Bedroom Remodel part 1

The original bedroom layout in my motorhome did not work well for me. It had a "walk around" "RV king" bed, two shirt closets too short for shirts to fit in, six small drawers in two nightstands, a mirror/shelf, over-bed cupboards that could only be reached by standing on the bed, and some difficult to get at under-bed storage. Half the top of the bed wound up being used as additional storage, as did the walkways that were too narrow to walk in.

Since I was staying a couple of weeks at a relatives house with a 30-amp outlet and water available, I took the opportunity to get as much of the remodel accomplished as possible.

The first stage was the tear out. The mattress came out, one of the nightstand was removed, the shirt closet above it was cut down, and the bed support and from was cut down to the partition between the water tank and the under-bed storage. While a lot of the construction was done with screws, not all of them could be reached and some of the tear out was done with a three-pound hammer damaging some of the parts I had hoped to save. I wound up using my circular saw, sawsall, jig saw, and a hammer and chisel to do the tear out. (The hammer and chisel could reach places that the saws could not.)

When I found the bed support was a couple of sheets of thin plywood separated by small boards and foam insulation, I wound up cutting a few more inches off and putting a 5/4 by 4 board across the outside edge, attached to the small boards with flat angle and T brackets. To make the new bed support over 75 inches long, a frame of one by sixes was constructed and screwed to the floor and the existing frame. To fit a twin mattress 39 by 75 inches, I tried to make the support at least 40 by 76. The section over the water tank wound up being 44 inches wide.

To fill the eight inch gap to the wall, I started construction on a shelf unit. One 1x8 was screwed to the back wall, and another to the side wall with angle brackets. A single shelf has been installed so far, at about the height of the bed frame.

A piece of thin oak-veneer plywood was screwed to to bottom of the former shirt closet, with the back rear corner resting on the board screwed to the rear wall. Two of the drawer glides recovered from the destruction of the nightstand were screwed in, and the smallest drawer fits nicely and opens at about head level over the window.

Lessons learned:

• It takes a lot of screws. A full box of 100 #8x3/4 inch screws were used, as well as all of several other sizes I had.

• Nothing is square. Measuring four times and cutting twice is frequently not enough.

• It's worth the extra money for straiter lumber, even if knots, etc. in cheap lumber won't show.

• Everything takes longer and costs more than expected. (Actually, I knew this, but the project reinforced it.)

• Home Depot seemed to have things that were a better match for my project than Lowes.

• Home Depot will give refunds for unused things without much question, so buying extra and returning may mean fewer trips to the store.

• It's worth buying a sharp saw blade.

• Add two inches to the measurements from the longer of the short sides of my T-square.