Homemaking

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Sneak Peek of the New Dresser

The ‘secure the filing cabinet’ project took longer than expected today, so the new dresser isn’t done yet. But there’s enough done for a decent sneak peek. My mother ordered me to only show what’s done and to not reveal the interior ever. Ha ha ha.

The new dresser offers about as much cubic storage space as did the cloth dresser, but in a more compact package. It goes floor to ceiling and fits in the space next to the shower with no overage. The extra three inches or so of clearance space through the dressing room might not sound like much, but it makes such a difference!

We built the dresser out of plywood. When it came time to secure the drawers, my mother’s initial idea of just putting a stopper in front of them didn’t work so well. We squeezed in a ninth drawer and there just wasn’t enough vertical room any more to lift a drawer over the stopper. So we both concluded that a door would be best.

My mother isn’t the kind of person to slap a door together with plywood, some trim, and 50 billion screws. Instead, she used pine 1″x2″s, some thin press board paneling, part of the leftover vinyl from the desk, stain, and wax to make this gorgeous Shaker-style door:

I can’t show the whole thing because we have to finish the top of the dresser for reasons I’ll get into when I do the proper reveal of the dresser that will show off some of the little construction details.

The door is held with a hook:

(I still need to stain and wax the front of the plywood casing. Don’t tell my mother I showed you that picture! 😀 )

Finally, the inside:

And there’s the starting point for the dresser. Originally, I was going to have a very simple structure to hold some plastic baskets. But my mother got inspired to use some empty wine crates as the drawers. They were of a perfect dimension for the space, so the dresser got built around them.

The dresser is secured to the rig with two toggle bolts. Obstructions in the ceiling wouldn’t let it go very far, so they are more insurance than anything.

Even though I haven’t gained any storage space, the new dresser’s dimensions and aesthetics make a huge difference. I also like having nine small drawers rather than six big drawers.

I’ve also finally figured out how to make the wardrobe work for me, so as soon as we complete that project, the dressing room will be done.

I don’t get any credit whatsoever for the dresser or any other jobs, btw. All I do is fetch tools, hold the wood for sawing, and help with the staining and waxing. My job involves a lot of stairs. 😀

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SamaN Wood Fillers and Stains

This weekend, my mother and I are finishing up the wonderful new dresser for the dressing room. Today, I learned how to make a Shaker-style door, was initiated to brou de noix (a natural stain made from walnut shells), and I am left in charge of waxing. Tomorrow, we will hang the door and do the little finishing touches so I can do a reveal!

This project is also one of several to use SamaN brand fillers and stains. They are a Quebec-based company, but there is a US site, so the products may be available elsewhere in Canada.

The wood filler is latex-based so it will not shrink or crack, it is sandable, and it is stainable. So it’s great for fixing little problems in woodwork.

The SamaN stains are my favourite of their products.

The stains are water based and do not leave overlap marks. I have a bottle of their ‘oak’ colour and it is almost a perfect match for my woodwork. Every time I notice a chip, discoloration, or other mark, I dip a Q-tip in the stain, apply it, and then wipe it off with a tissue. It even works on the pressboard casings that have worn edges. What an easy way to do maintenance and a great product to keep your RV woodwork looking nice over time!

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Much Thinking About My Battery Bank

My inverter and battery monitor installation project has turned into a revamping the battery bank project.

I can’t believe that a high end RV like a Glendale Royal Classic does not have a proper battery compartment that makes accessing the batteries for maintenance easy. The batteries are in the corner of a narrow compartment on the front passenger side:

That picture might give the impression that there is a lot of room to work, but there isn’t. Getting in there is such a twisty business that I neglect my maintenance. For one thing, I’m very overdue to clean my battery posts. I have started to keep a cover over the batteries, but getting it off is a pain, and then you have to blindly squeeze in there to do the maintenance on the positive terminal. Getting the cell caps off to water? Augh!

