Once more into the breach

Brian got the RV back from the shop yesterday, 10 days before we needed to leave for PAX.  That obviously doesn’t give us much time, especially when you consider the ambitiousness of our biggest project.  So, last night, three of us got together to put our first dent in that project:

What we want to build

This is essentially a total reconstruction of the RV’s bedroom, which would replace the single queen bed with four twin beds.  There are just tons of benefits to doing this:

• while we’re driving, the two upper bunks would not be in place, but that would still give us two places where people can sleep on the road.  Twice as good as before!
• when parked, this increases our total comfortable sleeping capacity to six (from four).
• since PAX is only one of the purposes to which Brian will put this vehicle, it’s worth mentioning that this change gives every member of his immediate family a place to sleep on trips.
• even with just the two lower bunks complete, we can get rid of the horrible atrocity that is our old bunk bed frame without losing any capacity

That last point bears some further explanation.  We don’t have any illusions about being able to finish this whole project in the time we have.  Therefore we will not be building the upper bunks until after PAX Prime.

This can wait

The upper frame we have planned would involve some fairly precise welding and some very careful construction for the supports.  There’s no rush, but more pertinently there’s just no time.  What we really need is the ability to sleep two PAXers while driving, something we can’t do right now because the bunk we built for East just isn’t stable when the RV is in motion.  However, since we’re going to be fixing the table/bed and we still have the couch, we only need four sleeper spots, and we’ll have exactly that if we can get the lower bunks in.

The lower bunks alone are no trivial project.  Brian wanted to mimic the functionality of the queen and provide storage space underneath them.  This will be especially handy when we install the upper bunks and need a place to stow the disassembled frames when we’re driving.  We will also need to make sure they are strong enough to support us, and secure enough not to move around when we’re driving.  Here’s a closer look at the design I came up with:

This will come in SO handy

We’re going to seriously have to put the gas on to finish this in time.  Last night, we picked up the parts we need to build them, and got as far as cutting all the 2x2s and 2x4s down to size.  Today Brian and I both have family obligations, so we’ll be returning to this project tomorrow (potentially with the full crew!), and see how far we can get through assembly.  We will also have to tear out the queen bed and much of the cabinetry already in the bedroom.  Tomorrow is probably our best work day before PAX, so realistically we probably need to damn near finish this project by quitting time in order to have any confidence that we’ll be able to get through our other (smaller) projects and still have time to tweak things and prep the RV.

No IRL pictures this time, but I promise we’ll have some for the next worklog.

PAX is just around the corner.  I know tons of you are super excited, and that feeling is definitely shared by us.  These projects are daunting but there’s absolutely no question that they’re completely worth it.  PAX here we come!