Re-carpeting the doghouse

Not the actual dogs doghouse. The fiberglass cowling that goes over the engine in between the front seats.

"Sure, I see how it is."

The old carpeting was thoroughly glued down, but fortunately the glue had degraded over the years and peeling it off was pretty easy.

Just a bit of wire brush work and a wipe down to get a nice clean fiberglass surface ready for re-carpeting. Since the old blue carpet peeled off in one large piece it made a perfect template for cutting the new carpet, which saved a lot of time measuring, cutting and going to Lowes for more carpet when I get it wrong. I very nearly tossed it in the bin since it was pretty nasty, but my natural inclination is to save everything because you never know when it might come in handy (Thanks, Dad, for that!) With the template it was super easy - so if you ever do this never, ever throw anything away until you are completely done and absolutely certain it will not have a purpose. That will be brilliantly illustrated when I get to what happened to the old bathroom cabinet we took out in a later blog post!

So with a bit of fitting and cutting darts and gussets - this is very much like sewing a fitted bodice! - I got a perfect fit on the form and ready to start gluing it down. I picked up a can of Elmers Flooring Glue and just to be safe; a roll of double-sided heavy duty carpet tape. I decided to do this in the RV rather than lug the heavy fiberglass up three flights of stairs to the apartment. So it is sitting on the dinette table.

Never having done this before I figure a complete coating of glue is the way to go so I just grab a putty knife and start slathering it on, very much like frosting a cake, and once I have a layer of glue over the entire area I just lay my pre-cut carpet over it and start fitting and forming it down on the gluey fiberglass. I wasn't sure how to hold it in place until it occurred to me that giant bulldog clips would work brilliantly! Luckily I have lots and lots of these - they are dirt cheap and I use them to clip potato chip bags, bags of frozen veggies, piles of mail, hold things on hangers; if something needs holding I am a firm believer a bulldog clip will do it. In this instance they were the absolute perfect tool for the job.

After clamping and gluing I needed to weigh down the top to get a nice firm and flat adhesion up there. The box the interior paint came in worked quite nicely for this!

That is Rustoleums "Cabinet Transformations" kit, which is perfect for painting RV interiors!

Now that the doghouse is all carpeted and ready to go back in place all I need to do is get the man tinkering with the Chevy 454 out of my way and re-install it:

 The finished product back in place and looking great with the newly re-carpeted cab area:

 Now all it needs is a really cool center console to hold drinks and maps and stuff.....hmmm, where did that bathroom cabinet get to?.......

The Kitchen Window

For some reason I decided to tackle the kitchen window curtains. Never mind that this is way out of the logical sequence of interior projects - I never let logic stop me before.

Definitely in need of help

 My first thought was that I wanted some sort of coffee theme. I love coffee. Coffee-type colors are all through this project - rich browns, creams and golds. Yeah, a coffee theme tiny kitchen sounds about right.

Nice coffee theme fabric

 So I headed off to JoAnns with a vague idea of looking for coffee-print fabric.
I know I have seen this before, and I figured I could find something compatible.
I spent over an hour wandering the fabric stacks.

Nice and bright, but not what I had in mind

Nothing. Absolutely no coffee-print anything that is quite right for the look I want to achieve. I almost bought a really cool "atomic starburst" pattern in blues & pinks on a brown background but decided that, in spite of the fact it contained all my target colors (Well, OK, not the pink) it really did not go with what I had in mind.

This is actually a dish towel, but it could be curtains....nah

So my next stop was the Goodwill Store. Old curtains are easy to modify and surely they would have something. They didn't. I found nothing worthwhile here....except this:

Black metal coffee sculpture. Too cool.

Wow. Black metal coffee sculpture! I love it. 49 cents later it is in the truck with me on our way back to JoAnns for paint (you didn't seriously think I would not embellish it did you?) Found the perfect DecoArt metallic paint in "Rich Espresso" and I figure I will paint just the lettering and the mesh parts and leave the rest black. It will look amazing behind the stove over the glass tile.

