Rexhall Redo

[KAS]

Hi, I'm KAS, I told my hubby about how in my younger days I wanted an RV. Being hubby he stored that information away and surprised me with a project.

Actually, he found two projects. Knowing that Airstream is my dream machine, he presented me with a 1985 Airstream. It had been parked after its first 30,000 miles and never moved. Needs new window treatments and is waiting for more maintenance. THEN, because he felt the Airstream had too light a chassis and wanting to find a transmission for the diesel engine he was considering putting in it, he ran across the other project and purchased it for the price of a new transmission.

Turns out the second purchase was odd inside so nobody wanted it, but it was also low milage, with a cummins engine and everything working pretty well and the heavy chassis hubby wanted, and an interior I could re-do to please myself. It came with a bathroom and snack area, but five desks rather than a normal interior.

His project is getting all the hoses, etc. in perfect order, adding extra filters and such, and mine is to decide what I want to do with this interior.

The Rexhall is 36 foot long, with a door up front like on a bus, rather than located behind the passenger seat like in other RV's I have seen. There is another door in the side toward the back. The restroom and snack area separates the back room from the rest of the RV.

I want it to sleep 6 and I need to add more kitchen and a second refrigerator. Also seats for installing car-seats.

Am exploring bus conversion plans because we have no slide-outs so those floor plans are useless to me.

Meanwhile, I have NO idea what we will do with the classic airstream. It is so nice inside, I could not bring myself to alter it in any way. At the same time, THIS was my dream machine, but the truth is the Rexhall serves our needs better because the desks have to come out anyway and so I feel no pain at ripping out and re-doing any part of that layout for my personal preferences. The classic Airstream is sitting next to the Rexhall right now and I don't really want to part with it, but we don't need TWO no matter how good a deal we got both times.

Anyway, hubby and I are older parents, he is nearing retirement age, we have two small children who will be traveling with us and I have two older kids and one grandchild. Hubby is an experimental physicist with a start up company seeking new funding--no luck-- so he may just retire soon; I write and blog. We do everything on a budget that realistically ought not to stretch that far but it is amazing what you can free money up to do when you decide you don't need other things.

I'm delighted that hubby found this forum and suggested I join it.

Such fun!

[historyljc]

Hi KAS, welcome to the forum. Have fun with both your coaches. Are you going to post some pictures of your mods and improvements?

[KAS]

Posting pictures sure would be fun, I'll have to look into figuring out how to get them into the computer and small enough files to share. I want to make a picture for my profile too, so I'll get to it eventually. Perhaps that shall be next weeks project.

I do love seeing the pictures on here of people's rigs. There are some lovely new looking RVs. My Rexhall is clearly not new and rather battered from its previous life, but it was low milage, etc. Hubby insists that as long as it isn't leaking and no parts are falling off, that there is no need to do stuff just to make it prettier.