1. Our cabinets were decaying.  There had been water damage that required significant repair, we knew we had a major project.
2. I have an Ikea kitchen and love the cubbys, drawers, fittings and thingamabobs that come with the Ikea Rationale fittings.
3. Minimal carpentry skills required for a truly professional looking finish.  Drawers, doors, pulls and even sinks are all Ikea-rrific.  You gotta love it.
4. I knew that I could do it.  I had done my own Ikea kitchen. I had bought the flat boxes and installed the cabinets. If I could DIY 21 linear feet of base cabinets, wall cabinets and another 14 feet of tall cabinets, I could DIY a 19 foot trailer, with help – of course.
5. Finally, design.  My house, with an Ikea kitchen, was one of Metropolitan Home’s 2001 Homes of the Year winners.  An Ikea kitchen is flat out beautiful and I love good design.

The picture above shows the run of kitchen cabinets dry-fitted in the trailer.  The order is from left to right: 24″ refrigerator-30″ sink-24″ oven-18″ tall pantry.  The pantry is next to the bathroom and on the other side of the bathroom is another 18″ tall cabinets that will be fitted with shelves for a linen closet and will also hold the electrical components and the two deep cycle batteries that we charge with a solar panel.  More on that soon.

Fitting the base cabinets is pretty simple. I’ve discussed my friend the compass in an earlier post. Our trailer does not have much of an arc below the mid-line.  I used the cardboard inside the Ikea boxes to sketch a rough pattern and then used the compass to make the cardboard patterns more precise.  When it looked like I had a pattern that was pretty close I cut the Ikea fiberboard, but only after bringing each piece inside the trailer and clearly labeling which piece went where and which side was up.  You have no idea how confusing all these square pieces of white fiberboard get after a couple of hours, or minutes. I became the queen of blue painters tape and sharpies.  A tip:  the fiberboard will shatter if you cut it with a jigsaw, but a jigsaw makes it really easy to cut the arcs that you need.  I found that taping the fiberboard with that blue masking tape that you use to mask windows worked perfectly.  No shattered  fiberboard edges, and I could scribe lines on the blue and then pull it right off after I made my cuts.  Perfect!

Here’s an after picture.

There are a few posts between here and there.  In this view the gaucho is pulled out  and the bed is made because my son is visiting and we use the trailer as a guest house.  I’m just on my way to the airport to pick him up.

Next post:  The final installation and my perfect floating counter….Yes, I did get it! Yay me.

So the water heater sat half done in the garage for a few months while we completed the rest 0f the trailer.  But we did eventually complete the rest of the trailer!  Or most of it anyway, and one of the best parts is the marvelous water heater. So lets scoot forward in time to when after all the cabinets are completely isntalled and the plumbing is finished, now we can complete the installation of the water heater.

So, as it turns out the actual installation- that is the putting of the water heater into the trailer, hooking up the connections (per Atwood instructions) is pretty simple.  It just slides in (take a look at this post for a front view) and the water connections are on the back, the gas on the front.  The gas is a little fiddly to get to, you have to poke the gas line through a small rubber gasket, but its not hard just annoying. The heater barely fits in the 18″ Ikea cabinet and we kind of mangled the crappy styrofoam insulation that Atwood uses.  You see it here artfully repaired with duct tape. We eventually repaired it properly- no really we did, promise.

Did I mention that this water heater was not exactly cheap?  I was appalled at the quality in general.  The dump valve for the water heater is plastic and on the front. It looks as though the first time you use it you will be replacing the whole heater. I decided to add an external dump valve of my own devising here in cabinet.  Since I use quick release plumbing fittings throughout the trailer, the only difficulty was drilling the hole and running to the hardware store to buy the valve.

I mentioned in an earlier post that the Atwood vent is on the opposite side from the Bowen so we had to flip parts of the cover, this means that much of the exterior connections on the cover did not actually work well or at all. I were faced with trying to figure out how to connect the pieces of the cover to the trailer.  However, once I decided to move the dump valve to the interior of the trailer, I didn’t need to access the outside of the water heater except in odd circumstances. Essentially,  the electronic ignition and the installation of the dump valve inside the trailer means that I never have to open the exterior cover.  So we just screwed the cover on. And we used the same stainless steel screws that we used to attach the permanent parts of the heater and cover to the trailer so it all looks the same. Simple.

So what do I think of the mutant heater?  I’ve been using this for more than a year now;  it’s quiet,  it certainly does heat water well and I do love the electronic ignition. I love that the outside of my 1964 Globetrotter still has the original Bowen cover even if it is a bit dinged up.

Now, when we pull in we turn on the gas refrigerator and heater (if needed) but always flip on the water heater.  It was certainly one of the nicer things that we did for the trailer. I recommend it although I questions about the quality of the Atwood. I guess time will tell. The Bowen worked for 40+ years before getting a bit touchy.