Maintenance | Day 82 of my 2023 Journal

One advantage of living in a van is the number of things that need fixing/maintenance is much smaller compared to living in a house.

Another advantage is once you start, you just have to finish. Otherwise, there is nowhere to live.

A third one, we realized, is doing the actual fixing right outside the supplies shop, as the home is on wheels makes it SO much easier every time there is something you forgot to buy.

All it takes is a day of sunshine and a lot of patience.

The disadvantage might be it is even harder to push yourself to get started. You just KNOW how exhausted you will be at the end of the day. Relieved and exhausted.

In our van, the big drawer inside was broken and had been for a few weeks. We had to change the glider part. Seems easy enough: Go buy a new one, take the drawer out, unscrew the screws, remove the old one, fix the new one, and put the drawer back.

In our case, it was a bit more complicated.

In order to take out the drawer, we first had to, of course, empty it, leaving everything outside at the parking as there was no space left inside for the stuff.

Secondly, we had to remove one of the 2 doors to the bathroom, as one person had to sit on the toilet to press down a piece of plastic to take out the drawer. On the other side of the drawer, we had to remove the door to the water container to press down on that side. But before we could get that far, we had to take out two seats as the drawer did not open fully with the seats in place. And before we could do that, we had to take out the table.

Okay. Once the table was out, one child's personal box was easy to take out to clean and organize, so why not do it while everything is chaos anyway?

Long story short, it took about 4,5 hours in the sunshine, everybody organizing and making small and big modifications, and when we drove off, the vibe of the van was so much lighter.

Getting things like this done is such a relief.

Now we shall book a monthly maintenance day, as putting things like this off is just a waste of good energy.

NB! If you want to see a video of the process, you can see it on Instagram.

Love and light

Cecilie Conrad

# 82 of my 2023 writing challenge - Read them all here