Other then new wood flooring, we are relocating the wire run that is currently in a box about 3 inches wide at the floor and runs from the entry to the dining cabinet. You can see by the discolored plywood how large that run was. The new way- will be to add an outside corner of wood, stained to match the new wood floor. More info to come. I had to use my Fein saw to cut the floor to relocate the wires. I thought others may like to know that these runs can be made less obtrusive.
erniee,
Looks like a good start keep us posted. By the way what are the 6 bolts that we can see in the pic.? What type head do they have? We can't tell on our monitor. That must be how the floor is tied to the frame (just a WAG) but sure would like to know for sure.
Pamela & Mike
Ernie,
I would be beholding to you if you could post a picture of the floor without the carpet but before modification? I have installed real bamboo flooring up to the kitchen in our coach so far, and I noticed that hump along the sidewall. Very curious as to how that looks underneath the carpet, and how I'm going to work with that when I install the flooring for the rest of the coach. I was very much thinking along the lines of what you've done here.
Don
Those are rolok bolts that go across the coach and secure the top of the compartment divider in the basement to the main floor framing. Same as what's coming up through the fiberglass skin on the bottom of the coach. You can likely see these if you pull the drawers out of your wardrobe closet and look down at the plywood subfloor where it is above a basement dividing wall.
Don
Don,
That is what we thought they were. Mike wondered how the upper portion of the divider bulkheads were connected. He thought that it was the same as on the underbelly but not for sure. The way our coach is laid out there is carpet or a cabnet floor that would have to be removed just to check & see, too much work for that.
Pamela & Mike
Don, the photo shows 3- 1"x1" strips. Foretravel had the wires coming up from below in 3 different locations. I cut the plywood and Willie was able to zip tie them and then moved the whole bundle against the wall. A 1/8 inch of luan was used for the original cover.
Thanks Ernie, that is helpful. I ran into a similar situation around the base of the bed. In that case, I rerouted the cable along the vertical wall of the bed platform and then made a piece of molding that had a hollow for the cable. the hardest part was working in such a tight space! Even in my experience which is limited to our coach, I can see that the most difficult part of working on interior remodeling in a coach is the tricky molding and trim. One needs to come up with all kinds of creative solutions ;) I hope you post more pictures as you proceed on this project, very interested in seeing how you tackle some of those tricky areas...
Don
Don, that flooring is looking outstanding. Nice job, I'd like to do the same someday.
Chuck
Don,
NIce work, if the day job doesn't work out, perhaps ou should be in the Foretravel chassis repair and interior upgrade business!
:-)
Thanks Tim and Chuck! I had finished up to the kitchen before I discovered the bulkhead issue. The trim in the bathroom makes the bedroom trim look like a piece of cake, especially the carpet covered toilet pedestal (can I say yuck?) and the shower. I have pictures and I have been planning on posting some sort of write up on the flooring project. I plan to go on up to at least just behind the Pilot/Co-Pilot seats and maybe all the way to the dash, which is what prompted me to ask Ernie for a before picture... I want to know what I am up against before I rip up the carpeting. All that is waiting on finishing the basement project for now. Anyway, I don't want to derail Ernie's thread and I don't know how to break this out, so I will just start a new one at some point... In the mean time, I am looking forward to seeing how Ernie handles some of those molding/trim challenges... it is always nice to see what the pro's do.
Don
Today, I installed the entry trim. The wire runs at the bed base will be laid flat and glued with thermoplastic. Willie wants wood on the verticle surface of the bed base. I'll install the wood on the floor, and then fit the wood on the bed base. I did the first runs of wood, today.
The accelerator pedal can be removed with backing off a couple of screws. The braked pedal has a valve attached and Willie thought we should leave that intact.
Let me know how the wood in the bedroom works out. I was told that the rubber carpet pad was 100 dollars a foot and it was sound deadening and that a wood or tile floor int he bedroom will make it too noisy.
John,
Good thing I saved all the rubber pad then! I will definitely post on our impressions of the sound levels after we hit the road. I put 1/4" cork underlayment under the bamboo, which also had about 1/8" cork underlayment glued to its underside. So far, although I haven't taken it on the road since I put in the flooring, tests while idling and fast idling with a db meter showed virtually no difference. The rubber pad is the same as what is on the inside of the generator hatch in case you are curious. It is very heavy and dense. I suspect it is also under the front seating area... I can feel that there is a place where the underlayment is thicker up there that feels similar to what I noticed in the bedroom before I pulled up the carpet.
Don
Interesting to put a cork under layer there. That might help a lot.
I have wood in my bedroom and don't think it is noisy. But I have no idea what is under it, as it was there when I brought the coach.
$100 bucks a foot- someone is pulling someones' leg. If it was worth that much, then the pile outside the coach is worth stealing! I have floored many pusher coaches, and haven't had any negative comments from lack of sound deadening. Cork can and has been used as a sound deadening, but it needs to be all over the coach to keep the height the same.
I looked at our receipt from last year, $4.35/sf and our bedroom took 36 sf. It's a heat and noise resistant material, probably fire-proof as well.
