Our 1990 Winnebago Chieftain Makeover

Our 1990 Winnebago Chieftain Makeover

The Remodel:

When our 1990 Winnebago Chieftain arrived I knew we had some work to do. I only gave us a month to do everything so we had to work quick. The first thing we did was fix the ceiling. Once that was done, the old heap didn’t look half bad, but we still had a lot of work to do. The next thing was gutting what we didn’t want in the RV.

The window boxes had to go, I had almost all of them out before my wife asked if I took a before picture. I had not, so I had to reinstall a couple so she could take some pictures. Once they were all removed I was amazed about how much more open it felt. We didn’t gain floor space but we gained visual space of around a foot all the way around. Then went the curtains, because let’s get real, they were a hideous blue mauve color. There was only a couple more small things that went such as the overhead compartment above the bed, and a television rack in the bedroom. We were finally ready to start the painting process.

We had already picked our paint colors because More Adventure Mom hates wood paneling and loves gray.  We chose to paint the wood panels white and the paint splash wallpaper walls a medium gray. The next step was the long and tedious job of removing all the cabinet doors, then all the hardware. We laid all the doors out in our front sun room so we could paint day and night without the worry of weather. Once all the doors were finished with their first coat we started painting the interior of the RV. It seemed like it took forever to get all of the wood paneling primed and painted. It didn’t help that our second can of paint was untinted base. 3 hours later we finally realized something was not right. So we took it back and exchanged it for a fresh white base coat. Apparently this happens a lot as the paint people at Lowes just laughed when they heard. About 2 weeks later we had all of the paint finished and doors hung back up. But there was still more of the hideous blue mauve fabric all around the RV.

The dinette booth now looked even worse. The blue did not look good with the gray and white so we went to Hobby Lobby and bought some medium gray fabric for the seats and gray and white chevron material for the back. We chose to use duck cloth as it is a heavier material for wear and tear. While we were there we to get a yellow chevron material for the window curtain at the booth as well. A couple days later I had free time to start reupholstering the booth. The seats were easy, I used a piece of plywood on the bottom and wrapped the fabric around the seat. Then used a staple gun to fix the fabric to the seat. The back cushions weren’t so simple. They are a rhombus type shape so I had to make a whole new cover. After removing the old covers I used the foam cushion as my stencil and traced the outline onto the fabric I was using. I stitched the entire outside except half of the bottom so we could insert the foam cushion, then my wife hand stitched the rest while I started the second back cushion. The finished product looked much better and really brought a homey touch to our new old RV.

We lived in Florida and knew about hot weather, so we definitely wanted black out curtains to help keep the heat out. However, these curtains were way too long for our windows. After measuring the windows and looking at the sizes of curtains, I found that we could use one panel to cover each window. This was great news as we were working with a super tight budget. I took each black out panel, cut it in half, then sewn a seam and loop for the curtain rods. For the front curtain The panel was exactly wide enough to go from top to bottom and long enough to cover half the front. The RV was now almost finished. All that’s left was to install the solar charging system.

 

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