OK, a long-overdue update. Here's the kitchen; it's pretty close to done, with a bunch of loose ends to tie up. I just put in the under-cabinet LED lighting today and got it wired up.

What I did, in total, to the kitchen: I removed the existing Rialta kitchen and replaced basically everything except the plumbing and wiring. Wenge countertops (wax & oil finish so I can use the whole surface as a cutting board), Norcold DC fridge, new cabinetry I built mostly from pine and plywood to try to keep it light, Ramblewood Green stove, Houzer sink, some faucet I got off Overstock, soap dispenser, water filter system, new backsplash, and LED strip lighting under-cabinet. Still todo: magnetic spice rack, over-stove light fixture, knife magnet bar, under-sink shelving, over-stove pot hooks, paper towel dispenser, and lots of miscellaneous stuff.

Long shot of the kitchen. LED lighting doesn't work well with my iPhone camera so it looks oddly purple.

Nice big drawer. The stock one is miniscule and has really low sides so it's easy for things to fall out of it. When I removed the old kitchen I found all sorts of junk spatulas and stuff on the ground that had fallen out of the drawer.

Under-sink cabinet is much bigger. Shelf peg holes are drilled on both sides but I have to mount the water filter and figure out other stuff (probably hiding the solar controller & inverter in the small space at the bottom) before I can cut the shelves to fit.

Sink area, with drop-in cutting board out of the way. You can see the wood grain here and the way I packed all the faucetry stuff in the back there (it's a snug fit.)

LED strip under the cabinet. I just ran it back and forth with 90-degree folds at the corners. White duct tape holding it flush for now, though I'll need a better solution (probably wide staples or something) or eventually it'll peel off. This is first-pass. Works well, though.

I ran the power for the LED lighting at the back up into the cabinet. Just wrapped the wires together with the little controller wires, heat shrink & electrical tape to wrap it up. Again, white duct tape will have to be replaced by little plastic bracket or something, the tape'll peel off in a day or two I bet.

Inside the top cabinet. Wire comes up from LEDs, purple and green are power, and the wire running out the right is the IR receiver for the remote which I mounted on the side of the cabinet. The little controller comes in a plastic box with a DC coax connector; I removed the box and soldered the power wires straight to the board so I could use those spade connectors you see there instead. As always, the white duct tape makes it look extra professional.

I'm going to just mount the remote on the side of the cabinet and cover the space between it and the IR receiver so it's just like a permanent switch mounted there. I'm doing this because I'll have other LED strips in the RV and I don't want the under-cabinet lighting picking up signals from the other remote. I pretty much always want the under-cabinet lighting to be the same warm white color and only use it when cooking.

There's the lighting on. As before, it interferes oddly with my camera so it looks crappy in this shot. In real life it's a nice warm white light.

And one more shot. It's nicely low-profile, I'm really happy with how it came out.

Brian and I spent a good chunk of Sunday hanging out in his Rialta. Seeing what he's done is definitely inspiring for the work I'll be putting into the 1995 Rialta I acquired 3 days ago.

The stock configuration in mine feels very claustrophobic, which Brian's, even though it's loaded with a garage's worth of tools, totally overcame. Moving forward, getting rid of that feeling will be the primary focus of my work.

Hey man, looking good! I too have been renovating my 1995 Rialta down here in Portland. We should totally have a show and tell at some point! I'm going to get some photos up as soon as I have this phase of the remodel ready.

Curtains & Door Update

A while back I made a front cabin curtain and rear curtain. The rear window curtain is easy, just a big hemmed rectangle with a top pocket for a rod. The front was harder. We ended up making them out of three panels - one for driver's side door, one for passenger's side door, and one for the front console & windshield. I mounted mine with strong magnets (the MAGCRAFT neodymium magnets from Amazon that Ty mentions in his RV book.)
Here's a quick shot. (The upholstery on the seats is the last remaining Bauhaus upholstery in my RV, I've reupholstered everything else with it on it, and seat covers are en route. Yeah, it's bad.)

I also made a blackout curtain to match that fits much more snugly up against the windows. I made this curtain deliberately draped. The nice thing about using magnets is the curtains can just stack - if I want the blackout curtain on, I can then put this curtain on top of it and the magnets just stick together in a stack.

The reason I'm posting this update now is I finally got around to making the two remaining curtains, for the kitchen and door windows, this weekend. For the other windows I got the JC Penney day/night blinds Ty recommended, but for the kitchen and door windows I thought curtains made more sense, and gave me a chance to use the weird gray damask cloth again which I like.

I didn't have a sewing machine this time so I made them almost entirely with fusable interfacing, which I've never used before but is essentially a roll of 1/2" material that is iron-in glue; you put it between two pieces of cloth and iron it with a wet cloth on top and it glues them together. Useful for doing hems and whatnot.

I had to hand-finish the pockets where the magnets went. So for a simple rectangular curtain, the piece of cloth was basically a fat "capital I" shape, if that makes sense. Here's the finished thing:

You can see the stitching where I hand-finished it. There's a magnet in that little pocket. Here's what it looks like on the kitchen window:

I made matching blackout curtains, again. I just attached those magnets with JB Weld - you can see it lying on the counter in the lower right of the above photo - because I was too lazy to sew pockets onto that cloth (which doesn't need hemming or anything, so I avoided all sewing for them, they were easy.)

As for the door, we took the screen door off recently and it looked much better without it, except the interior material is the same speckly beige as the walls, and there was some water damage to the material at the bottom of the door so it was warped and folded. So I painted it clean white to match the kitchen cabinetry, and then used the leftover kitchen backsplash material (patterned aluminum sheeting from Home Depot) to add a kicker panel for aesthetics, which also conveniently covers the water damage. I think it looks great!

