So we decided to get a motor home, and my husband became married to a motor home online sales site. He searched all the time, sometimes showing me the ones way beyond our price and others within range but not configured the way we wanted. We looked at a few and they were intriguing in unique ways.
The first was pretty good, but the owner had made no effort whatever to remove her stuff or clean up the RV. Really, shouldn’t a person clean out the stove, vacuum a bit and air out the refrigerator when you know people are going to be snooping about? You know, if you are going to sell a house, you should neaten things up a bit, maybe bake cookies so everything smells good. We’re pretty good at looking beyond such stuff. All the same, it was the disorganized one in my mind, besides being just too small for the price. Had it been nice from moment one, I might have been won over despite the size.
A second looked better, larger and neat but too much looked nice but didn’t work. If we didn’t want to drive it any where, we were good. The engine was spotty when it came to power, not all lights were working, inside and out, no refrigerator, etc.
We looked at a third because the price was good, but it looked like it was used by hunters without a care for cleanliness, not to mention quite a bit of the practical items missing or damaged. I began to think what we could afford was just not what we would want. But the man kept looking.
He found another that looked pretty good in pictures and was said to be in pretty good working order. So we knocked on the door clearly waking up the owner (even though we had made an appointment) who looked like he had partied all night. He let us tour the RV, and I tried really hard to smell beyond the distinct odor of less than legal ingredients, look beyond the poor and abandoned attempt at refinishing the cabinets, the replacement couch (a metal frame with a lumpy mattress), no refrigerator, etc. It was the largest we had looked at, and we wanted to give it a chance, so we talked about how we could renovate the inside figuring it would come to about $1,500. But did we really want a vehicle that might cause us to be marked by a drug dog at school because we spent too much time in our RV’s fumes? We started referring to it as the drug den RV in order to differentiate it from the others that were just not what we wanted.
So he found another weeks later and pretty much after we had both determined we were going to have to save another two grand to get something we would want to camp in. I went along, prying at my not so open mind. We arrived in a really nice neighborhood, upscale country. Checked out the RV on a cold rainy night. Nice colors (time-faded pink, almost tan — no stripes or gaudy colors), everything worked, all original except for a new refrigerator, fellow educators and the price was right for us. So we own a motor home. But my husband after all that looking at fixer uppers cannot leave well enough alone. He’s busy making prettier what was already pretty.
