Opening Up A Can 🥫 of… Our Ohana 🤙

It was time to crack this open and see how truly bad things were….

With The Ohana parked in her new work location, in which she would sit until she was closed back up, we began again opening up the compartment above the water heater so we could remove the door.

First we had to cut out the silicone used to seal it:

Remove all of the screws:

And with that we had our first door off. The plan was to remove the outside fiberglass paneling up to this seam (See picture below) all the way along the camper up to the entry door. This would allow us to not only address the back corner, but try and discover what the cause of the bulge closer towards the front might be.

I began by removing the taping job that was running down where the very back corner had split:

Then we removed the seam cover and mounting strip:

Next came off the refrigerator rear access panel door.

And we were on to the lower fiberglass seam.

Look at the gap in that corner without anything holding it back! 😨 At least the panel is floating out to match up with the bulge in the side now! 🤣 With all the things pinning the fiberglass panel in place removed, it was time to start removing the framing from around the water heater so we could try and get it out.

Then it was back to getting the fiberglass panel disconnected from the corner, because it was still caulked to the corner panel seam. I continued working along, addressing whatever might be keeping the bulged water heater from it’s glorious escape beyond the walls of the RV.

**Yep- That’s original faded yellow you can see with the blue stripes from underneath the paint…**

Here is some pieces of the face frame that was holding in the water heater:

Then it was about time to actually try and get this water heater out, so with that I disconnected the gas and water lines.

The fiberglass could still not clear the flange on the front of the water heater to come off…

So out came the panel saw to make a cut by the water heater.

And to address the other end of the portion of the fiberglass panel we needed to remove by the door it was a little cut with a multi-tool:

And with that our panel was loose and ready for removal. With some careful finagling the side was open!

So I bet you can guess what I did next…

With one water heater down. 👇🏽 It was time to survey what was left…

Well, needless to say, I had a lot of cleaning and mold clean up ahead of me. As I peered in at the back edge of the RV I found this:

So I started cleaning up the back corner where the water heater had been and surveying the wall to see if there were any clues to what was causing the mid-wall bulge.