Traveling comfortably for long periods in a Class B RV is a struggle between bringing along the items you want versus what you can actually carry, without filling the rig with so much stuff that there is limited room to move around inside the RV. The image above is from our trip to North Carolina to sell excess china where we deliberately over filled our RV.

Our 3-month trip this spring helped us to identify what we must take with us and what we really would love to take but can’t. We really missed our Solo Stove on that trip, but it was either pack the fire pit or our charcoal grill. Everything is a trade off in a small RV, and our desire for grilled meals won out in this case.

Early on in RV ownership, we identified a few improvements, such as a swivel passenger seat, to improve our camping experience. A description of those changes can be found here.

This year, we made two modifications to increase the interior storage of our RV. We converted an 12 inch closet with a hanging bar into a closet with shelves. Joe’s not a carpenter but he has a table saw and a power planer and managed to cut a pre-finished shelf board into four shelves and install them using corner braces.

This allows us to store our laptops, iPads, chargers, large food items and wine bottles in this cabinet. So what is that white fabric? It’s velcro cloth strips that prevent items from sliding off the shelves as we travel. Are they ugly and inelegant? Sue sure thinks so, but we have not yet found a more elegant solution. Please leave a comment if you have an idea on how to improve on the velcro.

The open space on the bottom of the shelf is reserved for our drinking water. While we carry a fresh water supply, we prefer to purchase drinking water and store it in a Dometic water jug. The water pump (also sold by Dometic) that attaches to the jug is absolutely amazing.

Our most recent improvement attempted to capture the extra space in the cockpit of the cab. As you can see below there is a lot of space above the driver and passenger that is begging to be used.

Vancillary sells a set of brackets and a shelf template that can be installed in both Sprinter and Ford Transit vans. Here Joe is installing the brackets.

Below, Joe (still with all ten fingers) is cutting the pre-finished maple plywood. Note the lack of safety glasses. I wonder what this guy did for a living????

The shelf allows us to store light-weight items – mostly bedding – above our heads as we drive, and freed up most of a storage cabinet in the rear of the rig.

Shoe storage is also an issue that we have difficulty addressing. It’s not that we are being overly style-conscientious, but different shoes have different purposes. We have shoes for our campsite which are slip on’s because we put them on and take them off every time we leave and re-enter the rig. We also have dedicated shower sandals, hiking shoes which double as biking shoes, slippers for inside the rig and a pair of shoes in case we are going somewhere and want to look presentable, like we’re not camping. That’s 10 pairs of shoes for two people!

We settled on a Thule shoe bag that hangs from our bathroom door when we are camped, which we move to the rear sofa when we travel. As a bonus, the shoe bag also holds our bike helmets.

If you have read this far it will be painfully obvious that we are constantly working to improve/optimize storage in our rig. Every improvement has increased our comfort while traveling. We have reached a point where we can’t further modify the inside of our Ontour to permit additional storage.

We camped in our present rig for 79 nights in 16 states and covered 8,293 miles this spring. Our Ontour 2.2 is working well for us but we still have the urge to see if there is another rig that will better accommodate our travels. We just returned from the Hershey RV show which included a Pleasure-Way East Coast owners meetup. We met a lot of fellow Pleasure-Way owners and toured a lot of new RV’s at the show and will report back in a few weeks with our findings.

Thanks for staying in touch.