What doesn’t help is that 6V batteries are taller than 12V batteries, another reason why I wanted to move back to the 12V style. But thanks to all the comments I have received, I now know that my battery information is several years out of date and that I can get two 6V with all the amp hours I need and that I will be better served by them than by two 12V. So I am eventually going to replace my two 6V with way fewer amp hours (90!!!!!) than I thought they had (150!!!!!) with the biggest Trojans (200 amp hours!!!!!) I can fit in my space. Thank you so much to everyone who beat me about the head with this information.

So all that about batteries to say that I am always going to have two tall 6V that don’t fit well in the compartment and that I am always going to have trouble doing maintenance on them.

Then, there is the design of the battery bank to keep in mind. I’m no longer going to be able to simply connect everything to my battery posts.

The addition of the 1,000W inverter means having to put in a 150A fuse on the positive side to protect my system. Such a device is not available locally, so I am shopping online and getting frustrated by the lack of sources in Canada.

I also need a shunt for the negative side, but, thankfully, that came with the battery monitor.

As for cables, ha! I need a short length (about one foot each) from the terminals to the fuse and shunt respectively, and then about six feet from the fuse and shunt to the inverter in the rig. All four cables need to be 2 gauge and will require lugs, which means crimping. I am not buying a crimper, so that means having to pay someone to make the cables for me. And that’s if I find cables. The best tip I got so far was to look for a place that specializes in car stereos, so that’s where I’ll start looking.

When I look at how others have designed their battery banks, I see that the shunt and fuse holder are often bolted to the side of the battery compartment. My compartment only has one wall and it’s not easily accessible, so forget that idea.

The more I think and research the project, the more the technical part of it becomes very clear and the more the challenge becomes a lack of sources for parts and a lack of space to work.

Relocating the battery bank is one option. But the only compartment that would be suitable is the giant passthrough at the rear of the rig. I’d be loathe to lose all that space and I’m nervous about having my batteries back there; it just feels like a more vulnerable spot than the front compartment in terms of potential accidents.

But that would put my battery bank directly under the office, so I’d be able to put the inverter in the office and avoid running the 120V wiring from the living room to here. It also seems to make more sense to have the batteries down here since the converter is in this room. I’d still have to run wiring the length and width of the rig to keep the batteries connected to the truck alternator and converter, but that should be fairly doable so long as I keep everything labeled in the dismantling process.

The biggest con for moving the batteries is the weight redistribution. My existing batteries weight 260lbs total. It seems like I will be able to reduce that weight with the Trojans, but for now, I have a battery bank that weighs 260lbs. The distribution of the weight on the axles is such that if i were to remove 260lbs from the front passenger side and move it to the rear, I would have to find 260lbs to move to the front. All the weight in the rear of the rig is inside, not in the storage compartments. I’m sure I can pull that much weight out of the storage compartment, but it won’t fit in the passthrough at the front.

So moving the batteries, while an attractive idea with a lot of benefits, is ultimately a much bigger project than what I want to get to get into.

Therefore, the idea that I am mulling over right now is being able to access my battery bank from above. Yup, I am considering building a trap door in my living room to the compartment below. I believe it could be positioned in such a way that the chair would cover the hatch, so the hole wouldn’t be immediately apparent. There would be a matter of ensuring the floor is still structurally sound, well insulated, and well sealed to keep off gassing fumes (and cold air) from sneaking in from the basement. I’m not crazy about this idea, but so far it’s a notch above using the rear passthrough.

I have to empty the rear passthrough next week so that work can be done on Miranda’s rear end. Once it’s empty, I’ll examine the space and determine which option I want to go with.

I am actually at the point where I think that AGMs, while twice (or more) the cost of traditional batteries, could be my solution since they are virtually maintenance free and once the knuckle grazing battery bank set up is done, I wouldn’t have to twist myself into the battery compartment very often. So that option is very much on the table.

If any readers have designed their own battery banks where there was no obvious place for one, I’d love some input!

