Organization
& Storage
In our thoughts about living
in a small RV, we talked about the importance of organization and
storage. It is very important that
everything has a “put away” place. Get rid of clutter! A Class B is much too small to allow
clutter. It will take a little
while to figure out what works best for you. But to get you started we will show you
what is working well for us. It may
give you some good ideas for your rig.
Of course we may change things too if we find better ways.
Kitchen Storage. All the kitchen
storage information in the Kitchen section.
Bathroom Storage. All the
bath storage information is in the Bathroom section.
Outside Storage. All the outside storage information is
in the Exterior
section.
Floor
Level Storage. Roadtrek
designed lots of storage into our 190 Popular. The diagram to the right shows Red
Rover’s available storage (varies with year and model of Roadtrek). Under the dinette seats are various
appliances – the generator, converter, water heater, furnace and the
battery in a vented compartment.
But additionally there are 3 general storage areas. And there is the underfloor
“trunk” that appeared in the pre-mid-1996 Dodge Roadtreks.
Under the third passenger seat is a huge storage area that can contain large
objects if the seat bottom is lifted up.
Storage 1 & 3. Storage 1 is for his stuff - shoes, shower bag, and
whatever. Storage 3 is for her shoes, boots, flip-flops and sandals.
Storage
2. Storage 2 is just inside the rear door
and shares a door with the water heater.
It has at the front the bottle jack and the
Lynx leveling blocks. To the rear
are some safety triangles, a tool kit in a plastic case, and a tool bag that
contains the infrequently used tools (soldering iron, wire connector, hammer,
wrenches, etc).
Underfloor Trunk. Just
inside the rear door is folding door access to the “trunk”. Inside we have a soft side cooler, a
screen room, a tarp, and two SilverShade mesh tarps,
the Coleman Fold-N-Go grill and some seldom needed items.
Storage 4. Under the
third seat has a power strip extension cord and hair dryer, but other contents
vary with the plans for the trip.
As I write this it contains supplies for the event we just
attended.
This is the view from the
door that opens to the aisle.
This is the view from
above. One wonderful feature of
this space is that the seat bottom can be lifted away to store large items
under the third seat.
Later models of Roadtrek have
a drawer under the seat. This is
handy but is does cut down on the storage volume. We are happy we can use the whole
compartment.
Clothes
Closet. The closet contains the hanging clothes, but also at
the bottom, a notebook of manuals and important Roadtrek info, two golf
umbrellas, the table legs when not in use, the crank for the awning, a small
electric heater, the Pet Hair Eraser portable vacuum, and a gallon or two of
drinking water. A pocket on the
back of the door holds gloves and hats for cold weather and two mosquito hats
as well.
The bungee cord keeps the
umbrellas and table legs out of the way of the clothes.
Best RV Trick. Someone on the Yahoo Roadtrek List
passed on the best trick for RV closets.
Put the hangers in with the open side toward the door. No more struggling to get the hangers in
or out. Or
finding special hangers. Or cutting off the tip.
Duh! Now why didn’t I think of that?
Clothes
Storage. We
learned from our bicycle camping days that rolling clothes is an efficient way
to store them. So we made cubby
holes (with Masonite, and slots cut halfway) for rolled clothes in the cupboard
next to the bathroom. For long
sleeve shirts, two will fit in a cubby hole and for T-shirts, three will
fit. Two pairs of
shorts or one pair of long pants per cubby hole. One shelf for her and
one for him. Unless wide
weather swings are expected this plus the hanging closets has been plenty of
room for up to a 5 week trip. We
plan on washing clothes about once a week.
The top shelf in the cupboard
has pillowcases, Eagle Creek double sided bag with underwear & socks, extra
toilet paper, laundry soap and dryer sheets.
Long Compartments by Air Conditioner. Although we have a His and a Her side, there some general items in these
compartments. His side has the DVDs
and bike helmets, and her side has the dog food. Extra clothes or reading materials ends up
here as well.
Odds and Ends. One problem we ran into is every night the kitchen counter or stove top
would get stuff from our pockets dumped on it. Keys, wallet, change, and other
miscellaneous stuff would clutter the coach. We needed a good place for such
stuff. After some thought we
decided under the clothes cupboard was the perfect spot. These drawers are essentially invisible
to the casual observer. And we each
have one for our stuff!
Office Supplies.
It seems that office supplies of some
sort are a necessity in this computer age.
Our “computer box” described on the Electronics page stores our office supplies in
a plastic box.
The box contains a small
inkjet printer (a Canon), a hand scanner (Brookstone),
extra ink, drawing pens, scissors, ruler, stapler, 3-hole punch, white-out,
adhesive strip, and both photo and regular paper. This seems to cover what we have needed
on the road.
STILL
UNDER CONSTRUCTION