In The Beginning or A tale of 2 Motorhomes - Part 2(The catch up)

As I had mentioned in my first post I actually started this project over a year ago, so whereas the last post explained what the project was and how it came about, this post will bring you up to date with where I am on the project now.

I'd like to thing that if Justin Bieber or Brandon Flowers had a tour bus that it would look like this my RV

So one of the first things that I worked on was removing everything from the RV that I am keeping (the burned one). This meant gutting the back portion of the RV. I had to tare down what was left of the walls that devided the bedroom from the bathroom area.

The bedroom itself was totally gutted execpt for the engine cover/bed box(which I also tore out), but in the bathroom I had to tear out everything, the shower, the sink, the toilet and all cabinetry because they were all burned or melted or destroyed beyond repair.

Everything forward of the bathroom was spared and just had smoke damage, as far as wood walls and cabinets goes.

I removed both the drivers and the passenger seats so that they would not be in the way and so that I could have them re-upholstered.

Next I had to remove anything that could hold the burn smell. So that meant taring out all the carpet(including all the carpet pieces that had been installed at the bottom of all cabinets, wall paper, all furniture(a couch and 2 lazy boy recliners), and the fabric headliner on the ceiling. While I was doing all the taring out and removing I also removed all the doors from the cabinets that I was keeping so that it would be easier to sand and refinish both the cabinets and the doors.

In order to remove the fabric headliner I had to remove everything from the ceiling first. This included air registers(5 of these), floresent lights(about 8 of these) and other assorted things.

Next, I broke up all the ceramic tile from the kitchen and bathroom(no easy task) because there were about ten pieces that were broken and also we decided that we wanted hardwood floors in the kitchen and living areas.

Oh and here is a strange side note. This RV had a washer/dryer unit in it back in the bathroom area, which is great. However the manufacturer(Monaco) put tile everywhere in the bathroom area except for where this washer/dryer unit went. Consiquently, the unit must have had a leak and it destroyed a portion of the subflooring(approx. 3' x 2') that I still need to cut out and replace.

All of this gutting work took about 3 months, but once it was done I had kind of a clean slate to work with.

I was going to use this post to get you all caught up with where I am on the project now but as I see how long this already is, I think I'll divide it up a little.

Tune in to the continuing saga of "What have I Done So Far"

In The Beginning or A tale of 2 Motorhomes

Lets start with a little background on how this project came to be.

Ever since I was about 18 and got the chance to travel in my grandparents motor home, I've wanted one.
We owned a 26' travel trailer back in the nineties. I pulled it with a 97 Chev 1 ton dully crew cab. It was great and it got a lot of use. My older 5 kids(I have 8) loved it and all have fond memories of camping, trips to Disneyland, Yellowstone etc. But every time I would see a motor home on the highway I would drool thinking "someday, someday".

We had to sell the trailer back at the turn of the century(2000 - wow that seems weird to say), because I was a computer programming consultant at the time and everything went dry after Y2K.

Back in about 2006 I started looking at older motor homes, when I would see them for sale locally(I live in northern Utah) and when I say older I mean mid 1980's models, because people were selling them for between $2000 and $8000 which would have been about the same as what we had paid for our travel trailer.

I found that I really only ever looked a class A and not class C motor homes. Just never really liked the Class Cs.

Then sometime in 2007 I found that ebay had a whole section on RVs and more specifically thousands of motor homes. It was there that I started looking at and reading the adds for diesel pushers and fell in love with them.

I had been a fan of diesel engines for towing for along time. In fact if Dodge would have made a 1 ton dually crew cab back in the mid 90's I would have bought one instead of the Chevy. Anyway, I also found myself looking mostly at ones with Cummins engines in them. My father-in-law worked as a regional service manager for Cummins back in Indiana for 20 years and because of that I have been partial to Cummins engines.

The only problem with the diesel pushers is that they tend to be noticeably more expensive than gas motor home. However, again on ebay I would find the occasional diesel pusher that was priced in my range.

Well one day back in January of 2010 I was looking on ebay and found an ad for a 1999 diesel pusher(I can't remember the make or model) that was located about 15 miles from where I worked. It had some interior smoke damage from a refrigerator fire, so I decided to go look at it since it was local.

Well, while I was looking at it another person showed up and bought it right on the spot. To say the least I was disappointed because the damage was not to bad and the price was right. I was about to leave when the guy that was selling the motor home stopped me and said "hey I'm sorry about that but now that I know that you are not opposed to a fixer upper I have another situation that I am trying to broker, if you'd like to hear about it". I said sure and he proceeded to tell me that he knew of one guy in Ogden, Utah (only about 10 miles from where I live) who had a 1995 40' Monaco Executive that he bought brand new and subsequently wrecked it(ran it into a ditch) and that it had been sitting in a warehouse ever since. It only had 17000 miles on it when he wrecked it. He had always intended to fix it him self and after 14 years he finally decided he was never going to get to it.