Detail after painting

OK, got that diversion out of the way, on to find those coffee curtains.

After trying a few more fabric shops and second hand stores with no luck I decided to at least look at the ready-made curtains. This goes against my nature. This is too easy. There is no sport in just going and buying something. I would much rather make it or find it at a thrift shop and fix it to be the way I want it.

Sort of explains the whole reason for remodeling a vintage Winnebago.......

Anyway, I spent the next hour wandering through Walmart. They did in fact have cute coffee-theme curtains. A bit too cute for my taste. That and I really hate the idea of having cheap Made-in-China curtains in my mini-mansion. Because truthfully the whole "Oh! Those are cool" and "Thank you, I made them" conversation is totally shot at that point.
No one is impressed by Walmart cafe curtains, sorry.

Fred Meyer didn't have much to offer, but they diverted my whole idea-stream with this:

Attention successfully diverted!

Ooooh. Wow. A shiny brass napkin ring with little sparkly enamel bits that will look so great with my glass tiles! And they are in the clearance piles! Clearance piles are almost as good as thrift shops. I bought two for 1.99 with no clear idea of what I was going to do with them yet. Also grabbed a chocolate brown tassle thing with no idea for it, but hey! It is the right color. Now I need to find other stuff that goes with them and my wire sculpture. A new idea is vaguely taking shape as we go.

Next stop, World Market! This will take a bit longer than my other stops simply because I cannot enter the place without looking at everything in the store. I loooove World Market.

And they delivered up exactly what I need to make my RV kitchen curtains - Napkins:

Lovely mocha stripe napkins and chocolate brown tassle

 Yes, Napkins. And a matching place mat. They are exactly the right size, in a luxurious ribbed texture fabric, rich browns, creams and golds and already hemmed on all four sides - important since my sewing machine is in storage, Yay for fusible webbing tape! - and they are so lovely and exactly right AND in the clearance piles! Oh, they also look absolutely fabulous with my glass tile sample I hauled along.

Today is getting better by the minute. Back to JoAnns to pick up a few notions and then home to figure this all out. Not sure where the place mat or napkin rings will come in yet, but I'll think of something I'm sure.

Sitting at a stoplight halfway home I thought of it and it is genius if I do say so myself. I know exactly what to do with those place mats. Quick stop for self-stick velcro strips and upholstery tacks.

OK, so now I have a pile of stuff to work with and need to figure out what it will be. First I head out to the RV to grab one of the oak trim strips I salvaged off of those nasty window cornices when I tore them all out. It just happens to be the one off the kitchen window so it makes a perfect gauge for the necessary width of my napkin curtains:

But my place mat idea is way more intriguing  to me so I go for that instead. Kinda like "Eat dessert first."

First thing I did was cut that place mat in half down the middle. Now it is more than long enough to span the width of the window. I need to shorten it up, but I want to keep the neatly sewn edges so cutting is out. A couple of box pleats oughtta do the trick:

Pleats with the help of my trusty stapler

With a couple staples to hold it until I can sew them down my pleats line up perfectly. But how to attach it to the wall? Hey! Where is that oak trim strip? Hallelujia, this is gonna work!

This will be a valance above the napkin curtains. Once I hang the curtains I will trim the valance down to about 4 to 6 inches and tack the fabric to the back of my salvaged oak strip, then I figure to hang the whole thing from the underside of the cabinets with an L-bracket I kept from the bathroom cornice. This seems like it will work.

Pleated Valance ready to trim for length

Now back to the curtains. Since my two napkins are already exactly the perfect size all I need to do is figure out how to hang them. I thought about cafe clips but I saw them at JoAnns for $10.00 for a packet of six! Holy cow.

 My solution was to get little white plastic rings and sew them on, then paint the things with my metallic paint from the wire sculpture project.  This worked very well.

So I got the curtains hung on the second day and they do look pretty spiffy to me:

Not bad for a couple napkins. Cannot wait to paint those specky walls!

Now to get that valance up there......

Ta Da - salvaged oak trim, metal bracket off old cornices and 2 place mats = Custom Valances!