Here at Guaranty RV, we understand that one of the challenges that RVers share—whether they’re out on a family camping trip or living the full time RV lifestyle—is keeping their RV organized. Whether you’re traveling as a couple with the family dog, or you’re hosting the kids and grandkids on an all-family camping extravaganza, it’s easy to make mistakes in how you pack, what you carry and how you store things. Those mistakes can lead to less-than-pleasant outcomes. Have you ever opened your RV cupboard only to find that things shifted when you were going down the road, and now canned goods and broken jars are spewing out on your feet? It’s happened to the best of us.
In this blog we’re going to talk about how to keep your RV organized for both convenience and safety. This week we’ll discuss online resources for organizational tips, and some things we’ve learned from full-time RVers who have a lot of experience on the road. Next week, in part two, we’re going to wrap things up by focusing on problem areas like the kitchen and outside storage.
Learn How to Organize Your RV from the Pros
Start With Checklists
RV lifestyle blogs are a great place to pick up tips that will save you a lot of time and hassle. You can learn so much from others mistakes, and full-time RVers are usually happy to share the solutions they’ve found for typical problems. For instance, we love this piece of advice from Terry and DT at RVGoddess.com: Always start with checklists to organize your packing, your meal planning and shopping, etc. There is nothing worse than getting to the campsite and discovering that you forgot some essential ingredient or tool. If you’re taking a road trip, maybe you can stop and pick up that forgotten item at a store along your route—if you’re in our neck of the woods, the Guaranty Travel Center will have everything you need—but if you’re camping out in the mountains as we love to do here in Oregon, it’s a much larger imposition to drive back to civilization because you forgot to fill the propane tank. To make things easy, Terry and DT have put together five different FREE checklists that you are welcome to download and print. The RV Goddess suggests putting your checklists into a binder so that you have them at your fingertips, but you can also keep those downloads in a convenient file on the laptop or tablet that you take on the road.
Find Creative Storage Solutions to Make the Most of RV Closets and Drawers
Jason and Nikki Wynn’s blog Gone With the Wynns is another place to find excellent advice about RV organization. As a couple of perpetual RVers, they know the ins and outs of life on the road, and they’ve learned some great tricks about how to make the most of those deep RV storage spaces. To learn more about how to utilize lazy susans, divided organizers, storage cubes and shoe tubs in your big cabinets and cupboards, take a look at their fun video: RV Organizing: Don’t Be a Hot Mess. You’ll be amazed at how a storage cube turned on its side in an overhead cabinet can be a game changer for organizing your clothes, or how an easy-to-make divided organizer can save your breakables when you hit that pothole in the road. And best of all, if you like the Wynns’ solutions, they’ve added online links to everything they use so you can purchase your own.
Use Other Online Resources Like Pinterest and Buzzfeed to Get Ideas for Your RV
Pinterest is full of resources and ideas about everything imaginable, and there is an active RV Lifestyle community with Message Boards about organizing, space saving, and more. Search for topics like “ RV and Camper Space Saving Ideas” or “ Camper Ideas/Organizing.”
For some other excellent organizing tips, we also love this Buzzfeed post: 44 Cheap and Easy Ways to Organize Your RV/Camper.
The Internet has done a lot to bring RVers together, and because people who love the RV lifestyle are some of the friendliest and most helpful people on the road, they are using the Internet to help other RVers. So whether you’re looking to purchase a new or pre-owned RV, or you’re thinking about how to organize the travel trailer, fifth wheel, camper, motorhome or toy hauler you already own, you can do a lot of your research from the comfort of your favorite chair. If there’s anything we can help you with along the way, be sure and contact us.
Check out Part Two of this blog, as we discuss kitchens and outside storage organization.
Photo: Brett Neilson
