Friday, August 30, 2013

South Dakota, Sioux Falls - Friday, August 30, 2013 - Tower Campground


Well we’ve been busy since I last posted on Monday.  Unfortunately, we haven’t been out having fun.  I mentioned a while back that we were working on finding the source of a leak we had in one of the bedroom slide outs.  We worked most of one day dismantling the inside trim to get to the basics of the slide out.  We caulked and coated where we thought might be a problem.  But, a few days later we had a leak again and it hadn’t even rained!  The water came from the air conditioning system.  Greg got on the roof and worked on the gutters to make sure the water from the air conditioning system was being diverted correctly.  Even though he got that fixed we still knew we hadn’t fixed the leak problem so we made an appointment for Tuesday at a local RV service center.

We spent most of Tuesday at the RV service center while they worked on what they thought would fix the problem.  They were able to remove the slide out awning which was too big of a job for us and found that one of the brackets that attaches the awning to the slide out hadn’t been sealed.  Since this leak had gone on for a while before we detected it, we did have some inside damage – this is what has kept us busy for the rest of the week.

On Wednesday we had a small area of vinyl ceiling on the slide out that is right above the bed that we had to take out so the wood underneath could dry out.  When we got the vinyl off we headed into town to JoAnn Fabric and got some headliner material and marine vinyl to replace what we took down.  Took us two trips to do that because I decided I wanted to put up a color other than the original white, so we brought home samples and then had to go back once we decided what we wanted.

The padded headboard we made before we moved into the coach was also damaged by the leak.  So we decided to make another one using some of the same material we decided on for the ceiling.

We also had to get a battery operated nail gun so we could put back the trim pieces we took down.  We went to Lowes and they told us what we wanted wasn’t made.  When we got home Greg went on line and found out that Home Depot had what we wanted, so we headed back to town to Home Depot.  While we were there we found the trim we wanted to use on the headboard.  We were thinking though that we would have to wait until we got to Kansas to use David’s truck to get the lumber, so we put that on hold.

I know I should have taken pictures of all of this, but we were making such a mess I didn’t feel like documenting it.  I’ll take pictures of the finished project.

On Thursday we measured the ceiling to make a pattern before we cut into our repair material.  I dug out some leftover Christmas wrapping paper which worked just fine.  Our pattern had to be seven foot long and it had two angle cuts to it so that took us a while to get just right.  We managed to get the headliner material up on the ceiling and got it covered with vinyl and it looks pretty good so far.

On Friday we went into the Sheriff’s Office to apply for our gun licenses.  We found out that we have to go back next Friday to pick them up, so we are going to have to stay here a day longer than we originally thought.

I had a vision of some type of metal decoration worked into the headboard so we went “looking” at a local furniture store and then Hobby Lobby for the perfect piece.  We found what we wanted at Hobby Lobby and decided we could figure out how to get it home on the bike, even though it was about 4 foot long by 2 foot wide.   We did get some funny looks and one lady even rolled down her window and commented on our “bike decoration”.  This thing was lying across my lap as we went down the road.  We made it without any problems so I’m thinking we may go back after the lumber.

When we got back home Greg caulked and sealed everything he could get to on the slide out before he put the trim back on.  Our repair project is looking pretty good so far.

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