Well it’s about time! Winter is over!!!! It won’t look like it in the picture- but the temperature was at least manageable, and thus Alaskan spring! Finally we would get to put our hands on our new baby again and starting to make her better. This was exciting news in our world!
On another note I also have a bit of exciting news in regards to this blog as well; we are almost caught up. With this post we will be in April of 2020, so I only have a few months to try and catch up on until we are blogging in real-time! 🎆🎇🎉🥳 I will try my best to get there, but I must forewarn you; A LOT has happened in just 2 months.
With that said, it was time to open up that corner a little bit… remember this scenario?
It was time to find out how bad this corner was underneath this patch, as well as finally get down to why there was such a bulge in the wall as well. So off with the metal band-aid!
Yeah, the back corner was pretty damaged. I probably could have done a clean up and build back together without delving too far, but this is about the time I discovered I had a larger problem….
I had noticed the bulge by the water heater had gotten a little worse; but not knowing how loose the whole back corner was I had hoped it was just caused by shifting. Unfortunately it was not. When I had bought the rig, the seller told me he had winterized all of the appliances and gave me a clean bill of health on them all. At this point it became quite apparent he had not winterized the water heater…
All of the sides of the water heater were bulged out, leaving the water heater itself heaved up a good 3/4″ off of the floor at the edge.
Bummer! This meant we were going to need a new hot water heater. As I surveyed the problem, this lead me to another realization; I couldn’t just take it out. The water heater had bulged out so much I was going to have to take apart the rear panel at the corner so I could get to the water heater door framing and dismantle it.
I decided I would wait just a tiny bit longer, for a break in the weather to be a little more dry, to open up the back corner fully and do the work.
I hesitantly messaged the seller and let him know what was going on, and asked him if he could cover the cost for a new hot water heater. He was very cool about it, letting me know he was happy to but things might have to wait for funds due to all of the shutdown from the Corona Virus. I let him know that there was no rush, and I super appreciated that he was willing to do it! That was great news! We agreed on just the replacement price to directly replace the original. Laura and I wanted to upgrade the water heater since we were opening it all up anyway; so we would cover the additional cost for the difference and shipping. After lots of research here is the one we settled on;
Currently I haven’t got to run it yet, but we are super excited to try this out when everything is ready! So the plan was to catch the next small stretch of good weather, remove the paneling back to the camper entry door so we could find out why the wall was bulging, remove the old water heater, build the opening for the new one, and re-build the whole back end as needed.
Whew… not too much, right? Well, ‘Till Next Time!
Geoff Murphy 6/5/2020