Interior Remodel w/pictures
When we bought our coach last January, the interior looked just like the "Before" picture in David Flanagan's ad in the Motorcader magazine. We knew we wanted to update the interior and make it a little more friendly to our style of travel.
This summer, I built a cabinet to go against the wall behind the recliner to give us a little more storage space (including 11 slots for wine bottles). I also turned the bedroom TV cabinet into storage and put an LED TV in the front.
Then, we started the real remodel process in Oct when we had David Flannagan remove the old shag carpet and put in new carpet in the bedroom and slideout and tile in the living room and bath. We kept the hardwood floors in the kitchen and I put a new coat of finish on them.
Then when we got home at the first of the year we kicked off the rest of our projects. I removed the window valences (including the slideout trim), dinette seats, the sofa, recliner and the pilot and co-pilot seats. Everything went to our local upholstery expert except the recliner. It seemed like a shame to recover a perfectly good leather recliner so we moved that into the house and sent him a 20 year old Euro recliner and footstool I had for him to recover and match the rest of the updated upholstery. He put in all new firmer foam and we really like how comfortable the furniture is.
I used a piece of scrap carpet from the new bedroom floor and made it into the new headboard material.
While the furniture was out, I rebuilt the vertical window trim in solid cherry and when the horizontal valences came back from the upholstery shop, I reinstalled them with new MCD shades. I also rebuilt the window frame around the two slideout side windows in cherry.
Then I built a new solid cherry trim piece to go across the front window below the cabinets to cover the old vinyl trim that was there. It was the easiest solution. I think I would have had to remove all the front cabinets to get the old trim piece out to recover it.
Next was new bases for the two dinette seats. I wanted to raise the seats up and also include more drawer space. The old drawers were very small. I think the new drawers are about 3 times the volume of the old ones. Built the bases out of cherry to match the rest of the cabinetry.
Finally, built a new cherry table top for the dinette. It's 5" wider and 8" longer. Gives us a lot more table space for our daily meals and activities. I installed it over the existing table top so in the future it can be removed if we change our minds. I also modified the table extension in cherry to match the top.
Finally, we reinstalled all the new upholstered furniture.
Overall, we're very pleased. Tomorrow we get new tires and chassis batteries and then it will be time to pack and hit the road for Alaska in May. It will be much easier to keep everything clean while we're enjoying the great outdoors.
A BIG THANKS for all the great ideas we picked up from the forum as we were planning the remodel!
Rich
Topic: Interior Remodel w/pictures