Reader Vicki asked for more details about how the door between the living area and cab of my motorhome works.

The door fits over the loft floor.

Detail of how the door slots into the loft floor. The bottom part allows the door to slot into the passenger side wall.

From inside the living room, I grab the top of the door with both hands and lift the door to slot the bottom part into the wall to the right of the door.

The door is now out of the way and I can access the cab.

I then slide the door out of the way along the wall towards the driver’s side.

I just about never go between the cab and the house through that opening. I prefer to park, get out of the driver’s side door, walk around the rig, and enter through the house door. But it will be nice to now be able to go in this way when it’s wet out.

My mother and I blasted through our to-do list today, leaving only a few minor things to finish up. This was the first time that we were able to get through the list without adding anything to it!

Even though my floors have been in since the winter of 2010, the trim has been troublesome. I blasted through the easy parts and made a failed experiment on the hard parts, then pretty much gave up.

Being a woodworker, my mother knows offhand what trim is available on the market. So she looked at the bits we had left to do and made a list of materials needed to get around the problematic parts. The biggest problem I had beyond the funky angles was that the edge of the floor wasn’t flush with the wall, so there would be a gap behind the trim. I had thought to get trim in and fill the gap with putty or caulking, but my mother had a better idea, of course.

Now, I am going to share some pictures, but, please, no comments on the state of my floors! I had the energy to either blog or scrub floors this evening and I thought blogging would be more interesting. 😀

This is what the front of my fridge has looked like for two and a half years:

This is what the front of my fridge looks like with two layers of trim and a bit of putty:

My mother didn’t like the threshold I put in the toilet room (neither did I!) and she had a piece of proper threshold the right size, so she used a band saw to cut it to fit the awkward space:

She did an amazing job along the vanity and shower in the dressing room:

We also finished up the door to the cab, adding some trim to make it look more finished:

Now, I just have to paint all of that new woodwork. The trim will be painted golden brown and I am undecided about the new wall. Logically, it should be yellow, but that may end up being too much of a good thing. My mother suggested wallpaper and I am considering it. That would add a little bit of texture to the room.

Besides all of this, we also put in new bookcase dowels and fitted the male end of the 120V wiring that will connect the inverter to the shore power cable. It was raining, so we’ll leave the female end plus the final bit of work on the new front door exterior window frame for a nice day.

I have to say that Miranda is looking really good these days. I almost feel like I have a new home!

I’m always amazed by the number of RVers who don’t worry about their rig’s carrying capacity and fill it to the brim. I want to live in Miranda until I choose not to rather than because she has fallen apart due to improper care. So carrying capacity is always foremost on my mind. When I bring in something, I do consider where I will store it, but I also fret about the added weight. Whether it’s a box of printer paper or a plywood for a wall, I think of each item’s weight and whether it is worth the carrying capacity it will take.

So cast iron might seem like an odd choice for an RVer, but for me, it has made perfect sense. I have been so happy with the cast iron pan I picked up in Lynden, WA. Admittedly, it took me some time to learn how to properly care for this precious addition to my kitchen; how to season it, clean it, and cook with it. But the end result has been worth the effort. There is just something about food cooked in iron over an open flame. Seared meat becomes succulent, pan breads are extra flavourful, and sauces are enriched by the tasty morsels scraped from the pan.

The most important things I have learned about cooking with cast iron are:

-add the food only when the pan is hot;

-things that cook quickly, like flat breads and thin cuts of meat, can be cooked over a medium flame;

-things that cook more slowly, like a thick cut of meat, should be cooked over a low flame to prevent the dreaded ‘charred exterior, raw interior’ result;

-clean the pan immediately after cooking with a damp cloth, then rub on oil or shortening before the pan cools;

-wear a very good over mitt, such as an Ove Glove, or two regular oven mitts while handling the pan.

Tonight, I made pitas for the first time. My cast iron pan surely contributed to making my effort extra delicious!

Rolling out dough for fresh pitas.

A still hot clean and oiled cast iron pan ready to prepare another delicious meal.

You can’t get yummy spots like those in a non-stick pan!

(Calling pitas magic isn’t hyperbole; I can’t believe my first attempt resulted in perfect pocket bread!)

I cannot believe I have successfully brought this battery bank upgrade project to term. Thank you so much to everyone who provided advice along the way. I also have to thank Xantrex for it’s very expensive for what you get but priceless battery monitor connection kit, without which I really don’t think I could have done the battery monitor installation.

All projects involve compromise, and this one was no exception. I don’t like where the battery monitor and inverter are located, but I’m thrilled with where the 120V connection from the inverter ends up.

The first part of today involved removing all the battery connections and pulling the batteries out of the compartment. They are heavy suckers! While I got the fuse and shunt screwed to the side wall, my mother went into her shop and cut a new floor for the compartment since the plywood I had installed had gotten warped and sloppy looking.

