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New to Trippin’ With StanleyNew to Trippin’ With Stanley Who is Stanley? Well, Stanley is our RV! He takes us all around the U.S. to taste delicious craft beers and meet new friends along the way. We work from the road, Brian is a graphic designer and I am a...

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Austin = hashtag epic, hashtag awesomeAustin = hashtag epic, hashtag awesome As I type this I sit on a beautiful outside patio on S Congress at a coffee bar called Jo's. I am surrounded by Mac Book Pros and I can almost see all the tweets swarming around my head. I am sure...

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Sedona I'm glad I got to knowya!Sedona I'm glad I got to knowya! Here are some pics from our time in Sedona. We stayed with our good friend Brenden and his girlfriend, Britta, in Cottonwood, about 20 minutes from Sedona and Jerome. They were the most excellent...

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Golfing and Hashing in PhoenixGolfing and Hashing in Phoenix We had plans to meet up with our Nu friends Bill and Debbie in Phoenix after we left our troubles in Tucson. Maria was able to convince Debbie that it would be a good idea for all of us to go golfing...

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B-C-YessB-C-Yess In between our stops in Quartzsite we made a detour to Tempe to visit my friend Kevin and enjoy a long weekend of sports. The main reason we wanted to be in the Phoenix area was that the BCS National Championship...

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Renovations Pt. 1

Posted by msdesign21 | Posted in You trippin! | Posted on 17-08-2010

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Ok, so I am waaay behind on these posts but if you can believe it or not, I’ve been kind of busy lately. I did successfully finish my thesis last week for my masters in Design Management. (I can do another post about that topic if people are interested) And now that we are on the road I have some catching up to do!

So the last time we talked about Stanley I introduced you to Gare Gare. The steps after the purchase seemed to be endless, so where do we start? The ugly fabric, that’s where! Ripped all that out of there, took down all the blinds and then started to remove all the cabinet doors for painting. Basically the rest of the steps that follow was to take out everything that was yellow/dirty (which was EVERYTHING) and prep it all to paint. Ripped out the carpet, took out the queen size bed in the back, attempted to remove the dinette benches so we could lay the laminate down, but that didn’t work, so they stayed in. The steps went on and on and on. One nice little idea we had, when taking everything out, we put all screens and hardware into individual plastic bags labeled with a sharpie so we knew what each screw went with. Right when you think you are done taking everything out, you realize there are about 20 other things you’ve missed.

The garage was a mess!

Ok so fast forward about two weeks, everything is out, we’ve begun the soaking process with OxiClean, by the way, the best cleaning solution EVER! It worked on just about anything i could fit into the small baby pool! I had been scouring the RV blogs and found two very helpful posts on soaking the Day/Night blinds in OxiClean and painting the inside of your RV. This forum provided a great tip, purchase PVC pipe with two end caps for soaking the day/night blinds as the longest ones we had were over 68″ and were too long to fit in our baby pool or the bathtub. Once we got the right size PVC pipe, this worked like a charm. I’d recommend at least 4″ pipe, 5″ if you can find it.

Dirty Yellow Blinds

filthy vent covers!

The second RV renovation tip comes via Jim on RVhobby.com for painting the interior of your RV. Turns out RV’s don’t have walls like you would typically find in a home, instead most RV walls use a technique that bonds a vinyl sheet to luan board. What does this mean? Well, it means that priming the walls takes a little more attention and effort that normal.

Scrubbing the walls

Scrubbing away, beer never too far away 😉

The TSP cleaner that Jim recommended really did the trick. Gare Gare must have been a smoker because everything in the RV was yellow, before the TSP and OxiClean got a hold of it anyway. TSP is nice because it doesn’t suds up and it cuts right through all the grime and grease on the walls to ensure the primer sticks. After cleaning the walls it was on to sanding

and masking.

Luckily we have incredible friends and were able to barter beer, baby haircuts and food in trade for help with all our steps. Big thanks to Scott, Ann, Angel and Jen for lending a hand!

Van's first haircut

Trading haircuts for labor 😉


Now everything is cleaned and prepped, so its on to the priming. We ended up going with Kilz Primer. This was the first time Brian and I have ever painted, so as it turns out, we weren’t very good! Luckily, it was just the primer and it didn’t really matter if you could see brush strokes going every which way. This experience did however trigger 1 of the 2 best ideas we had for the entire renovation, we ended up hiring a professional to come in and paint everything white. This was a great decision as the painter used a spray gun and everything was nice and evenly covered. It is always nice to do things on your own, but if you can pay $400 for a professional to come in and get it all done in 2 hours vs. your 2 weeks of time, it becomes VERY worth it.

Masking and painting help with Ann

I think the fumes were starting to get to us... goofy times ensued

maybe it was fumes... and beer!

Primed for paint

The white paint has been applied

White paint in the back as well

ah, white bathroom...

the white was soo refreshing after all that brown and yellow!

This concludes our post on Renovations Pt. 1. Part 2 will include applying the green and fast foward to the finishing touches. Thanks for following!

A website to discover!

Posted by msdesign21 | Posted in You trippin! | Posted on 04-08-2010

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About a year and a half ago Brian and I joined the Lawrence Home Brewers Association. Brian had started to dabble in brewing with our good buddy Dane and I just wanted to taste the beer! It turns out to be a whole lot better than that. The people I have met at these meetings are incredible passionate about their craft and have a ton of knowledge to lay on you if your quick enough to take it all in. The best thing this group has made me discover would be how to better describe and inform my palette. They are a great group of people and we will surely miss their company on the road. If you’re in the Lawrence area and are interested in checking out the meetings they are every second Thursday of the month and their website is here: http://lawrencebrewers.org/main/


Now to the point, a year ago a woman came to our meeting to talk about her webiste project TravelBythePint.com It is a video blog of all the great breweries in the U.S. Brian and I will be sure to check this out while on the road and report back on the good ones we find. Not to mention our good friends Chuck and Cindy forwarded us a list of about 20 breweries to hit in the Northern CA/SF area. We sure have our work cut out ahead of us 😉 And to all the folks out there, we always drink responsibly. 😉