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RV Life

We redid the whole RV bedroom, and finally slept

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We had not been sleeping well in this RV for weeks, and it was quietly wrecking our mood every single day. Not dramatically. Just the low grind of waking up with a sore back, again, and starting the day already behind.

So Fabiola decided to redo the entire bedroom. New mattress, a cushioned wall behind the bed, cabinet doors where the Brinkley gave us shelves that never worked, and a closet that finally makes sense. This is how the whole thing went, including the parts that did not go well and one afternoon that had nothing to do with the project at all.

Some of the links below are affiliate links. If you buy through them we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you, and in some cases you get a discount we arranged. The mattress was sent to us free to try out and talk about. Everything else here we bought ourselves.

The mattress was the real problem

We had been sleeping on the mattress that came with the Brinkley for a year and a half. At the time we thought it was fine. That is the thing about a mattress you did not choose: you have no reference point, so you assume the back pain is you.

The replacement is the Aurora Luxe Cooling from RVMattress.com, in medium firmness. It is a hybrid, so individually wrapped coils underneath and memory foam on top, with a cooling layer that was the part Nathan cared about most for obvious reasons.

Two things made it work for an RV specifically. First, you give them the actual measurements of your bedroom rather than picking a mattress size and hoping, so it fits the space you have instead of the space a house would have. Ours went from the stock 10 inches up to 12, which sounds like nothing until you are trying to close a bedroom slide. Second, it ships compressed in a box, which matters when the only route into the bedroom is an RV door and a hallway.

Opening it is genuinely a two person job, and it expands faster than you expect once the plastic comes off.

A week and a half later

We waited before saying anything, because a mattress feels great on night one no matter what it is.

After a week and a half it is not close. We genuinely believed the mattress that came with the Brinkley was good, and this is on another level. The cooling is not a marketing line either, you can feel it, which for anyone who sleeps hot in a metal box in August is worth the upgrade on its own.

It comes with free shipping, a 120 night sleep trial and a limited lifetime warranty, so the risk of trying it is mostly your time.

RVMattress.com gave our viewers 30% off. Use this link, or scan the QR code in the video, and the discount is already applied when you get there. There is no code to type in. It costs you nothing extra and it genuinely helps the channel.

The longer write-up, including what to measure before you order one and why RV mattress sizes are their own headache, is on our RV mattress page.

The cushioned wall behind the bed

This was the easiest win of the whole project and the one we would tell anyone to start with.

The wall behind our bed was bare, which is fine until you sit up to watch something and put your head against it. Fabiola measured the space and ordered upholstered cushion panels, which come in a range of colors. They are sold as anti-collision wall padding for children's rooms, which sounds funny until you remember that padding you can headbutt safely is exactly what you want behind a bed.

They arrive with their own peel and stick adhesive, and we did not use it. Instead we put Command large picture hanging strips between the panel and the wall. Those are the interlocking velcro kind rated to 15 pounds, not the plain adhesive tabs. The reason is simple: if we ever want them off, or want to move one, we pull the strip apart rather than tearing at whatever the adhesive has done to the wall. In an RV that you plan to sell one day, that matters.

A few things we learned doing it:

  • One pair per panel was enough. They are rated to 15 pounds and these panels weigh almost nothing.
  • Stick the pair together first, peel the backing, then press the whole panel to the wall in position. Do not try to place the two halves separately and line them up afterward.
  • Keep track of which half belongs to which panel. They do not match perfectly across a set, and if you shuffle them you will be standing there wondering why nothing lines up.
  • Press for about 30 seconds and let it cure before you trust it.

It took under an hour and it changed the room more than anything else we did.

Turning a useless shelf into cabinets

If you have a Brinkley you know the shelving above the bed is not especially functional. Open cubbies are fine in a house and a bad idea in something that moves at 65 miles an hour.

The plan was three photo panels and two cabinet doors across the opening. The photo panels went up on the same Command strips as the cushions, light enough that it holds fine and forgiving if you need to nudge one over.

The doors are Jasper cabinet doors from Xpress Cabinet Doors, two of them, MDF panels in a maple paint grade frame at 15.5 by 12.5 inches. Paint grade is the right choice when you already know you are painting them to match the room, and you can order them cut to whatever your opening actually is, which in an RV is never a standard cabinet size.

The mistake was on the order form. Cabinet doors come with a boring option, which is whether they arrive with the hinge cups already drilled. We chose None. That single dropdown is the reason the hard part of this project existed at all.

