RV Floor Replacement Project Part 3: Deconstruction

RV Camper Floor Replacement Project by Rick Kessler Jr.

Author's note: I wish I could post all of the photos I took as I did this project. However, I took them with my iPhone and left it out in the rain. It completely fried the phone to the point two different stores couldn't even bring it back to working order, let alone retrieve all the photos. I'll do my best to describe everything, but I'm afraid I have no pictures. I created some diagrams in the Scribd file above and inset into the post below that further tries to explain all that I did.

Click here to read Part 1: Admitting the Problem Exists.
Click here to read Part 2:  Realizing the Scope of the Problem

Figure 4; the blue depicts the extent of the water damage and its origins

Step 3: Deconstruction

You can see a video of the project, including the layout of our camper, by clicking here.

With the cabinetry out, the dinettes removed and vinyl floor peeled away, I found myself looking at Styrofoam saturated with water (see Figure 4, above). Water that had somehow found its way in 10 days earlier when we drove to Mackinaw City camping trip in a rain storm was trapped in the floor.

Now, a quick Google search with keywords "Bantam" and "water" will turns up scores of hits. It seems early model hybrids, like ours, and especially Bantam models, like ours, are notorious for taking on water when being driven in a rain storm. There's a bunch of theories why, but I was staring at the result. Our floor began to rot from the door and from the front right corner of the camper.

So my RV Floor Replacement Project also became a Make It Watertight project.

I decided I'd make it watertight as I went along. First things, first. Finish removing the rest of the floor.

Scraping the Styrofoam out was easier than I anticipated. The bottom layer of 1/4-inch luan also wasn't too bad. Wherever the water hadn't yet caused the glue to fail was a little more difficult. In fact, this helped me to decide to limit the floor replacement to the front 2/3 of the camper. The back 1/3 was fine. It also meant I wouldn't have to remove the last dinette seat (the one which housed the fresh water tank) at the rear of the camper.

After scraping out the Styrofoam and bottom layer of plywood, the only thing left was the aluminum sheeting that was used for undercoating. Some of this I found to be riddled with holes, especially where the water heater had been under the U-shaped dinette, and another likely culprit to our water infestation. I decided to keep the aluminum because most of it was fine, but I knew whatever new floor I put in would have to somehow be protected from the elements.

Once we had everything ready for the new floor installation, we discovered another surprise that needed our attention: one of the metal cross beams -- in fact, the only one in the interior of the camper -- had broken. The location of the break was right at the door,which is why the floor was spongy there the worst, and why the cabinet and dinette seat had pulled away from the wall.

Before any new floor would be installed, we had to figure out what to do with that.

Next -- Part 4: Assembling the New Floor.