There's No Place Like Holmes!

First, let me give credit and thanks to Kelli and Zack Tennant for the awesomely punny phrase that I used for the title!

I want to give everyone a little tour of Holmes and show how we have set it up as our new home. This post will be heavy on the photos. We have already lived in Holmes for five weeks! Now, we both feel very little desire to ever live in a sticks and bricks home. It has the perfect amount of room for us and we love it!

So, if you get a chance to visit with us at our home on wheels, this will be the first thing you see:

This is our lovely patio. The awning is not extended, since we have had a somewhat windy, rainy March in our neck of the woods. The chairs recline and allow for cloud watching and counting airplanes as they fly far overhead. We also have a very nice gas grill, which is stored in one of the handy compartments built into Holmes.

If you don't get sucked into one of the chairs, climb the steps and head on in. To me, the first thing that registers is how much space there is.

Starting on the left, you would first encounter the electric fireplace and my little desk. The fire place is one of the things we really enjoy. Besides being pretty, it puts out a decent amount of heat. On chilly nights, we don't even run the furnace, but leave the fireplace going and it is perfect.

Next, we come to the kitchen. We have a very large fridge for an RV. Some people prefer to have a regular residential fridge installed, but we think that this one has plenty of space. We did have an issue with it until recently. We kept having quite a bit of water dripping down inside the refrigerator. One day I even came home to find water on the floor under my desk! We asked people if they had the same problem and they kept talking about the drip pan. Well, we couldn't figure out what they were talking about, we had nothing like that in our fridge. I finally remembered finding a long plastic tray under the sink when we first got Holmes. I didn't know what it was for, but held on to it. Thank goodness I did, because that was our drip tray. The dealership never put it into place, just tossed it under the sink! Now all is dry!

Next is the stove and microwave oven. The stove is pretty small and you have to light the pilot light with one of those long lighters, but it works very well. Well enough to bake brownies, so what more can you ask?

The kitchen is small compared to a standard kitchen, but pretty spacious for an RV. My most important kitchen utensil? My stepstool! Everything fits cozily in their cupboards, but I am constantly climbing up to reach stuff. We have a large pantry and lots of drawers. You have to juggle things a bit, but cooking is no problem. Besides the stove, I use a induction burner and an Instant Pot. We weren't going to, but we broke down and bought the littlest Keurig there is. We were given a lovely French Press for Christmas (thank you, Rich Wendling!) but we haven't worked up the courage to try it yet. #KitchenGoals.

After the kitchen, we see Thomas' office. It took a while to find a setup that worked for him. We still have more monitors and other assorted computer stuff to set up, but Thomas can comfortably work and play his computer games as well. We have great internet connectivity through a Verizon JetPack, which I will talk more about it the next post.

Moving on, here are our extremely comfy recliners. This is where we watch TV, read and even eat most of our meals on TV trays. And when the other person's snoring gets too bad, the recliners are comfortable enough to sleep on! We keep towels on them since leather + bare legs from wearing shorts = no bueno!

Here is our other little sofa, which can be converted into a full size bed. We have not actually tried it out yet, but it looks comfy. Maybe someday our great-nieces can test it out for us!

These are the stairs that take you up to the bathroom and bedroom. I am a little paranoid about falling down them, especially in the dark, so I always have a firm grip on the handrail.

This is our bathroom. It has an absolutely huge shower for an RV! We have a ten gallon, quick recovery water heater and neither of us has ever run out of hot water yet!

The sink area is perfect, except someone clearly way taller than me installed the mirrored medicine cabinet. I can only see about two-thirds of my face!

We have a standard RV toilet. For those unfamiliar, it is operated by a foot pedal. You push the pedal down halfway to add water to the bowl and push it down all of the way for it to flush. We have had problems with the bowl not holding water, which allows fumes from the holding tank to seep up. After research, we found that we have to keep lubricant on the seal at the bottom and to let off off the pedal abruptly to help the valve kind of slam back into place. From my internet research, apparently this is a frequent problem with this brand of toilet and we will be changing it out for a better brand in the future. There, now you know probably way more than you wanted to about RV commodes!