I used to have the batteries sitting perpendicular to the rig. Now, they are parallel.

This is the shunt screwed into the side wall of the compartment. All my negative connections (save the inverter, not yet hooked up) tie into it. The fuse is about two feet to the left, with the positive connections installed the same way.

As I continued to work, she tried to trace a path from the battery compartment to the study for the inverter starter and the battery monitor wiring. Well, there was no path for the wires. We encountered obstacle after obstacle. We could have brought the monitor up on the driver’s side, but there was only enough starter wire for a straight run, so the effort didnt feel worthwhile.

My idea of putting the inverter into the same compartment as the batteries in its own mini-compartment also didn’t work because my cables for it were just a wee bit short. That meant the inverter had to go up into the living room. If we were going to make a hole in the floor for that, I was going to simplify the project and bring the battery monitor cable up through there, too.

As for the inverter remote starter, I thought I wasn’t going to need it where it is, but it will be installed when my mother and I finish up the woodworking projects. A picture below will explain why.

Hole in the floor allowing the passage of the 12V, battery monitor, and 120V cables. It’s finished with a computer cable conduit like you see on desks. We’ll also be adding insulting material.

My mother then took off to buy some exterior-grade 120V cabling while I got everything but my inverter hooked up in the battery compartment since I wasn’t too sure about the ground issue. When she came back, it was time to pass the 120V (15A) cabling from the inverter in the passenger side of the living room at the front of the rig to the shore power cable compartment located just past amidships on the driver’s side at the rear.

I was actually up a good part of the night thinking about this wiring issue. I had originally thought that the inverter would be in the battery compartment. So the easiest thing would have been to install an exterior-grade outlet in the compartment wall, snake the shore power cord under the rig, and plug it into that outlet.

Then I thought about that. I just didn’t see myself plugging and unplugging several times a day when I am traveling. Having the outlet in the shore power cable compartment would mean being able to leave the shore power cord plugged into the inverter all the time. I would then just have to turn the inverter on and off as needed.

We brought the 120V cabling down into the battery compartment through the same hole as the 12V cabling and out an existing hole in the side of the compartment. Now, we just had to get it across and down the rig and up into a compartment full of electrical wiring. Well, crawling under the rig notwithstanding, this was the easiest part of the day!

We got a couple of false starts because of the dang muffler that prevented us from crossing the rig sideways. A neighbour who is knowledgeable about cars was out in his yard, so my mother went to ask him for advice. He said that there would be a bridge of sorts at the very front of the rig because of the transmission and that would give us a path far enough away from the muffler.

He was right! And soon as we got the cabling to the driver’s side, we were able to follow the generator wiring’s route all the way to the back of the rig. The hole for that wiring into the compartment was big enough for us to fit the 120V cabling through after removing the insulating material! We still need to fit a male fitting at the inverter end and a female fitting at the compartment end, but the hard part of that job is done.

The 120V exterior-grade cabling is essentially a heavy-duty extension cord that will live, curled up, in the shore power cord compartment.

I will be putting a female end on this cable. This will allow me to add the 30A to 15A adapter into which I will plug the shore power cable. Don’t worry about the wire end being open since it’s not connected to anything.

Once all the cabling was run outside, it was time to get the battery monitor cable run inside and hooked up to the monitor. After much debate and hemming and hawing, I concluded that the easiest place to install the monitor and still have it be readily visible was behind the ladder to the loft.

The cabling cuts across the roof of the cab (floor of the loft).

I made all my connections as per the Xantrex diagram. While I was outside doing the fuse hookups, my mother secured the monitor in its hole in the wall. How that works is the monitor is threaded like a bolt and there is a plastic nut to hold the monitor in place behind the wall. I’m just glad I remembered to thread the cabling through the nut, then the wall, before doing all the connections!

It works!

Can you believe this display was actually bright orange?!

As for the inverter, Croft determined that the ground is to protect me from the inverter casing in the case of a bad situation with the 120V side of things. This fairly confirmed what my research told me. So I was able to hook up the inverter to the battery bank and test it, but I will be adding that neutral wire next week (I won’t be using the inverter in the meantime, but it let me put away my tools and repack the compartment).

The inverter is on the floor in the living room behind my big arm chair. I’ll have to be extra diligent in sweeping behind there to keep the dust and cat fur out of it!

The inverter works (pardon the wonky angle of the photo)!

Right now the voltage reading right at the batteries, on the solar monitor, on the inverter, and on the battery monitor all reads the same, 13.3V (remember, I’m plugged into shore power). It will be interesting to see what sort of voltage drops I’ll experience, if any, once I start boondocking. I expect the drops to be minimal since I have very short cable runs with very small gauge cabling. I spared no expense for this project!

I feel so satisfied and competent today. This is the first time I’ve ever done a project with my mother where she was there for labour and I was there for the technical portion.

Now, to see how the rig reacts when I plug it into the inverter. I hope that is not exciting. 🙂