Upgrades

Flamingo Lake RV Resort
Jacksonville, FL

All the behaviors you practice as a homeowner come into play when you live in an RV.

At home, if you go to bed with the dishes undone, it’s because you forgot to turn on the dishwasher. When you do that in an RV, you wake up to a sink full of smelly dishes.

If your recliner breaks one day, you consign it to the basement and let the kids jump on it. In an RV, you get out the gorilla glue, turn it upside down and try to mend its sorry guts. That’s what I’m staring at right now. An upside-down recliner that’s leaning on a counter trying to recover from my ministrations. Lovely.

If your rug gets dirty you can clean it yourself, or send it out. Here, when the dog regurgitated a hairball, or whatever dogs regurgitate, we didn’t see the spot until the stain had set permanently. Then we noticed another we’d overlooked. So now we have to rip up the rug and completely redo the interior of our coach. Putting a plant in the middle of the rug is not an option.

You’d think I’d be upset about this, especially given our recent bill for a new bumper for the car, but actually this works right into my house-behavior theme.

I love to decorate, and changed things in the house with some frequency. But RVs nail everything down. Every piece of furniture, except for the afore-mentioned broken lounger, is permanently installed. The rug is wall-to-wall, extending up the wall in places, a style that went out in the fifties. Everything is beige or gold or brown, none of which is my color, not that I dislike the combination for somebody else. It’s just not me.

In fact, this not-decorating is not me. So now I get to re-do our new home after only eight months. Heaven!

I’m going to rip out the ugly rug, tear up the brick-shaped white tile in the kitchen and bath area, and put in a tile floor. Speckled black, if I get my way. No matter that every dog hair will show. I’ll just get out the damp mop and tidy up. And it will be shiny and reflective and make us look like those $3 million Newells. The ones with the gold faucets and mirrored ceilings. And what are those mirrored ceilings for anyway?

John wants to replace all our window screens with sleek black motorized screens. Ah, one more remote to misplace. I love this idea, since as I look up from the computer screen, not one single shade is plumb. They’re all at odd angles, and I feel like I’m living a scene from Gaslight where Charles Boyer tries to convince his wealthy wife Ingrid Bergman that she's crazy by tilting all the pictures. If that technique really worked, I’d be a lunatic at this point.

Next up comes the bathroom, with its Sanitas wallpaper. How great would some marble tile look in there? And it would be nice to replace the folding coffee table that I “repaired” with some extra-long screws that are now poking through the top of the table. Please, don’t judge me too quickly. The newspapers don’t slide off anymore.

Can I find an excuse for replacing the bed linens? I’ll figure something out. I always do.

This redecorating is fun. We haven’t spent a dime yet, and I’ve already mentally wiped out our retirement nest egg. We’ll be saying “Welcome to Walmart” sooner than we expected.

Maybe I shouldn’t do the marble in the bathroom.

Granite could work.