Chip Gaines may love demo day, but we faced our first one with a bit of trepidation. First of all, RVs are not built like houses. Parts are sometimes assembled on the wall and fastened from the outside in, before the outer skin is put on. So you unscrew thirty screws and still have to carefully twist and pry something free. Three gazillion staples hold down the carpet--and it goes in before the built-ins do, so you have a choice of cutting it away as best you can and replacing with flooring just as thick, or disassembling entire cabinets ...
The first thing that had to go was the carpet. Wall-to-wall just gets so nasty, especially if you have pets--and the original owners clearly did. And if you've ever pulled it up and seen all the crud that works its way underneath, it's pretty gross. Thinking this should be the easy part, we pried up an end and started pulling. Both of us. Holy, moly, this was going to be hard work! There were staples EVERYWHERE!
So I decided to take down the curtains instead and let in the light. I love light. I need light. Much better.
Let's get rid of those lovely valances, too ...
But we finally had to face wrestling up the carpet. And pulling staples. Prying staples.
Getting stabbed by staples.
Swearing at staples.
Yes, of course I was doing my share, but somebody had to take pictures!
Uh-oh. When we pulled up the carpet on the kitchen slide (yuck, carpet in a kitchen?), we found water damage. But was it old or current? It felt very dry ... When we got home, I emailed Al Reurink at Modern RV, who knew this rig inside and out. They had, in fact, replaced the rubber seal on the slide not long before we bought it. We would continue to monitor this, but the good news was, the damage was likely old. The bad news was that it went under the tile and of course it would need to be repaired ... sigh.
Meanwhile, back to pulling staples. Prying staples. Getting stabbed by staples. Swearing at staples. And doing it all in a very confined space, ugh!
To add to the fun, when you're over a certain age (and we are), getting up and down, up and down, up and down, and kneeling, and bending ... Not so easy and sometimes pretty painful, especially after a couple of hours. Fortunately, we laugh at ourselves a lot, and oh boy, did we laugh over the next few months. The demo process--and figuring out how we would reconfigure things--would stretch out, a few hours a weekend, over the next year or so. Lucky for you, I'll condense it into a few blogs, and, hopefully, it won't hurt a bit. Feel free to laugh.