An issue with our coach that I caused: back in the homestead we had a sturdy gas cooktop, so I’d bang a spoon on a pot to dislodge stuck food. Well, it turns out that glass induction cooktops are a bit more sensitive than I’m used to; the very first time I used it, and banged as usual, it stopped working. Who knew? Oops!

So, I purchased a replacement cooktop (the same kind, albeit new), and yesterday I swapped them out.

Here’s the old cooktop after being pried out (with the DishDrawer dishwasher visible below):

The new cooktop:

The bottom; it just plugs in to an outlet under the kitchen counter:

The new cooktop installed:

The cover restored and label removed; all done:

I’ll try to remember not to bang on this one!

I previously mentioned that we removed the couches from our coach so we could use our recliners and add a desk. Well, while at Olde Stone Village RV park one of our first projects was to assemble a desk.

The desk is for Jenn to do her work, and includes drawers and a keyboard tray, plus an external screen and laptop. Those are mounted on arms, so they can be swung aside when we want to watch TV, as the main TV is on a “televator”, i.e. it raises out of the shelf behind the desk. (We haven’t gotten around to setting up the TVs yet; another project for this week.)

To the left of her desk is a top-access litter box and litter bin for our cat Paladin, who is currently being boarded; we’ll pick him up on Sunday. Hopefully he’ll accept that new box!

A peek behind the screen and laptop support arms, mounted to the desk:

Update — the drawers slid open while driving, which isn’t ideal, so I added some roller catches that should hold them closed:

While the coach was at Mom’s place, we spent some time organizing things, plus doing some minor modifications.

One tweak was to mount a towel holder under the kitchen cabinets, so it didn’t take up counter space:

We also removed the towel rails from inside the shower (a crazy place for it, having to remove the towels when using the shower), and installed new towel rails outside (I didn’t get a picture of that, though, and the coach is currently at a dealer getting serviced, so I can’t get a pic).

We left the ends of the towel rail in the shower, but rotated them to act as hooks. And added wall-mounted liquid dispensers:

For Jenn’s necklaces, we added a couple of wall-mounted racks by the vanity:

In the living room, you may recall that we removed the couches so we could use our chairs:

Since the front edge of the chair base hangs over the edge of the slide carpet, we added some higher feet using rubber doorstops, to make the chairs more level and stable:

We also added some extra shelving in several cupboards, and other tweaks. I’m sure we’ll make more over time, to customize the coach to be more comfortable.

To explore local areas, get groceries, etc, we drive our 2016 Chevy Colorado pickup truck. But driving that as well as the coach isn’t ideal, so we got a tow bar installed on the coach, plus modifications to the truck, to enable the coach to tow the truck. When the truck is towed by the coach, it is colloquially called a “toad”, for obvious reasons.

We lucked out in that the truck we already had is one of the few models that can be towed “four down” aka “dingy towed”, i.e. with all four wheels rolling on the ground, instead of having to put it on a trailer or dolly. Four-down towing is much easier than dealing with a trailer.

Here’s the tow bar on our coach during installation:

It has several components, including (left-to-right) an electrical cable for lights, a safety brake cable (to apply the brakes on the truck if it becomes disconnected), two safety cables, the bar itself (with a drop hitch to make it more level), and an air hose for the brake controller:

The air hose is interesting; the coach has air brakes, and the air hose lets the coach braking be shared with the truck (see below):

On the truck side, two tow bar mount points were installed, with a bar connection and a safety cable on each side:

Under the truck license plate was installed the safety brake connection (that will stop the truck if the pin is pulled out), the electrical connection (for the lights), and the air hose connection (for the brakes):

Here’s the whole tow bar setup. The Roadmaster tow bar is top-of-the-line, with non-binding arms, and LED lights on the side, for safety:

Inside the truck is a button to disconnect the battery, which is one of the steps required to be towed (it also needs to change the transfer case to neutral, and other steps).

Actually, here’s the relevant page of the truck manual, detailing the steps to flat tow:

Also inside is an air-powered brake controller that presses the brake pedal exactly like if someone were sitting in the truck, proportional to the pedal in the coach being pressed:

That brake controller is quickly disconnected when the truck isn’t being towed.

And when the tow bar isn’t in use while camping, it can be covered tidily:

During the few days between getting home from our Yellowstone vacation and leaving the homestead, we moved more stuff into the coach and into storage.

Another big project was to remove the two leather couches from the coach. They were nice couches, but the L-shaped main couch kinda blocked the passageway when the slides were in, plus we wanted to use our fancy individual chairs, and have a desk in place of the smaller couch, since we’ll be working from our various campsites.

Here’s the L-shaped couch, with the L part slid in (see the inside tour post for its expanded state):

We also removed the smaller secondary couch opposite that; here it is piled with stuff:

The disassembly of the two couches only took a few hours; I took them apart into small enough pieces to be able to fit out the door, starting by undoing the four bolts holding each piece to the floor:

The seatbelts are also mounted to the floor, but I left those:

Part of the couch (with hide-a-bed) on its side:

I kept the seatbelts, tucked into the cavity in the wall; these proved very useful to hold our chairs in place later:

Part of the couch removed; you can see the carpeted slide-out (we later removed the plastic from the carpet):

Next was the L-shaped part:

That couch completely removed:

On to the smaller couch; it also folded out as a bed, in a jack-knife style:

Removed:

More seatbelts from the smaller couch:

The smaller couch space; we’ll add a desk there later:

We took the couch components to our storage unit; we could restore them to the coach when we eventually sell it, or include them as “some assembly required”, or sell separately, or something; a problem for future us:

Here’s our coach with our chairs in place, along with lots of boxes, with the slides in; still enough room to get past them:

A wide-angle view:

I’ll provide a picture of how it looks with the slides out later, once we’ve tidied away more of the stuff.