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!
