May

Of course May is crazy for everyone with it being the last month of the school year here. I also have a tradition of spending a weekend camping near my birthday. This year we did it the weekend before and we were lucky it was not snowing. We drove three hours to Lathrop State Park as I was told it had a beautiful lake. The lake was lovely but it was too cold to take out the boat. The kids enjoyed the lakeside playground. The family was with us one night but because of the rain the parents and Clementine went home Saturday. By Sunday afternoon it was dry again.

Beautiful campsite
Beautiful campsite

I was pretty busy before we left so a few things were at the last minute. The bathroom door was stuck shut with a broken door handle that I removed and replaced with our used lever handles that I have not yet complete replacement of all the handles in the house but I have a lot of handles. The handles are meant for thicker doors so I had to shim it with a rubber washer. I also had to cut the edge to fit the strike plate and lower the jamb hole a little. Not a short job.

Replaced broken bathroom door handle
Replaced broken bathroom door handle
New handle
New handle

I also hung a customized clock. I saw an inexpensive clock at IKEA and could not resist cutting a Cricut vinyl project for the RV.

Getting ready for my birthday campout
Getting ready for my birthday campout

But finding and repairing the electrical problem took the longest. On our February trip to Mesa we discovered our tv and cell signal booster 12v outlets were not getting power. I checked the fuses and that was not the problem. I checked power at the fuse box and it was good. Eventually I cut the wire that fed the outlets from the water tank compartment and that wire was dead. Since I could not isolate the wire connection to the fuse I added a fuse in the last slot on the panel and ran a new wire to the cut wire. I had completely disassembled the outlets and some of the connectors fell off when I pulled them so I had to redo several of them. And I needed to do a better job of crimping them.

Checkinge RV fuses
Checkinge RV fuses
Fixed dead 12v outlets with new wire
Fixed dead 12v outlets with new wire

The water was leaking profusely at the pump outlet and had to be redone. That meant removing the pressure tank I had installed but had not pressurized the system to see if there was a leak. With the time crunch the easiest thing was to remove it. Then I had to dig into my plumbing stash to redo the connections. It seemed that I had stopped the leak but when we were underway water was in the bathroom and hallway. It turned out the toilet valve that lets water into the toilet was stuck open. So we didn’t have running water for the weekend which was not so bad since our campsite was right across from the bathrooms.

Pressure tank
Pressure tank
Leaking winterization valve
Leaking winterization valve

Of course the leaks were worse than I expected so it took awhile to fix them.

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