Anyhow, you have to step out of the bathroom and down to the first step in order to shut the bathroom door and walk into the bedroom. Weird, but that is what you sometimes have to do when there is limited space!

We have a king sized Sleep Number bed. Readers of my previous post will remember the fun we had getting it installed. But it was worth it! We have plenty of room and only struggle over the super soft blanket we have on it occasionally, if by occasionally you mean every night!

We have our second TV in here, along with a built in dresser and the bench that doubles as a laundry hamper.

Our closet looks kind of crammed, but it work well, things just need to be moved around in order to use the washer, on the right, and the dryer, on the left. The washer was installed so that we couldn't reach the hoses to shut the water off, which led to imaginings of a flooded bedroom if things went haywire. Luckily, I have a handy Pa to fix it for us! He and Thomas pulled out the shelf that was underneath it and reinstalled the washer lower so that we can access the hoses. Much better!

Well, that wraps up our tour! Hope that you enjoyed! In the next post I will go over the outside parts of Holmes and show how we get our water, electric, sewer and internet/TV service. Thank you for reading!

The Challenges Continued

So much has happened since we bought our Holmes and Watson rig. I feel like I am way behind in telling our story. But I promised to spill all of the frustrating details of how we ended up where we are now.

At the end of our last post, Thomas and I had called it a day on the struggles that we had getting Holmes ready to go. Our washing machine had toppled from its pedestal to the floor of the closet, plus other little issues that the dealership needed to address. In the interest of time, I will try to summarize what happened.

Thomas headed out early for the long drive back to work. The service department towed Holmes from the campground to a service bay. While the work was being done, I attended four seminars that day. Some of the info was useful, but many of the classes were geared to driveable RVs as opposed to towable ones, such as we have. At the end of the day, the service department needed to keep Holmes overnight since they needed to wait for a new washer, as the first one died when it went crashing to the floor. The service department would deliver Holmes back to the campground at noon the next day, Tuesday. I decided to drive the hour and a half home as opposed to staying in a hotel near the campground.

 Finally, I arrived home after a two and half hour drive due to nasty traffic. As I walked towards the house, I noticed that something was strange with the front passenger side tire on Watson. This is what I saw:

A gouge in the tire! And it was down to the belting. I hurried over to our local tire place. They could replace the tire, but the new tire wouldn't be in until the next morning. They could fit me in to get it installed later the next morning. Fine.

At 11:45 am the next day, while waiting for the tire replacement to be finished, I received a call from the campground. The county had just informed them that all of the water on the property would be shut off at noon. I asked them how I was expected to stay in the RV with no water. They told me that that was why they were calling, so that I could fill the tank with sufficient water to get me through. I explained that the water was to be shut off in 15 minutes and I was 90 minutes away getting my truck repaired. They were sorry, but the county left them no choice. ARRRGH! We decided that I would stay home and leave Holmes at the campground.

Now, our next challenge was that we had made a service appointment with an RV supply store to have a Sleep Number bed installed in Holmes. The mattress that came with Holmes originally was very uncomfortable. Thomas had scheduled a vacation day for Friday to help me hitch up Holmes and make the drive over to Camping World. We had purchased the bed prior to taking delivery of Holmes because the store was having a great sale on the Sleep Number beds. I had specifically called our dealership and asked them what size bed was installed. The service manager assured me that he had measured it himself and that it was a queen size bed.

On Friday morning, we drove from our home to the campground, hitched up and headed on over to Camping World, which was two exits north on the interstate. Everything went smoothly, the people at Camping World were awesome. They called us back to look at how the installation went. Disaster! We had ordered a queen bed, as we had been assured by the dealership that it was indeed a queen. Well, we walked in to see a queen bed in a king bed sized space!

Thankfully, Camping World had a king size bed in stock and switched it out, just charging us the difference in price and a bit extra for installation. They even honored the sale price, even though the sale had been over for more than a week. We were very grateful to them and furious at our dealership.

Aggravatingly, we still had to remain at the campground one more night. There was no way that we were hauling Holmes through rush hour traffic and then attempting to set up in the dark at our new park.

We made it to our new park home the next day and have been very happy here ever since! In the next post, I will describe our new park home and the process of very successfully selling our sticks and bricks home. Thanks for reading!

