 No more tripping over shoes. No more charging cords everywhere or cramped desk space or just stuff stacked on top of stuff everywhere. Our Renault fixed all of that and I'll give you a tour today. Hey everybody, it's Robin with Creativity RV and some eagle eyed viewers noticed that we had a different background in our last two videos. No, I didn't go and get another RV that would be number four. If you're new to my channel, I had a 25 foot B plus van to start out with on the road and then I had a 25 foot class C and last year I moved to a fifth wheel. I have a grand design solitude 310 GK. It's great. I plan to keep it for a long time, but if you watched last week's video, you know that Doug, my boyfriend, moved in and is also full-time and we found that the space just didn't work great for us. We came to a long-term visitor area out here in the desert to camp next to some friends for a few months during COVID and when we got here, we pulled into our spot and saw that we actually had something happen in the RV that needed a major repair. That's how all of this started. We're lucky because we are camping next to Eric from the channel Wonderboom who did my desk last year and we asked him to help us fix this problem, but then we started thinking, you know, we were here for a few months. We knew Eric, we had a friend here who was an electrician and another friend that knows how to sew. So we really made a list of everything in here that wasn't working great, but let me first tell you about the things that needed to be repaired. A couple of weeks before we hit the road to come down here to the Arizona California area, a friend of mine sent me a video by Liz Amazing who has the same exact RV that I have and their island fell. Now this is a huge island in the middle of the kitchen. It was the reason that I wanted to get this rig, but it's a big, heavy countertop and the manufacturer only secured it with two screws. We found out that those islands can collapse and fall and we thought, you know, when we get down to the LTVA, we should really ask Eric to help us support that a little bit more. We drove for like three days and once we got here, Doug and I plopped down into the chairs over here and Doug looked over at the island and says, does that look weird to you? Sure enough, half of our island collapsed down onto itself. So all the cabinets and the countertop collapsed over the base. It was completely uneven and we had to actually get a block of wood to support it until Eric could come over here and fix it. And here are some pictures of him doing that. He just took out some of the baseboards under the cabinet and then supported it with some wood. By the way, Wonderboom, the channel, after this video, it was putting out a video showing how he did everything in here that he built out. It's really fun to make a list of everything that bothers you inside of your rig and then find a way to fix it. And we did that and I'm going to take you around this rig and I'm going to show you everything that we did and how it fixed the problem we were having in our full-time life. Like I said, Doug and I are both in here working full-time and we needed two good workspaces. Here in the corner, we had this lovely couch, but nobody ever used it and nobody ever slept on the pull-out bed. And in the place of our couch, Eric made this amazing desk. Now, this is called Shishugibon, this finish, where you actually burn the wood and it gives you this amazing contrast actually in the grain of the wood itself. Now, we didn't go as deep on the Shishugibon as you would see traditionally because we wanted it to be even for us to ride on and have it be a good work surface. On the back of the desk, we have what we call the book Corral. I have a lot of actual books and it takes a lot of room to store them. So, what we did is we built this little Corral that is secured into the wall and it holds all of the books so they can stay here and we don't have to find a place to store them when we're about to travel. Another thing we wanted to fix are these big cabinets here above the new desk. I don't know why RV manufacturers make these giant cabinets that have all this vertical space that you can't use. So, Eric put in a quick shelf and we were able to put bins in here that I can actually reach and get stuff down. With the old setup right here next to this chair, we had a cubby that was full of cords. We can never find the cord we were looking for no matter how many ways we tried to organize it. But luckily, we were traveling with our friend Bob who's an electrician and he put these pucks in three places right here and one on each side of the desk. The great thing about this is that it closes. So, we can keep the dust out of it but when we want to use it, it's got a charging platform for your phone so you just set it on there. So, we can charge a number of things in here without any cords showing. Up in this cabinet is Doug's PlayStation. Before we had this Renault, his PlayStation was always sitting down here and the cords were going over here and we had cords for our fire stick and all kinds of stuff. Our TV is down here and it turns out that there's this section of the wall back here that hides some cords that the manufacturer put in. So, you can't tell now but we popped that off and ran the cords down from Doug's PlayStation right down through this channel into the TV so we never see cords again. After Eric finished the kitchen island repair, we thought about what else we wanted to have done here and we decided that we needed more counter space. So, just like in my old desk, we created a pop-up at the end so we have more counter space and on the other side, I had a burky that was put into a planter so it kept it off of the ground. We wanted to have it permanently installed in the air and so we figured out this great way to put it on the wall and I decided to secure mine with a set of corsets. Our fifth wheel came with a couple of cubbies under the stairs for shoes but like a lot of you, we put our shoes here in the entryway and we were always tripping over them. So, in the front of our nook