Travels With Miranda

I think we can all appreciate how much time we spend on the toilet.

In my rig, the toilet has its own room with a nice heavy door that makes the room forgettable. It’s so easy to just toss stuff in there and forget it until you actually need to use the room for the purpose for which it is intended. And then, you go, “Oh, no!” as you realise you have to move X, Y, and Z out of the way to use the toilet.

This morning, I swore that the broom was never going to attack me again and that I was going to spend the time needed this afternoon to tame the most necessary and most poorly used room in my home.

I completely emptied the room, then washed it all down, from the ceiling to the floor. Then, I actually got the paint out (not surprised that I had tons left, but surprised that it was still good!) and did a ton of touch ups. No more staring at depressing white spots or scratches while doing my business!

Then, it was time to evaluate what I was storing in there and, to my surprise, I was able to determine that everything that was in there belonged in there or, rather, had no better place to be stored. It was just a matter of reorganizing a little.

End result:

This picture really makes me regret not taking two seconds to take a before picture because you would not believe I had the same amount of stuff in here, the room was so crowded and barely usable!

I went through my hardware bin to use up odd bits and found everything I needed to secure everything. A curtain rod hook was perfect to hang the broom:

And another curtain rod hook was the perfect solution to hold the floor piece of the filing cabinet securer:

And finally, an eye hook and a zip tie are holding up the vacuum:

I have no illusions that that will hold for travel, so I’ll have to take the vacuum down for now, but I have an idea of how I can use snaps and elastic in junction with this set up to really make the vacuum secure. I just don’t have time to sew today.

The floor now only has a garbage can and two big containers (one of carpet cleaning solution and one of stain remover for topping up a spray bottle) that fit perfectly behind the toilet.

When I was cleaning out the top shelf, I found some pictures I had completely forgotten about! They are from my trip to Maine. I found some little screws and hung up on the blank side of the room. I went for the random layout approach and it didn’t come out as nicely as I would have liked, but it’s nice to have them out:

I’ve bought all the supplies I need to continue touching up the paint all around the rig, so I guess today was the kickoff of spring spruce up. What, it’s only late-January? Well, it’s very springlike around here these days!

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 love the shelf I put up in the toilet room, but it hasn’t been that useful since I haven’t been able to secure anything up there. I ran a tension curtain rod across the opening, but the slightest bump would dislodge it and everything would end up on the floor.

Fast forward to The Apartment. It had a long hallway to the main part of the room. I wanted to hang a heavy blanket across it to muffle noise and to block my view of the front door from the desk. My maintenance guy suggested I hang the blanket on a tension rod. I replied that the blanket I had in mind would be too heavy for one. He looked at me like I was crazy and told me to go look at shower curtain tension rods.

Shower curtain tension rods?

I ran over to Walmart, poked around the bathroom stuff, and found nice big adjustable tension rods that sure looked a lot sturdier than the flimsy curtain rods I was familiar with. Small hiccup; they were $20. It was one thing to pay that for 80 square feet of flooring, but I was not paying that to block a hallway! But then I had an epiphany and did some mental comparing between the width of the hallway and the width of the toilet room. I wasn’t looking at spending $20 on The Apartment but rather buying something that would serve me in the RV.

End result:

That this is not going anywhere! I can now feel comfortable storing the ginormous extra bag of cat food up there!

Miranda’s interior makeover is definitely an amateur and barely skilled effort. But that doesn’t mean that the rig can’t still look pulled together. One of the unifying elements is the oak cabinetry throughout. The problem is that there is also mismatched wood throughout. So starting in the kitchen and then in the dressing room with the wardrobe doors, I used a golden brown colour that matches the honey oak of the cabinetry to make my additions blend in a little better. I decided to buy a ton more of this paint colour and use it in the study, which had no fewer than four different wood finishes.

