Delays and More Delays

  Hope everyone had a good time over the holidays -we spent the day with Eden and Burt so we had a great Christmas!  All the parts that we ordered to finish the motorhome were delayed because of the holidays but they finally started coming in last week. We could be out of here! Buuut…… we got a leak!  Ken joined two gray water tanks ( shower and sink waste water) together and that has become a reoccurring problem. He’s on his third patch job and if that doesn’t work he’ll have to start over with a new tank.
We’ve had a lot of time to putz around and fix any little things that we didn’t like. Here’s the before picture. I can’t take an after picture yet because the motorhome is in Ken’s shop.

Busy Week

    This was funny – the Ford dealer delivered the truck with 1/4 tank of gas. Ken used most of it up test driving the motorhome and never put any more fuel in it. On the day we picked it up from Ken’s shop ,we had to drive a few miles to the gas station. We just made it- flat on empty as we stopped at the pump!

We’ve been running around town getting the process started on everything that still needs to be finished – graphics designed and made , cushions measured to be sewn , new water tank ordered ( Ken installed one that is much too small) and bits and pieces bought to finish the inside.  I’ll post some more pictures as we get things finished but for now -

MERRY  CHRISTMAS !!!!

New Motorhome Delivered!

All settled and paid for. Ken agreed to honor our original contract. It’ll cost us a few thousand extra because of the lawyer’s fees and we’ll be fixing some of the poor finish work but at least we finally have it. A few more weeks of work , some graphics applied and we should be ready to go and find some warm weather!
  Pictures of the sloppy work:


I’ll post more later as we add the finishing touches.

The Good , The Bad and The Ugly

First the Good. Here’s our motorhome. It’s almost finished. It’s drivable. All of the systems work. It looks pretty good.

Then the Bad. Ken has decided that we owe him almost $8,000 more and he is holding the motorhome hostage. This is completely outside of our original contract.  Some of the charges are for parts that are essential to the proper construction of the motorhome plus we never agreed to any additional charges as the build was progressing.
And the Ugly. Ken is angry and is retaliating in more ways than one. In an effort to get the motorhome finished as quickly and cheaply as possible , he has been cutting corners everywhere that he can. This is the completed interior.It looks nice in photographs.

However when you start looking closer you’ll see things like this. This is the dinette seat with material wrapped around a piece of foam and stapled to plywood instead of a real cushion. The cord snaking up the wall is connected to  a power strip which was supposed to be hard wired with the wires running inside the wall.

So that’s where we are now. We are not paying any additional charges but we’ve decided to stop trying to get him to fix any mistakes. We’ll just deal with those after we get possession of the motorhome. Since he refuses to honor our original contract ,we’re going to have to take him to court. Updates soon!

Two More Weeks

Not much to say about the motorhome yet. Ken told us that he was planning on answering the complaint that we sent to the Attorney General but since we haven’t heard anything about that most likely he hasn’t done it. Our attorney sent him a letter on Friday detailing our case against him and asking for a response which hasn’t happened either. We went to the shop today and nothing had been done since our last visit a week ago. We only stayed for a few minutes , just long enough to see if any work had been done. Ken ignored us. It looks like this is going to be ugly.

   Pictures of the interior

WE’VE HAD ENOUGH !!!

We had high hopes that this motorhome would be finished by now and we would be back on the road. Ken put a lot of effort into it for a couple of weeks but that didn’t last. The final straw came on Oct.23. He called us the 20th and said that they would be working on it all week and by Friday , the 23 , it would be ready for an inspection and for completing all of the finishing touches. When we went to his shop on Friday , it looked almost exactly the same as it had looked the previous Friday! We’re baffled by his behavior – why lie? We just can’t deal with this any longer and have started legal actions. The first step was filing a complaint with the Washington Attorney General’s office. Ken was not happy about getting that notice. We have also contracted with our own attorney to force Ken to honor our contract. Updates to come…
In the meantime summer is long gone from Washington state and the rainy season has begun. Our solar panels don’t work without the sun so our strategy for free and inexpensive camping which involved bouncing back and forth between Eden’s street , casino lots (every Indian tribe in Washington state has a casino) and state parks is no longer possible.  We’ll be hunkered down for the duration in a private campground. It’s actually not bad for a private campground but not the sort of place we normally chose to spend our time.

View from our widow..

  The other side..

It’s Been an Entire Year!

September 17 was our 1st anniversary of the start of this motorhome project. We never would have believed that we would still be waiting for it to be finished a year later. The picture at the top isn’t Ken’s pickled remains but he’s pushing it !  We gave him an ultimatum-work on it every day or we will remove it from his shop.  It’s to the point where that is possible so we have a lot of leverage.

More pictures here – http://cid-4ce32117b0082fb8.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/It%5E4s%20Been%20an%20Entire%20Year!!