right here, we actually have shoe storage but that's not it. Well, look at this. We have these massive drawers on both sides that hold things like big pots. You might remember when I first got the rig, I had a traditional RV table. Last year Eric ripped that out and made me a custom desk which was great but it wasn't working for both of us so we created this little nook and our friend Terry made us these amazing cushions so it turned it into a nice little nook where we can have a meal or work or play a game or do a puzzle. Speaking of which, this is another hidden storage compartment. Right here, Eric built us a custom area where we could store some of my paper and also our puzzle keeper which is huge and we never had a good place to put it so when we're not doing a puzzle, we can put it right in here. We also have another Shisugibon table here and it moves around because we put it on little coasters on top of carpet which works great and back there you can see that the big boy has his own little bed. He loves this nook. He lives in this nook. I'm psyched to tell you guys about the next one. Right here next to the door we have this dumb area that held I guess letters or tiny knickknacks that the manufacturer put in. We're going down the road. We're not going to put anything in there it would just fall out so what we did is we knocked out a shelf and in its place we put some fruit and vegetable storage. The big boy by the way eats my produce. He'll eat bell peppers down to the core so this is the way to keep him away from the produce and not have it on the counter. The next thing you'll notice is that we completely painted in here. We changed it from that awful brown color that they always do in RVs to this nice bright white with a black accent and it makes it so much bigger in here. Now painting an RV is a lot of work. It took a long time but it's more us it's more modern and it got rid of all the dark colors and the glitter that they had in here before. The next thing is the windows. If you look at the tour that I did last year when I first bought this rig which I will link above right now you'll see that these giant windows which is the best part of a grand design were covered by these weird brown vertical window coverings that blocked out about 30% of the light and I found that I actually really love this black frame. It makes me think of a submarine and I wanted to see that but to get that done we actually had to cut the window valences that were up there and resecure them to the wall. Now if anybody else wants to do this I forewarn you once we took the window coverings off we were shocked because these windows on these walls were not even. They were like punched into the wall at these weird angles so when we hung these window boxes at the top back up if the box was even then the blind came down uneven. Another cool thing we did is we put some dry erase paint in a couple of places and these are actually lyrics to a song that Doug and I wrote the other day we thought we were hysterical. This is the bathroom door. More dry erase this is where we keep our to-do lists. Next to the bathroom we also added a little compartment that holds the dry erase pens and the little stick pens for our new travel map that we're using to map out where we want to go across the country. Hey who's this good-looking kid? This is Doug from college on an award that he got last year when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame for soccer. We found out that he had been nominated every year since he graduated. How many years ago? Too many. Too many. He won the award last year in Wisconsin so we flew out for him to get it. We also painted the bathroom. It makes such a big difference especially with the skylight. It's so much brighter in here. Everybody out there knows that the lighting inside of these bathrooms is terrible. I actually found these little detachable reading lights that stick onto a magnet so I use them as a vanity light they turn and they're great for putting on makeup or doing your hair. If you do that stuff still and it's great. Hey everybody and I just thought this was really funny so I had to do it when you shut the bathroom door on the inside. This guy just stares at you. No. Once there were two of us in here we realized we had too many caps and so I got this great rack off of Amazon. We put it here above the door. It holds our caps just great and I also have one behind the door of the bedroom that holds our hoodies. In the bedroom we didn't do much except for just move some stuff around and add some white paint. It's made a huge difference. Behind the bedroom door we have hoodie storage. There are three of these racks and they work great because hoodies take up a ton of room in the closet and we found that if we just put these here we can just hang our hoodies and grab them when we needed them. Now this Renault took us two months. We thought it was only going to take us a couple of weeks. Eric did the desk and he did the nook and a couple of the extra things around the island but Doug and I painted this entire thing. We learned a lot about how painting in RV is different than painting a house. In a few weeks I'm going to put out a video showing you what worked and what did not work when we painted this rig. It's not perfect. There's still a few things that we need to touch up but we were just exhausted after a couple of months and we're really happy with it right now. We have extra paint so we're just going to do some touch ups as we go down the road. Overall we're so happy with this Renault. Really everything that we wanted to get done is done. It is the perfect space for us. We can pack up and travel so much faster. It's brighter. It's a great workspace. It's a great space to hang out and we're really glad that we did it. If you have any questions on this Renault please put them down below and I'll try and answer the most common ones in the next Sunday morning view queue where I answer viewer questions. I hope you're all doing great out there and staying healthy and happy. I'll see you next week. Until then, have happy travels and be free.