Note from Kurt: see my last post for why this is appear­ing some­time after Lisa authored it. She is get­ting around much bet­ter now.

It’s been quite a while since I posted to our house project blog. Suf­fice it to say that things became overly dif­fi­cult for me as I watched my lit­tle house dis­ap­pear before my eyes. I would get very depressed, than regain my equi­lib­rium, only to return to panic. Read more

Since we moved into the 5th wheel in the dri­ve­way, the loss of daily rou­tines has been among the most try­ing aspects of our daily life. The thought that you might be able to lay your hands on some­thing you once knew the likely loca­tion of, and the ensu­ing lit­tle incre­ment of frus­tra­tion that comes with the real­iza­tion that it may be lost to you until you once again move back into the house and unpack every­thing, moves you one step closer to a sort of low grade insan­ity that began with the incep­tion of the very process that has become — remodeling.

We did exten­sive research into travel trailer options after we hatched the idea of stay­ing on the prop­erty dur­ing our remodel adven­ture. For a brief time we thought maybe a trailer that could actu­ally be towed behind my Ford Ranger would be kind of inter­est­ing. But the real­ity both of the min­i­mal liv­ing space afforded by such an option and the fact that every­one and their brother is look­ing for just that lit­tle trailer at the height of travel sea­son soon put an end to that notion. Then we thought that maybe we could find some­thing big enough to accom­mo­date both of us plus Lisa’s brother who would soon be liv­ing with us. But the thought of a trailer nearly the size of our house parked in our dri­ve­way also seemed a bit improb­a­ble. Then there is the fact that my 6’5″ frame put severe con­straints upon the options avail­able to us. So ignor­ing for the moment that what we really want is a teardrop trailer small enough to pull behind our Honda Civic, I soon dis­cov­ered that the RV known as a 5th wheel (which requires hard­ware in the bed of your truck that I had no inten­tion of pur­chas­ing) has, by its very design,  more than enough head room for me. How we got the thing head first into our dri­ve­way is another story.

So into our sec­ond month in the trailer the con­verter decided to go on the fritz. The first night was incon­ve­nient since the con­verter takes the 110 volt power sup­plied via exten­sion cord and turns it into usable 12 DC power for the light­ing. But on the sec­ond night we soon real­ized that the igniter for the propane hot water heater also worked with DC power. Ooops …
On the third night we were awoken by a shrill sound ema­nat­ing from some­where in the the kitchen. I quickly real­ized it was com­ing from the LP gas leak detec­tor which was con­ve­niently designed to incor­po­rate a low volt­age alarm
By then, I was into research on what it would take to replace the defec­tive con­verter. It soon became clear (as so often it does!) that I could obtain a replace­ment online for about half what it would cost me to buy it locally. Could we stand to wait the extra time? As soon as I had placed the order the answer came when the refrig­er­a­tor stopped. Even thought it is clev­erly designed to run on either elec­tric­ity or propane gas, it still requires a small amount of elec­tric­ity even to run on gas.