A friend said the hardest move he ever made — was across the street.
We didn’t have a street to cross, still, it was plenty difficult. To set up the move we picked up our new (2008) RV and on Wednesday about 2 pm and parked it right across the patio mat – door to door in a big open lot northwest of Phoenix. It looked ideal. The buyers of our RV were going to do their move, at the same location, starting on Friday. Now the question was where to put all the stuff. We had a day and a half to get out.
We owned two RVs at the same time
Yes for two days, we owned two RVs. Owning two RVs, for two days, was way better than moving twice. We moved out of our 34 foot RV into our older/nicer 40’ RV which had much bigger storage spaces, how hard could it be. It was hard. The differences were immediately obvious. Every storage space was different both in size and location. We had more cabinets, but nearly all of them were smaller. (The refrigerator stuff was the easiest to move and new refrigerator swallowed the entire contents of our old refrigerator and still looked empty.)
We had multiple kitchen cabinets in our previous RV that could store the bread machine. In our new RV, the only cabinet big enough to store the bread machine was under the dining room table. Yes, we carry and have carried, a bread machine. I know this is odd, but it is so worth it, and it makes great bread (and Tami uses it to make fabulous pizza dough).
Separate and defined
In our old RV, the exterior storage cabinets were each distinct and each was filled with similar stuff. I was able to put like items all together. We had dedicated storage cabinets for tools and different storage for exterior cleaning supplies and a different cabinet for parking and leveling blocks. I was also able to store long items like the ladder and window washing poles across the top of the drive shaft (side to side) in four locations.
One large space
In our new RV, we have a single massive storage cabinet that was almost not divided in any way. It was similar to having storage shelves in the garage with individual boxes versus just making a huge pile in the middle of the floor. I now have a pile of stuff in the middle of the garage floor. The question of where to put all the stuff was much harder than I had envisioned.
Slider Tray
We have one slider tray in our biggest storage bay. As long as I don’t stack the stuff too high, I can slide the tray out from under the RV sideways, either out the driver side or out the passenger side, and access everything on the tray. This slider tray takes up one half of the big open space. I love this thing so much that eventually, we will have two slider trays. We also have two other small slider trays, which extend about eighteen inches out one side of the RV. One holds the tools and the other is filled with miscellaneous stuff.
Toys, toys and more toys
When we went back to California, we returned with the golf clubs we had in storage, unused, for the last three years. They all fit in the storage bay, including the bags. They are all part of the pile of stuff in the garage and to give you an idea of the size of the storage, two full sets of golf clubs take up about 30% of the main storage space. We are going to have to cut down on our golf gear.
Bicycle, kayak and fishing stuff takes about 30% of the space not including the kayaks that live on top of the car. Add that to golf stuff and you can see where our hearts are…toys, toys and more toys.
We went to Las Vegas.
Phoenix in March became too challenging to get RV parking all because of Major League Baseball spring training. We discovered that our new RV has insufficient battery power to run our huge residential refrigerator overnight and that changed the short term plan. Our new RV demanded to be plugged in all the time. We already knew that the batteries would need to be replaced and have plans in that department.
In case you missed it here is the post where we show off our new (to us) 2008 Tiffin Allegro Bus.
Glad you are in Las Vegas. Now you can start sorting.