And one final shot - that door with the curtains on. I made them as big as possible so they block visibility from the outside and so the blackout curtain gets a good seal.

So far I've rebuilt all the kitchen cabinetry, replaced the counters and desk with exotic hardwood (wenge), upgraded the sink and stove (same stove Tynan got, different sink), put in a water filter tap, soap dispenser, etc. And today I finished putting in the cork flooring. The kitchen countertop is covered in tools since I still haven't screwed the counter itself down, but I'll get photos of it later.

And here's later; I've got the siding pieces glued and held in with what you can see is a sophisticated, professional clamping system.

I may have to get some kind of trim for the edges - you can see how the side pieces show an edge which has some gray stuff - hardiplank or whatever that stuff is - in there. If it bugs me I'll cover it with a little matching-color right-angle trim cap.

And finally a closeup of some of the flooring. This is engineered cork, obviously, it's strips of it laminated together. I love the way it looks. It's nice and soft and springy but very durable. I had cork floors at my last apartment I rented, or else I'd assume they'd absorb water and shred easily. They don't, they're great.

All told, tearing up the carpeting and putting in the cork took two full days of work (spread across a few weekends.) Putting the cork in took twice as long as removing the carpet, I think. Cutting the strips to fit the weird angled edges and stuff was what took most of the time.

No updates for a while because I've been slammed getting everything ready (we have this weekend and one more and then we're out of the house and in the Rialta full time! Mostly I've been craning on the electrical system, and I'll post a bunch of photos of that in a bit, but for now a little taste to keep you from jonesing... seat covers from www.seatcoversunlimited.com came last night and I installed them. These guys asked me to take a ton of measurements - well, OK, specifically, they sent me these images:

I replied with these measurements for my Rialta seats (in case anyone just wants to crib the same ones - I wouldn't change anything about them, they fit perfectly)

Main seat:


A:17"
B:4"
C:49" circumference, 6" down from top
D:52" circumference, 12" down from top
E:56" circumference, 21" down from top
F:27.5"
G:30"
H:23" across, 9" back from front
I:16" side to side (all the way across - not sure what "width across front *from center of curve*" means, if you mean from the center of the front of the seat then I guess it's only 8" out to the side - does that make sense?)
J:19"
K:6.5"
L:15.5"


Arm rest:


The circumference is 16" at the pivot point and 14.5" at the front.
Measuring just the top edge, it is 15" long.
Measuring the from the center of the back to the center of the front, running down along the underside of the armrest, that distance is 18" (does that make sense? So that's the length of the underside plus half the height at the back and half the height at the front.)
The armrest is uniformly 2.75" wide.


Head rest:


A:10.5"
B:3.5"
C:27.5"
D:27.5"
E:6"
F:7"

They made them custom and it was about 5 weeks from when I sent the measurements to when the package showed up.

Here's what my seats looked like yesterday afternoon:

Just hideous. You couldn't ask for an uglier fabric, and it was getting threadbare on the seat just to make matters worse. Pretty much the worst thing in the world.

Putting the seat covers on was actually a multi-hour project, more of a pain than I expected essentially because you cannot stick your arm through the space between the two cushions (seat and back.) The way the Rialta seat is built, the back cushion kind of continues down and then wraps around the bottom. And the seat covers rely on you being able to run cords out the back between those to snug the covers on. So I was laying on the ground with a razor knife, tying string to a long screwdriver bit I used like a needle to try to shove it through the holes I was cutting in the back of the seat.

It was worth it, though! Here's what the seats look like now:

That's roughly a trillion times better. Here's a closeup of one of the seats so you can see the fit:

The only modification I made to the covers themselves was to add velcro under the armrest on both sides to help pinch the front and back of the cover together:

I can't seem to find the specifics but I think the cost, including head and armrests, for the pair of seat covers, was like $250 total. Easily worth it over other options I was considering. Real reupholstery was going to be $800. New seats would have been even more. These look and fit fantastically well and were super affordable.

My only real complaint is the armrest covers are kind of lame. The way they're made, there's a seam running down the center right where you rest your arm. I may just take them off and leave the gray viny visible. Minor quibble though. The seat cover and headrest covers fit like a glove.

Pretty awesome. You're like a modern day renaissance man: hacking and construction skills. Hope to make some money soon to do a custom v1n Sprinter chassis RV. I think having some mechanical know how will round me out as a person. Everyone knows that fixing the sink turns the ladies on.

Got around to dealing with the upper dome. I'm 6'4" so after Ty told me you get almost an inch extra headroom by taking off the inner dome (there are two, which would never have occurred to me for some reason) I knew I wanted to leave it off. I also knew I wanted to run an LED light strip around it to illuminate the dome and cast a nice light. I did both tonight.

I just ran a strip of painter's tape around the wall of the inner dome and used that as a guide for cutting it, so it sticks up, whatever painter's tape is, two inches or so. I cut into it initially with my Dremel & cutting wheel just to give me an opening to get my jigsaw in. For lack of any plastic-specific blade I just left the 'fast wood' cutting blade on and that seemed to work fine. Throws off tons of little plastic shrapnel, though.

Then I experimented with placement for the LED strip and settled on the inner dome, facing out, about 1.5" up on the side. That looked best of the positions I tried.

It looks pretty good. You can tell if you look right at it that the inner dome is just cut down as trim, you can see the line where it's cut, but it looks fine to me and gives me the nice finished inside edge but also the extra headroom.

Total time was only like an hour total including wiring and whatnot, this was an easy project.