[whatsnewell]

We have been in South Jordan, UT at my brother's home since Monday. We come here at least once a year to visit, and to utilize my brother's construction expertise. We came here in June of 2008 right after we bought the Newell to have him install the wood flooring many of you have seen. Since then we have been through the area several times as we travel and he has made some minor fixes for us here and there. This time we came to spend about a week to remove the wood flooring and replace it with simulated wood vinyl flooring. When I had my brother install the original Pergo interlocking flooring I asked him to leave the very thin carpet padding and to install the Pergo over it. I thought it would give the floor a softer feel, and deaden the sound a little and it did. The unforeseen consequence of my decision was that over 5.5 years the flexing in the joints resulting from the extra padding cause many of the joints to break.....plus we suffered some water damage during a torrential rain storm in East Glacier, MT this past July. Anyway, it was time to replace that flooring with the more practical vinyl. Additionally, we wanted to remove the sofabed so we could put in an extra recliner and a dedicated work station for me. Removing the sofabed was Elaine's idea, and it was a great idea. We have only used the bed part of the sofabed two, or three times, but for the most part (99.9% of the time) the sofa was impractical for our life style. Since our coach is one of the shorter Newells made in the 80's at 36' we don't have the luxury of changing the position of our TV from over the driving area to a more convenient viewing spot directly across form the sofa. Anyone sitting on the sofa watching TV has to sit sideways on it, or they end up with a crick in their neck. Additionally, the sofa creates a lot of unusable dead space. When I say "sofabed" I mean the kind of sofabed you would buy in a furniture store.....the original owners of our coach wanted a real couch/sofabed so Newell built the space around it and installed the couch/sofabed. One of the gas furnace ducts ran under the sofabed to a spot just behind the driver's seat, plus Newell had run some 12 volt wiring under the bed....not in a wire tunnel, and I had run a length of ROMEX under the bed to an electrical outlet I had installed near the front of the coach, so pulling out the sofabed meant we had to take out the heater duct work, and create a wire tunnel along the baseboard before we could even start laying the new flooring.

Naturally, there were hundreds of staples to be removed that were holding the original carpet padding place, and removing them became a major task. It pretty much took us a whole day to remove all the staples and to begin re-routing the wiring....that was Tuesday. Wednesday first thing I created the new wire tunnel utilizing the trim Newell had created to fill the space between the sofabed and floor. It had some kind of wire mesh allowing the heat from the heating duct to enter the living area from under the sofa. I used this nice piece in creating the new wire tunnel along the base board. I think it turned out well. I also had to install a new "register" for the gas furnace and to cover the hole cut by Newell to run the duct work.

Finally, Wednesday afternoon we began to install the new vinyl flooring, which comes in 4" X 36" planks. Pretty easy to work with.....you just peel off the backing and stick it to the floor. We probably got about 40% laid down Wednesday, and then another 50% down Thursday. We left the difficult parts for my brother to install....you know, the ones requiring a lot of fitting and cutting to go around the various angles in the kitchen, shower, and bathroom areas.....my brother is good at this stuff, and can do it three times faster than I. He was able to knock out about 1/2 of the "piece" work Thursday afternoon, and will finish the rest Friday afternoon.....we are almost there to our new salon look, and here are a few pictures showing the progress.