I wrestled with trying to keep the rubber padding under the bamboo floor in the bedroom, but the height difference would have been a killer. In the end, I decided to do the cork underlayment throughout the coach and the all of the way to the front with bamboo with the possible exception of underneath the pilot and copilot chairs. I may keep the current carpet at least in the pilot's area... for the time being, still haven't decided yet. All of which brings to mind, an advantage of going horizontally across the coach. Makes it easier to do it in stages. Right now it is stopped at the entrance to the kitchen area. There is a piece of trim at the sliding door that meets up with the carpet as a transition. All I have to do is take that piece off and then continue on as I had before. I removed about an inch of carpet padding under the carpeting, and continued the cork under the edge the carpet so that I can tape the seam in the cork underlayment when I continue the floor towards the front of the coach. It is difficult to describe in words, so I'll attach a few pictures... being worth a thousand words and all ;D
Don
same with my 95 - ordered from the factory with Ginger Oak.
Don, thats looking real Good
more walnut today
Looks beautiful! What type of flooring is that? Is it a laminate or walnut veneer? I like the color and the random lengths. Not too dark like some of the walnut that I've seen.
Don
The wood is an engineered product with real wood veneer.
Good job on the bed base Don. We used plastic panduit to house the wires on each side of the coach when going from carpet to wood. painted it dark brown and no one seems to notice until I point it out. The walnut panelling and the Brazilian Teak floor go well with the dark brown paint. I've got to run power from the foot of the bed to the head so we don't have drop cords all over the place but with 270 lbs it's difficult to get in there and harder to get out!
Hi Larry, thanks! I remember admiring the Brazilian teak floor and your coach when we met you guys at the thousand trails Park in Pio Pico. Although I'm not quite 270 pounds, I don't have fond memories of working down there on the floor alongside the bed! It is very difficult to get out once you've been in the same position for a while squeezed into that little space. fortunately, our coach already had outlets in the front of the night tables, although I had to disassemble them and pull the wires out in order to reroute the cables up on the sides of the bed platform which involved drilling a new hole closer to the platform and then feeding the cable back through. Fortunately that resulted in a shorter run so I was able to reuse the same cable.
Don
I went to the trash pile of that insulation- too much movement to install hard surface material on. Here is a photo of today:
the 2 white holes are for the couch bolts
Looks nice... Ernie, since you are attaching the couch directly through the flooring, I take it that the flooring is not floating floor. Is there a substrate, or is it glued or nailed down to the subfloor? I found one of the biggest challenges with installing the floor I installed in our coach is that it is a fully floating floor and everything has to have a bit of clearance along the edges... but not too much, or when there is contraction, the trim might reveal the gap. That was another reason, besides aesthetics and the ability to do the project in stages, that we went with a horizontal layout instead of lengthwise. I wanted to keep the possible expansion contraction to a minimum. Then there is also the matter of the couch which is fastened to the subfloor right through the carpeting. I plan to just attach it to the framing in the side wall and have it rest on top of the floor... and the same with the desk that I'm going to build. Of course, my plans could always change when I actually get to that part of it... ;D
Don
The wood flooring that i install is all adhered with urethane adhesive. Makes a solid coach even better. I screw the furniture down and use the same holes as they use self tapping bolts into the cross members.
shower area
You do beautiful work Erniee!
Great job cutting in around the shower Erniee. How do you do that? Inquiring minds want to know. :)
see ya
ken
Is that what one would call a multitasking shower :)) :)) Nice job with the new floor installation. Not sure I am that Brave.
Roland
thanks, all. I owe all my talents to a higher power.
Ernie, when I was doing my bathroom in ceramics I did the toilet base too, but covered over that silly grille opening in the base. It is tied into the space under shower and then into bedroom vent and I could not see the point of it. I did put a vent on the outside of coach to allow fresh air into the lower box area in case of smells. I used a fibreglass vent cover the same as what they use for washer/dryer and glued it on. I then spray painted it to match paint job pattern. Looks original, and does the job. You cannot really do any repairs thru the vent opening anyway, so another reason I did away with it.
John H
John, that is good to know about that vent. Willie is going to put another material on there
Folks- from all the coach manufacturers that I have had a chance to work on, all of them secure furniture to the floor. If there are stand alone cabinets, they are secured to the wall with screws and to the floor, also. The shear factor in a crash would be critical if not secured to the floor. FYI
For those that are interested in a smaller wire run cover:
more:
If you wanted something nicer for a step entry light then the old exterior light- you might like this:
Ernie,
Do you have a source for that LED exterior steps light? It looks like it would be a great improvement over the incandescent bulb.
Ernie, I see in the photo you did not take up the chair base but fitted the wood around it. I gather once the seat is in place it really is well hidden (just a bit of a dust collection point I guess)
John H
Willie and I looked at the bases. The co-pilot base could have been removed with a lot of extra work. I used some Kano kroil on the bolts and nuts and they were still not wanting to budge. So we left those alone. The nuts on the captains chair are hidden above the generator radiator compartment. Tearing that all apart was not an option. I'll get the info for the light fixture.
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