Some more projects

Carl has been working on some additional projects over the past few days...

Carl did this project a week or so ago, but I had not taken a picture of it... he added a 12v outlet now under the coach in one of the bays. He has a 12v vacuum cleaner that he uses when cleaning the Traeger Ranger smoker -- he was having to pull out a battery to power it, but created a 12V outlet that allows him to do the cleanup very simply!

A few months ago (actually, about a year ago now!) we saw this signpost at an RV in a campground and liked its style and construction. We took a picture with the plan to try to recreate it at some point... well... Tuesday was "some point"!

This is what ours is looking like so far -- we want it to be black, and had wanted to get black ABS supplies, but... we weren't able to find many components in the black ABS... so we decided to go with white PVC. We were planning to paint it even if we got the black ABS (because there would probably be writing on the piping), so we'll just paint the white components. We had a guy at Menards involved in helping us find all the plumbing pieces we needed (we ended up going to Farm&Fleet for some additional pieces too) - I think the fellow at Menards enjoyed putting the puzzle together as much as we did!

We had gotten a solar light for the "lamp" on the top of the post (it may be hard to see in the picture from the example lamppost above) - but we realized that the one we got has a square base, and it would be a lot easier to put on a light the top of our post if it had a round base -- so we're going to look for a solar light with a round base to complete our project. We also need to sand the plastic to rough it up a little in hopes that will help the paint to stick. And... we may want to put some ballast into the base -- we can use tent stakes through the base to hold it down, but we think a little weight would be helpful too. At this point, we are not planning to actually glue the pipes together, we think that they may hold together well enough with just friction, and we will want to take the cross piece off when storing anyway. Eventually, we may get a wooden sign instead of the photo sign that we currently have. But, we made a lot of progress on Tuesday!

A few weeks ago, I posted about the problems we had with the awning no longer retracting (https://journeyinamazinggrace.blogspot.com/2021/06/were-done-but.html) -- Carl had come up with a work-around, but it was a bit difficult to implement if we wanted to just put the awning out for a couple of hours (which is normal since we do not leave it out if we are away or for overnight). Carl had ordered a switch (Link to Amazon product) from Amazon and he got it while we were at Galen and Julie's... (it sure is nice to have a mailing / delivery address to use! -- thanks, Galen and Julie!).

On Tuesday afternoon, he got it installed and it successfully extends and retracts the awning. He wants to mount it to the side of the compartment, but it is a lot easier than the paper-clips and battery technique!