Easy Upgrades for Happier Camping

Are you stuck at home?  Are you chomping at the bit to go camping in your RV?  Are you watching for RV parks to open back up and thinking to yourself, “open … open….open!!”  That’s me!  Unfortunately, our 5^thwheel is too big for driveway camping in our driveway.  We’re actually toying with the idea of taking it to a place with a big parking lot with take-out food just so we can have dinner someplace else.  We’re getting desperate…  Maybe the best thing to do right now, besides dream of the trips you’ll take soon, is to work on little upgrades that will make your future trips a little happier.  

We’ve done several small-scale upgrades over the years in our rigs that have made our camping a little happier.  There are lots of things you can do!  I’ve seen people paint the cupboards and walls of the inside of their rigs, take out tables and build new things where the table once was, re-configure bunk house areas, and other more involved upgrades. These sort of amazing transformation type upgrades are not small scale in my book.  The ideas in this blog are not those kinds amazing transformation types of ideas.  We like the easy stuff!  

Here’s our list of things we’ve upgraded over the years:

TV’s – If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, this is probably the third or fourth time you’ve heard about TV upgrades.  The TV’s that come with RV’s aren’t great!  We swapped them out with Smart TV’s and it’s awesome!  RV Park wi-fi is sketchy, but we run them through the hotspot on my cell phone.  We’re able to keep up on our favorite Netflix and Amazon Prime shows.  You may be thinking, “I bought this trailer so I can go out in the wilderness and enjoy the great outdoors.”  We enjoy the great outdoors as much as anyone, but at the end of a big day outside hiking, grilling a good dinner, and a campfire, it’s pretty great to flop out and watch something other than a pixelated episode of Friends that’s showing on one of two channels that you can get on your antenna.

Faucets – Our first trailer had the world’s dumbest faucet in the kitchen sink.  It didn’t have the “arch” and just stuck out over the sink fairly level with the top of the sink.  So, when you put a pan in the sink to wash it, you had to flick the water into it.  It was ridiculous.  Imagine my delight when we accidentally forgot to leave the faucet valves open after a winter trip and found the faucet broken off and laying in the sink!  YAY!  We got a new, much more functional faucet.  After that, we decided not to wait for something to break and just get a faucet we like right off the bat!  If you don’t have a faucet with a pull out in your kitchen, you’re missing out on some much easier dishwashing!

Cupboard hardware – Don’t like your knobs?  Are they catching your fingers and causing you pain?  Swap them out!  It’s easy!  Go pick out some you like and swap them.  Just make sure if you have two holed drawer pulls that your holes are the same distance apart on your new pulls.  

Towel bars and TP holders – You know when you go to Home Depot and look at things: the stuff on the Left hand of the aisle is more expensive and the stuff on the right hand of the aisle is the cheapest?  So, when you look at towel bars and TP holders, the nicer ones are on the left and the super cheap ones are on the right.  The ones on the right are the ones that come with RVs.  Sometimes they’re even fancy colors like gold that you might hate!  Donate them and buy some that you like!  If your rig comes with already installed towel bars and TP holder, make sure you’ll cover any holes that are already drilled into the wall.  

Hang a picture – Got a favorite picture from a trip?  Hang it up!   I collect National Park poster art.  My RV is a great place to put it.  I buy the smaller sized ones and cheap mats and frame them with inexpensive frames.  They look great!  If the mat doesn’t fit just right, you can use scrapbooking tape that matches your mat to hide the gap.  There are lots of ways to hang pictures.  Command Strips might work for you.  We drill pilot holes through the frame and then screw the frame into the wall with nice looking screws.  The downside of this is, when we’ve gone to sell a trailer, we have to empty out the frame and leave the frame with the trailer, starting over in the next rig.

Hooks – It seems obvious once you think about it, but usually isn’t something you think about right off the bat.  You don’t normally think about it until you’re wondering where you’ll hang the dog leash or your wet jacket you’re wearing.  So, think about it now!  Where might you like a hook to hang something?  We have a hook in the bathroom for our clothes while we’re in the shower, hooks in the “hallway” for dog leashes and wet coats, hooks in the closet to hang up our PJs, and a broom hook in the pantry for the broom.  That’s just us.  Put your hooks where they work for you.  We use $2 hooks from the hardware store that go with the metal in our trailer.  

Drawer and cupboard organizers  – No one likes to clean up a jumbled mess first thing when they get to their campsite.  Where are your jumbles?  Measure the area and find some organizers that fit in your space online (since you can’t go to the Container Store right now).  You can check my blog for earlier posts about setting up kitchens, bedrooms, etc. to get more ideas on how to organize and where to find things for organizing.

Mattress – Is your mattress kind of a rock?  Do you sink to the middle?  Our second trailer had a horrid mattress!  We slept on it one trip and ditched it!   Comfort is super important when you’re camping (fake camping as it were)!  Make sure your mattress works for you!  In our current rig, we’ve gotten by with adding a nice topper to the mattress that came with it.  In our second trailer, we went to Camping World and bought a memory foam type mattress.  Camping World was a good place to shop because it was a short queen bed. 

Drawers under the bed – We keep the dirty clothes and laundry supplies in the storage area under the bed.  In our second trailer, the hardware that made it so we could lift the mattress to get to the storage was … stupid …  We didn’t know it, but it was totally useless!  Now that we have our new rig, it’s easy to get in and out of under the bed because the hardware is more functional.  When we replaced the mattress in the second rig, the memory foam version was considerably heavier than the horrid mattress that came with the trailer.  It took two people to put a pair of dirty socks under the bed.  That got annoying.  So, we had someone make drawers for the under-bed storage.  That was a great improvement and made life much easier.  This was a bit spendy, but was totally worth it in the “quality of life” department.

Change your lightbulbs – We didn’t do this, but the guy who bought our second trailer swapped out all the light bulbs with LEDs and says it’s much brighter inside and it’s less strain on the AC/DC converter.  For the record, that information comes from my husband, the Electrical Engineer.  I wouldn’t have a clue about AC/DC converters.  I majored in Recreation.  We didn’t have that class!

It’s a tough time in our country right now, and going camping would do a lot to adjust my attitude!  I can’t wait to get out!  Even if we end up someplace where things are closed, I’d like to look out the window and see something different and maybe walk my dogs someplace different!  Or, maybe we’ll just have our take-out dinner in a parking lot in our trailer just to be someplace different.  I hope you’ll get out and about in your RV soon. Until then, enjoy thinking about camping and maybe doing some easy upgrades.

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