Ocala, FL Sunny- 67 degrees
Those of you who follow me, remember the story of how awful the motor home smelled when we bought it. Some of you even experienced it! The previous owners had two small dogs and let’s just say they didn’t adhere to the same house keeping standards as I do. I’ll never forget the first time we entered. It was a 100-degree day in July and it had been closed up on the dealership lot baking in the sun. The salesman warned us, but we were up for it since it had the floor plan we wanted, and very low mileage. We fell in love with the online version of it. . My eyes watered as soon as we opened the door. It was one of the worst things I have ever smelled. Most of the offending odor was lingering in the carpet. As we both looked through the unit, I kept thinking this carpet has to go, and fast. With watery eyes, and still slightly burning noses we thanked the salesman and left. We looked at over 30 other units over the next three weeks and, despite the need for a good deep cleaning, we decided this was the unit we wanted. We negotiated the trade, knowing we had a lot of work ahead of us.
The delivery was delayed for several weeks as they fixed a long list of things we negotiated being fixed before we picked it up. Ironically, replacing the carpet wasn't one of them. This was one of those units that was sound, but lived in hard. Someone would eventually buy it and fix it up. It might as well be us, right? Less than a month before we left for Texas last year, we took delivery and proceeded to clean the carpets multiple times the odor fading a little each time. We vowed to replace it a soon as possible. In the meantime, an air purifier and non-stop Scentsy pots heating scented wax kept it tolerable. I was constantly asking people if it smelled okay in here, afraid I’d become 'nose blind' as the Febreze commercials say.
We had a company set to do it in Texas last winter, but they
had delivery issues with their product due to the heavy demand post Hurricane
Harvey. It wasn’t meant to be. As I sprinkled baking soda each day, and bought
scented wax by the truckload, I vowed to do it first thing when we arrived back
in Iowa. We lost a fridge to a lightening strike in May and our Heat Pump AC
went out in early June. More flooring money going to other things. I began to
wonder if we would ever rid ourselves of this dated, wet dog carpet.
As we sit in Ocala, with plenty of time on our hands and no sleepovers with grandkids on the weekends we have decided to go for it. We read blogs and watched some YouTube videos of the brave souls who have tackled the job themselves. We opted for a floating vinyl floor. For now, we will leave the carpet in the slide outs alone. The rest of the carpet and tile, from the driving compartment to the back wall, will soon be replaced with new, non-odor-absorbing, modern looking vinyl. We ordered our new flooring from Lumber Liquidators and it should be in this week. We are both excited to get going. The demolition will be a bitch, I won’t mince words. We have done it in two houses we bought out of foreclosure and renovated. In fact, it is one of the worst demo jobs there is. It’s back breaking work and if you think old carpet stinks on the surface wait till you start pulling it up! Unlike the blogs I’ve read of others who replaced the flooring in their RV’s, we are living in it. It will be an interesting couple of weeks as we disassemble things and live amidst the demo in less than 400 sq. ft.
I’ll post pictures of the progress and share our story of
what went well, and what didn’t so others can learn from us as we have learned
from others before us.
With any luck we’ll start the new year with nice new
flooring!
Until next time…
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