
It’s 12 feet x 9 feet x 7 feet tall and without being setup its 30lbs and 3.5 feet tall. It’s a monster and I don’t look forward to setting it up. but. When we are staying somewhere for more than a few days it will be an awesome area for more covered space, both for Chena to stay out of the sun but out of the stuffy RV (no we don’t have air conditioning) and for us to work when we want some air. I’m hoping for bean bags but Im not sure yet where we can store those.
I cant tell yet but I hope it’ll fit up pretty close to the front door and just become a porch-like attachment.
Here is a crappy photo till we actually set it up.
Also – perk- when me and Ross are about to kill each other, we can separate.
I finally got my trailer lights from Amazon. My friend Lisa in Santa Ana (CA) saw them at a Walmart a few months ago and told me to check it out. They didn’t have them at Walmarts in Portland but I easily found them online. They are deceivingly small in the photo on Amazon. I was expecting them to be a couple inches long and inch tall but they are pushing 3×2.5 inches (red potato size). (Camco 42655 RV Retro Travel Trailer Party Light
Same day I also got the remaining items for my counter top mosaic experiment.
I wanted to continue the “Day of the Dead” – Skull, theme I have going so I went to Etsy to find most of what I wanted.
I wanted to customize some tiles so I bought clear glass tiles from My Junk Drawer, who carries tons of supplies for jewelry and art.
The Skulls are from Happy Silence who has tons of amazing stuff including ceramic buttons, jewelry pieces and other ceramic joys.
The broken colored glass (black and teal) are from Artful Mosaic Supplies , who has tons of mosaic supplies as the name implies.
The letters are vintage game pieces I bought at a little store in Portland but you can also find them on Etsy, usually about .25 cents each. (check out the game letters). Many of them will even let you spell things out! Something I wish I’d done and still may.
The shattered glass in the top right corner is windshield glass I got by asking a glass shop if they had any laying around. They emptied out their shop-vac for me and after a little cleaning and drying (and the occasional hand cutting) I have lots of pretty blueish glass to play with. I’m planning to glue them into shapes using Diamond Glaze
The square white tile in the bottom left is what will make up most of the counter.
One thing I’m planning to use for the backs of the glass tiles is art from some of my art books. I haven’t gone through them all but Puro Muerto
The last thing on my delivery day list is my pile-o-pompoms. I call them dingle balls, no idea why. I bought 3 yards of the seafoam/blue and 7 yards of the petite purple from Christopher Pines on Etsy. Christopher has tons of pom poms, ribbon and lovely German glass glitter (which I bought 2 bags of previously) and will make you custom orders based on your needs if you email and ask!
I love Etsy, especially the option to search by “Supplies”. So many great deals.
Decoupaging the Cabinets
Since we got the RV I knew I wanted to do something to the interior and just had a little faith that the mechanical stuff would fall into place. I put off doing too much until I took it for its first checkup and the mechanic (the lying one) said everything looked amazing, it was in great shape and he was jealous. After he told me this, I immediately went to town painting and decoupaging.
It’s taken quite a bit of time to finish, a couple months of here and there, but I finally got all the cabinets finished – inside and out. I decided at the last min to make a little tutorial though whats written in the blog will be more helpful than it will.
Basically to start you need Mod Podge. You can get it at any craft store – especially the chains, but I found a bigger bottle for the same price as the smaller one at Micheal’s at a local art supply store. I had gotten a small bottle, 16oz, and promptly ran out – costing $11 at Michale’s, the larger one 32oz, was $15. Shopping online isnt a bad idea. Mod Podge comes in gloss, matt, satin and “for paper” though I have used both “regular” and “for paper” and seen no difference.For this project I used Mod Podge Matte-Mat in a yellow bottle.
I like to shake the bottle before opening it, or you can filthy up something stirring it and open the container on a big piece of mat board or poster board (any kind of work area you don’t care much about. You will drip.
First hint: The thicker the paper the harder it is to keep out the wrinkles. On my wall behind my monitor (see bottom images) I used a framing quality poster, very thick, and I just gave up trying to fight wrinkles. It still looks ok but with printing paper, like the .10cent kind Kinkos uses for basic stuff – It is not see through, even the white, and it easy to keep wrinkles out with practice.
Place the paper face down on the surface, and slather Mod Podge all over the back. It doesn’t need to be white (thick) just a thin layer. If you are doing large pieces of paper the paper will curl when its wet with the glue so careful it doesn’t stick to itself.
When you place the paper on the wall only start with an edge, whether the long or short edge, do not let the whole pieces lay down yet. Line up the edge as you want it and smooth the edge top to bottom or left to right so it has no wrinkles.
Slowly start to work your hand down or across the sheet, going back and forth while pulling the paper slightly to keep it tight/straight.
You will mess up quite a few before you get the hang of it and there is no amount of tutorial that can change that. I learned from just trying – I don’t read instructions for anything usually but I did look up “decoupage wallpaper”. The only thing I could find was a method with brown paper bags where the person wrinkled the paper up on purpose and put it up messy for a textured wall. This is fine but wont really work with printing paper. for most materials this will probably look silly so unless you’re using paper bags I dont recommend it.
If you see wrinkles and they look terrible – I cant get them out without them looking worse – I would just tear it off the wall before it dries too much. If you still have paper leftover on the wall you can use soap and warm water to get it off, I use the scrubby side of a sponge to get it all off. If the paper is dried on, sometimes you can put a sheet over the top of it and it will somewhat convincingly look unwrinkled. To get off a dried sheet you will need time, hot water and something to scrape with.
You can lay down new pieces while sheets are drying on the wall but be sure the piece before isn’t wrinkled too much because you wont be able to go back and take it off if you are overlapping the edges. You will have to take off the new sheet and the old sheet. Annoying!
For things like lights or pipes, in my case I had several to decoupage around, I removed the light and cutout a small gap in the side of my paper lined up with the wires. You can fill in the gap you see with a small piece of deco’d paper but since the light will just be covering that area it’s not too important. With pipes I had to be more detailed. I kept the piece I cut out and glued it back into place on the other side of the pipe.
Basically the same instructions from above except for the cutting part. Measuring the paper to have enough to cover is something I screwed up so being more precise might be a good idea.
I use an exacto knife to cut things but for most stuff you can probably use scissors.
My mirror for my bathroom door is clippings from a Life magazine from 1969. It was an issue about Tigers and had a run of photos of them gorging themselves on zebras and the like. Awesome.
I just cut out the pieces and supplemented and missing tigers with grassland images. I was fairly strategic and made sure that all the tigers were facing the directions intended for how the mirror was to be viewed while using it.
This is the wall behind my 19″ LCD monitor which I mounted on the wall. Its a mix of some of my favorite art from magazines I collect and a movie poster for Metropolis that I didn’t want to leave behind.
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