Then he said that he knew a guy in Brigham City, Utah(about 35 miles from where I live) that had a 1995  40' Monaco Executive that he had been towing a car with and the front driver side wheel bearing froze up on the car and the tire started on fire. When he saw smoke in his mirror he immediately pulled over which brought the fire forward and caught the back fiberglass on fire. it destroyed the whole rear fiberglass cap as well as gutted the bedroom and most of the bathroom. the rest just sustained smoke damage.

So he asked me if I wanted to see them and I said "sure".

After seeing both of them and getting some pictures I decided I wanted them. So I discussed it with my wife and she reluctantly agreed. I think her exact words were " I think this project is going to be way harder and time consuming than you think". Of course being a man who is handy with tools and cars and such, my only thought was "Piece of cake" and I told her 1 year, 1 1/2 tops.

Well, that was a year and 3 months ago. Am I finished? Not hardly. But I digress. Lets look at where I am now and what it took to get here.

I got a loan for $14,000 from the credit union and I bought them.

Now you would think that the first thing that I would have thought of, and worked out, would have been "Where do I put these two 40 foot motor homes and how do I get them there. But no I bought them and then I said to myself , hum, where am I going to put these to work on them. I know I'll put them at the side of my house. No wait the side of my house is all dirt and it is the middle of the winter. Maybe I can rent some warehouse space. No to expensive. Well this went on for a while longer and I finally talked with a neighbor of mine who does excavation and tractor work and he agreed to grade my side yard and put down about 6 inches of course gravel. OK. Now, how do I get them here. Well the one that was wrecked in the front was drivable, not necessarily legally drivable but mechanically drivable. You see about 6 feet of the drivers side was open to the air and it also had no windshield. But it was only about 20 miles from my home. Hum.

Long story short, I decided to drive it home, taking the back roads to avoid police, I mean traffic. I was quite the site, remember it was February, a sunny day but still only about 31 degrees. So I put on the heaviest coat that I had, a warm hat, gloves and old time aviation goggles. OK I didn't have the goggles but that would have really completed this bizaar picture.  People were taking pictures of me with their phones and some times cheering for me. At first I was very embarrassed but after a while I kind of got into it and cheered back. By the time I got it home I was frozen solid and couldn't feel my fingers but aside from that, all was well. I had my first motor home, such as it was.

I have kind of gotten ahead of myself here. I actually got the other one, the one with the fire damage, first. It was not drivable because the fire had burnt or melted all of the fan belts and most of the hoses. So I had to have it towed. I thought that it was going to cost me an arm and a leg but in the end they only charged me $256.00 to tow it 35 miles. I thought that it would be well over $500.00.

The work on my side yard was not complete yet so my neighbor across the street agreed to let me park it at the side of his house until my side yard was done. The neighbor that was doing the side yard work agreed to let me keep the one that I drove home at the side of his house until he was done with my side yard.

When my neighbor finally finished putting down the gravel, which, by the way, took a couple of weeks because of a string of bad weather, it was time to move them to my side yard.

I had decided that I would keep the one that got wrecked in the front end and use the burnt one for part, most especially for the front end fiberglass cap and some cabinets. So I first backed in the burnt one by pushing it with my neighbors tractor and then drove then wrecked one in front wise so that they were nose to nose. I figured this would make it much easier to transfer the nose cap from one to the other.

Unfortunately I had not noticed something about the wrecked RV that my brother noticed. The whole upper frame(from the floor up) of the motor home was tweeked. Apparently when the previous owner wrecked it he ran it into a ditch and it ended up on it's side which bent the entire upper frame.

One of the main reasons that I had decided to keep the wrecked one instead of the burnt one was that the wrecked one only had 17,000 miles on it and the burnt one had 110,000 miles on it and I didn't want to swap engines. Well, with the discovery of the bent upper frame on the wrecked one I decided to keep the burnt one because even with having to swap out the engine it would still be easier to restore.

Now here's the real kicker about this. The guy I bought the burnt one from wanted to keep the furnace, the LP tank, the inverter, the wheels and the generator. It seems he was working on building a houseboat and wanted these items for it. Not the wheels, apparently he wanted them for a semi he owned because they are Alcoa wheels. He put some old ugly wheels on it so I could get it towed. Because of all this I paid quite a bit less for this one than the wrecked one.

If I would have decided to keep the burnt one from the beginning I would have parked them back to back for the engine swap and I would have asked the guy to leave on all  the stuff he took and take the same stuff from the wrecked one. Consequently I had to transfer the furnace, inverter, wheels(no small task), LP tank(no small task) and the generator(no small task - big diesel generator) to the burnt one.

So that pretty much sums up how and why I bought these 2 motor homes.

I really wish that I would have started this blog a year ago when I first got the RVs so that I would have had pictures along the way, but I will start putting picture up from here on out.

This is what it looks like as of this post.

This is what I hope it looks like when I am finished with it

Coming Up. Part 2 of In The Beginning or A tale of 2 Motor homes:
    What I have done so far.

So stay tuned.