Now, I suck at taking decent before shots, but here’s an idea of what the bed base looked like this morning:

As you can see, the trim was unpainted. I was going to paint it golden brown like I did with the trim around the sink in the kitchen, but the bed base had a bunch of holes and scratches. Now, it’s all golden brown:

My desk, while sporting a few chips, does match the rest of the cabinetry, so it’s fine, except for the top:

I decided to paint the top as well as my little bookcase and the new top I made for it this morning (it’s been a productive day). Both the bookcase and desk top swill be golden brown and sealed with Verathane to protect the finish. Here’s a sneak peak of that:

Finally, the white door into the toilet room from the dressing room was getting on my nerves. I couldn’t figure out what to do with it. Once I was committed to buying more of the golden brown paint, the answer was obvious: match the toilet room door to the wardrobe doors. Ta-dah:

I’ve got two coats of the golden brown on now and will do a third after dinner.

Tomorrow will be a mostly lost day as I need to put in a half day at the apartment complex. I’ll be glad for the extra income and the new manager is glad to not have to come in yet on a weekend. So I hope that three coats of brown will be enough and that I will be able to apply the Verathane tomorrow. Sunday, I’ll be able to get the rig completely squared away, and Monday I will be moving back in 95% of what’s in the apartment, leaving only a functional office and kitchen!

I guess I could have kept on with a bit of a nautical theme and called this room the head since toilet room is so ugly and throne room or potty room are too cutesy. But I’m practical and not afraid to call things for what they are. It’s a room with a toilet, so it’s a toilet room.

When I bought Miranda, this room had one use only and the decor was not very inspiring:

Talk about a blank slate! The only thing I really liked about this room was the shape of the curtain and the linoleum, which reminded me of my dad.

Not being meant for full-timing, Miranda lacks storage for certain things in the place where you’d expect storage to be. Take toilet paper, for example. I could stack some around the toilet, I supposed, but I had other plans for the floor space. So, I decided to think vertically and came up with this monstrosity:

This shelf is a prime example of how I see the world. Readers probably see an ugly piece of plywood jammed into an otherwise pretty room. I saw something that just needed trim and paint to blend into its surroundings. I was right!

(don’t mind the wavy tension bar; it was a casualty of the Ice Fields dash!)

You can also see the new curtain I made, which matches not only the toilet room paint, but also the dressing room.

The other bit of storage I added to this room was the pocket door organizer:

The organizer makes the door a bit heavy and prone to shut, but is otherwise not a nuisance and an excellent use of space. It’s also a good place to store a roll or two of extra toilet paper to have some on hand.

The rig has brass accents throughout, so I did an experiment in toilet room to see if I could paint some of them, in this case the trim around the light switch and the toilet paper roll holder. The experiment was a mitigated failure in that at first glance they look fine, but a closeup shows what a crummy job I did. It was probably a combination of the wrong kind of paint and my inexperience with spray paint. Even with the paint job being the way it is, I prefer the dark brown look to the brass and don’t regret the attempt at improvement:

Finally, this before and after post was delayed because of my difficulty in finding frames to put up some art on the bare walls. I finally got two pieces up today and decided that they would do for now. I’m not sure if I should be putting artwork on the other wall or not. If I do, I’ll post an update. Both pieces are cheap post cards with images that have personal significance.

The first is of the schooner Bluenose:

Those who thought “Oh, that’s the boat on the Canadian dime and it reminds her to make money!” are completely wrong! This image reminds me of a movie I adored in my childhood, known as Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveler in English. It’s the store of a boy who travels around the world on postage stamps, and the Bluenose stamp features prominently in the story. So, the Bluenose makes me think of travel and wild adventures.

The other post card is an imagined scene from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales:

Pilgrims on a journey. Relevant to my RVing life, no? I love The Canterbury Tales and have read them a dozen times. I was fortunate enough to take a course on Chaucer in university in which the teacher insisted we read medieval English lit in the original Middle English, a very rewarding challenge. But I digress!

Here’s a final after shot:

Another DONE room!