Discover How Much RV Maintenance Costs - Everything That Broke in One Year
We’ve officially owned our home on wheels for one year! Find out everything we’ve had to fix in it during that time and what it ended up costing us.
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📍- Your Home-on-Wheels
Every new RVer will hear the same recurring warning repeated throughout the start of their journey: RVs require A LOT of maintenance. Even truer is that this amount of maintenance skyrockets if you plan to live and travel in your RV full-time. While this nomadic lifestyle is sought after by so many who wish to attain a new-found sense of freedom, it’s not exactly the carefree and whimsical experience you see from van-life influencers who are so often seen staring out of their opened barn-style doors onto far stretches of lush, wildflower sprinkled meadows. As they sit, hands curled around a warm mug of coffee, sometimes a dear can be seen grazing in the distance.
If you want to take your life on the road, it is best to erase these fantasies from your mind. Full-time RVing is a lot of hard work, and sometimes it can feel like you are just living between two catastrophes. On the other hand, I must tell you that we believe this lifestyle is worth every ounce of blood, sweat, and tears that get poured into it. Nothing worth doing ever comes easy, and if it was in fact “easy” then there would be a much greater number of people who embark on the adventure.
If you are an aspiring full-time traveler, I can only assume that you are up for the challenge, just as we were when we first bought our home-on-wheels one year ago. To better prepare you for the tribulations ahead, we are sharing all the maintenance that we had to perform on our RV, as well as what it cost us, as full-time RV travelers.
So, whether you’re here for informational purposes, or you simply would like to have a laugh at our expense, continue reading to learn about everything we did during our first year of RV maintenance, and how much it cost us.
Pictured here are the smiles of two kids who had no idea what kind of work was ahead of them.
Cost: $30
Cost: $30
While we don’t have a photo of the door actually popping out of place, here you can see the reinforced screws we have used to keep everything in place since then.
Cost: $100
Here is an example of one of the rollers, and the metal sheet that we inserted between the roller and the bottom of the slides.
Cost: $250
Here is Drew looking in our furnace, just seconds after seeing the mouse inside!
Cost: $75
We have a little scar in our RV after this one, but what’s important is that our frame is stable and we are keeping all of the rain out.
Cost: $75
Although this fix might not be pretty, it’s super tough. It actually survived our door getting ripped from my hand during a tornado!
Cost: $50
Here’s my man fixing the fan in our bathroom. If you’ve spent any time in an RV, and have experienced how paper-thin the walls are, you know that a reliable bathroom fan is a must!
Cost: $0
I wish I had a photo of our awning blowing in the wind but I was too busy panicking as this was happening. Instead, here is our awning, securely in place, with an appropriate amount of tension.
Cost: $20
I can’t actually believe we drove around with this bar upside down for so long. Here it is, right side up, with the locking piece in the correct position.
Cost: $1,600
Cost: $70
As an added bonus, we actually upgraded our propane detector to one with a carbon monoxide detector as well.
Cost: $1,100
This is probably the scariest photo I’ve ever taken. Look at how melted our breaker was!
Cost: $500
Luckily, most of the glass ended up falling outside of the RV instead of into our kitchen, but it still created a huge mess and we were finding glass shards for weeks afterward.
Cost: $140 ($70 per change)
That Bud Light box we actually use as a ramp to get our oil into our drip pan without splashes.
Cost: $10
Cost: $40
Here I am looking cheerful while cleaning the RV roof. It actually takes us several hours to clean the RV, which I’ve heard is pretty standard.
We hope you enjoyed reading about our first year of RV maintenance! Did the cost surprise you? Let us know in the comments, and let us know about your own RV maintenance costs so that we can help other travelers together!
Thank you for joining us at Discovery Detour, where the destination is always unknown.