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Snowballs

Once upon a simpler time, an RVer decided to increase the capacity of her inverter to allow her to run more office equipment.

This RVer went out and got a great deal on a higher capacity inverter and she was happy.

And then this RVer started to read about the installation of higher capacity inverters and realised she needed much heavier gauge cabling than she thought.

Much heavier gauge cabling in the needed lengths meant making her cables.

Making her own cables meant needing lugs and a crimping tool.

The bigger capacity inverter also meant needing to add a high amperage fuse to her system.

And once the RVer made a shopping list, she realised that there was no way to one-stop shop for everything.

And then her woefully inadequate battery bank space began to eat at her. How could she properly wire her solar panels, inverter, and battery monitors to the bank in a space too small to work in? Would she have to move the battery bank?

All the RVer wanted was a larger capacity inverter…

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Major Chaos For Major Improvement

WHEW. My mother and I are done with the last bit of the hard core renos we planned for the summer. Now, we have all the little details to finish up as well as the inverter and battery monitor projects. So I really don’t have much to show off just now, but some is better than none!

First off, my new desk top. OMG. I didn’t even know I needed this until my mother informed me that I did:

Hopefully, third time will be the charm for the desk. 😀

What we did is cover the existing desk with two layers of 1/2″ MDF glued together (no 1″ sheets available). We then covered the new work surface with cloth-backed vinyl. The colour is delicious. It’s sold as ‘plum’ but looks like chocolate in artificial light and wine in natural light. It contrasts perfectly with the green and the red tones can be found in the flowers of my curtains. The lady at the fabric store told me three times that I had made an excellent choice of colour and she was right!

I am worried about kitty claws, so I’ll be covering empty swaths of the desk with a mat or blanket.

There is now a gap between the top of the little bookcase and the new desk and I have a wooden ‘in box’ that fits perfectly there. I’ll show it off once it has a handle and latch. There is also a gap at the other end of the new desk top, at the end of the mattress:

My mother thought that my extension cord management idea was good, so she improved the idea, building a new bed frame with gaps for holding cords. We covered it with plastic trellis to give the mattress a flat surface to lie on. The trellis is rigid enough to be a good surface, is light, and will wear well. It was expensive, but the best product for the job.

At the end of the mattress, you can see a wide plastic drawer. I picked it up at the Ottawa Solutions store (I’ve never been to a Container Store, but I suspect it’s the same idea). The drawer spans the whole width and depth of the hole and is going to be used for archival storage (ie. old report cards, greeting cards, correspondence, and the like). I used to have all of that in a basket in an overhead cabinet, but this is a much better use of space. Over top of the drawer is just enough space for storing my laptop for travel.

Also at Solutions, I picked up what I needed to stop swearing each time I open the door to my wonderfully spacious medicine cabinet:

I like to open the door when I pass and just smile at how pretty and organized the cabinet is now. 🙂

The cabinet is well designed in that it has a lip on the bottom of each shelf, but everything would tumble out when I opened the door. I wanted containers that would fill the space and be retained by the lip.

So I brought the measurements for the shelves with me to Ottawa and went through the store until I found the cheapest items that could fit in the space. The silver containers were deeply discounted office supplies. There were three of the big ones left and without any real thought, I grabbed four of the narrower ones. Got home and discovered I still had a gap, perfectly filled by my brown basket. I couldn’t have designed this space more perfectly! Every space is sorted by use and everything is so apparent. No more opening up a tube of toothpaste when I already have one started.

To whet your appetites a little, my wonderful new dresser is now functional and just awaiting finishing details. The wall in the living room is up, but the door needs some catches and both need paint. There’s a new water pump access panel in the entrance stairwell, but it too needs paint. The filing cabinet still needs securing, but we think we have the solution. The office and dressing room both need paint touch ups. I also need tons of trim along the floor, but that will come with the electrical work.

My home was fine the way it was, but it is now ‘much better’ (said in my mother’s hilariously exaggerated French Canadian accent!).