Off to a Rough Start

I know that this post has been a long time coming. It will be broken up into a couple of posts, as it would be too much to cram into one. Thank you for your patience! Between the holidays, visits from friends and family and prepping our house to sell, it has been a very busy time (As the holidays are for all of us!). Our early days of being full time RVers started off with several challenges. Our original plan was to take delivery of Holmes, stay at the dealership one night to check everything out and then move to the dealership's campground for a week. That is loosely what happened, with many complications along the way.

On Saturday, December 3rd, we officially received Holmes into our possession. We had a walk through with a dealership employee who showed us how everything worked. We found four minor problems that needed attention: a missing end cap on the bumper, a missing lock pin on the tailgate bike rack, a loose slat under the bed and one of the recliners would not recline. No problem, a service tech came and fixed everything. While the repairs were being done, a very nice tech, named Shannon (of course, all Shan(n)ons are awesome, male or female!) arrived to help us learn how to hitch Holmes up to Watson, our truck. Thomas and I have hitched up travel trailers in the past, but never before have we worked with a fifth wheel. For those who are unfamiliar with fifth wheels, the trailer hooks up to a special receiver hitch that sits in the bed of the truck.

Well, Shannon the tech didn't let us down. He showed us some tricks that made the process go smoothly. The techs left and we made up a list of things that we needed to buy, especially groceries. Before we left to shop, Thomas noticed that the water from Holmes' roof was not dripping from the little spout that is built in for that purpose, but running down under the trim of the back wall. We decided to talk to the techs in the morning. They normally don't work on Sunday, but we had been told we could call the on-call tech if there were any problems. So, off to shop and grab some dinner.

We had an uneventful night. The mattress that came with Holmes was pretty uncomfortable and I ended up sleeping on one of the extremely comfy recliners instead. We had actually ordered a Sleep Number bed from a RV supply store called Camping World, but we could not get it installed until the following Friday. More on that in the later posts.

So, the next morning, we called the number that had been given to us to talk to the service folks about the leak. We also discovered that the one recliner still would not recline (or so we thought!). Plus, the refrigerator kept flashing an error code. Thomas looked in the manual and the error code showed a problem with the propane. Luckily, the fridge ran on electricity with no problems. We never got a call back from the tech. We decided to go to the sales center and ask what we should do. We were afraid that if we left the service lot, they would not be responsible for any repairs. Well, the manager at the sales center found out the tech who was on call was sick with food poisoning! They told us to go ahead and move to the campground, which was on their property, just across the street and to come talk to the service people in the morning.

We hitched Holmes up to Watson with very little struggle and then held our breath as we pulled away for the first time. It actually went very smoothly. Watson pulls the load easily and as long as you take the corners wide, it is not that hard. We checked in to the campground and headed over to our spot. It was a nice, centrally located spot. But, it was across from the campground clubhouse and there were a ton of golf carts parked directly across from it. We did not relish the idea of backing Holmes on a 90 degree angle to get into the spot. Our neighbor came out and explained that since the lot behind him was empty, he had simply gone around the block and pulled straight through. The space behind us was empty as well, so we did the same thing! So much easier.

We unhitched Watson from Holmes and connected up all of our utilities. In a future post, I will explain everything that has to be done in order for us to have electricity, water, sewer and cable hookups. But for now, we were happy to settle in and prepare for Thomas to head back to work the next morning. The reason we chose to stay at the Lazy Days campground was because not only did we want to check everything out, I wanted to attend the many free seminars that Lazy Days holds during the week in order to learn all that I could about our new lifestyle. So, all was well until I went into the bedroom. I opened the closet door to find our new washer lying facedown on the floor of the closet! They had not fastened it down well enough and during our move, it just toppled over.
You can imagine our frustration and disgust at this point. We decided to take care of it the next day and get some sleep.

In our next post, I will detail the hair-pulling-out experience we had getting all of the problems fixed. They did all get resolved, we have learned a lot and we are still very happy to be moving on with our plans. Even though we have weathered a lot of struggles so far, we still feel fortunate to be able to follow our dreams. As we keep telling ourselves, an adventure is just that. Not every moment of an adventure is fun, but it is still worth having!