So Fabiola cut the hinge cups herself, outside, under the RV because it was too windy for the awning. The tool for this is a 35mm concealed hinge jig kit, which is a 35mm Forstner bit plus a guide that clamps over the edge of the door. The guide is the entire product. Without it you are freehanding a 35mm hole into a finished door, and the first one will wander.

Ours did wander, because the guide has to be held down hard and it was not. Start the bit slowly, keep steady pressure on the jig, and once you commit to a hole do not lift out to admire it halfway through. Fabiola also discovered mid-project that the drill battery was why everything was so slow, which several of you had already said in the comments. The DEWALT set she uses comes with two batteries, which is the fix for that problem more than any technique is.

Then the lock did not work. We used three quarter inch overlay soft close hinges, and that overlay is exactly the problem: the door sits over the frame by about two fingers, so there was nowhere to put a lock that would still clear it. Work out your catch before you buy your hinges, because the hinge overlay decides what will fit.

So the doors got magnetic catches instead, which is what should have been the plan from the start. They hold the doors shut on travel days, which is the entire point.

The soft close is a small luxury that feels absurd on a piece of furniture you built yourself in a driveway, and we would pay for it again.

The closet, the floor and the bed itself

The rest was storage and soft furnishings, and it is the part that quietly does the most work.

Two things went into the closet. A set of cascading space saving hangers that hold several garments in the footprint of one, and a tiered tank top hanger that swallowed most of Fabiola's tops and freed the rod for Nathan's shirts. Then a wall mounted shoe rack on the back wall where nothing was living before. That one is sold for RVs specifically and mounts with adhesive or screws, which matters when you are deciding how much of your wall you are willing to commit to.

None of it is exciting. All of it is the reason the room stays tidy now instead of for three days.

We also put down a new washable carpet, which in an RV is less a decor decision than a maintenance one. Everything that comes through that door has been outside, and being able to put the rug in a machine rather than trying to clean it in place is the entire argument for it.

The bedding is a lightweight quilt in mineral blue, which is the blue you can see once the bed is made at the end of the video. Lightweight matters more than it sounds in an RV, because the thing has to be shaken out, folded and stuffed somewhere on a travel day, and a heavy comforter in a small bedroom is a fight every single morning.

The part we almost cut

While Fabiola was outside drilling, two dogs came off their leash and one went straight for her leg.

The owner came and got them. Nothing happened, in the sense that there is no injury to report. But Fabiola has a serious fear of dogs going back to childhood, one she has spent years working on, and being rushed by two of them while holding a drill undid a lot of that in about four seconds. She did not want to go back outside to finish the project.

She nearly cut the whole segment. Her words at the end of the video are that she did not know how much of her own trauma she wanted to put on the internet, and decided to leave it in because that is the reality of this life and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

So, plainly: keep your dog on a leash at a campground. A campground is not your yard. You are living twenty feet from strangers, and you have no idea what the person walking past has been through, or how your animal reads them. Most people are good about this. It only takes one.

Nathan ordered a couple of things afterward. An air horn, which turns out to be the sensible deterrent for a loose dog because it does not hurt the animal and it stops the situation. He also looked at a bat and was talked out of it, correctly, as a bad tool for this. And bear spray, since we are heading west, which is a different problem entirely.

The air horn now lives where Fabiola works outside.

What we would do differently

Pay for the boring. If you are ordering cabinet doors, the hinge boring option costs a few dollars and removes the single hardest step of the job. We chose None, and that is where the ruined door, the two extra days and most of the swearing came from.

Work out the catch before you buy the hinges. The overlay decided what would fit the moment we chose it, and we only noticed after the holes were drilled. We even bought a three quarter inch Forstner bit for the lock holes that we never took out of the packet, because by the time we got there the lock was already impossible. That bit is the physical receipt for planning the hardware in the wrong order.

Buy everything before you start. Even with the doors planned properly, Fabiola still ended up short a drill bit halfway through.

Expect to lose a screw in an RV, and go looking for it immediately. A loose screw in a slide is not a small thing later.

And if you have never installed a cabinet door, the honest answer is that it is harder than a video makes it look and completely doable anyway. This was Fabiola's first time fitting doors and the result is straight, closes properly and looks like it belongs.

Everything we used

The rest of what we carry is on our Amazon storefront: the bedroom list and the hiking and outdoors list.

Fabiola wants to know whether to do more of these. She has a drill now and a lot of opinions about what else in this RV was badly designed, so if you want more DIY, say so in the comments on the video. If you would rather she stopped, say that too. She will answer either way.