Getting Our New Home

That's my wife's cat in a skirt and it gave me panic attacks in the middle of the night more than once.

We purchased our travel trailer in March 2019. We'd spent months looking at various models online and checking out many in person. The salesmen were exceptionally annoying, always steering us to new models when we specifically wanted used. Few if any of the dealers in Winnipeg had used trailers. The only way to get a used trailer in or around town was to buy privately; but we needed to get financing and that meant hitting up multiple banks, not just going through our own. The dealer we had to go through was a 3 hour drive from the city.



They were also completely unable to understand that we would be living in the trailer full time. They constantly talked about how each RV they showed us would be great for a weekend or a week. In the Canadian prairies, RVs are for rare or occasional use. There are no open parks for more than five months of the year. RVs are viewed as a luxury item that you buy new and then run into the ground.

We finally selected the right RV, negotiated a little and made the loan application. It required a cosigner, but we managed it. The salesman assured us that the trailer would be given a full top to bottom inspection and everything tested as soon as it was warm enough to do so. Any problems found would be repaired. This guarantee was even in the paperwork.

Love at first sight. Taken within the first five minutes of seeing the trailer.

We picked up the trailer on May 21st. The salesman wasn't there, so another employee was "voluntold" to demo the trailer for us. He knew very little about the trailer, but we tried to roll with it. We even had a list of things to talk about and ask, so we weren't too worried.

We brought our truck in to test the lights. That's when the first problem happened. They thought that there was something wrong with our hookups, as one of the turn signals wasn't working. Thankfully, my shiny truck came with its own diagnostic equipment. The computer registered a fault in the trailer lights.

So the trailer had been sitting in their lot for more than two months and no one had tested the lights. This immediately derailed the demo. The trailer techs had to fix our trailer before we could even drive off with it. They had no ETA and we didn't know whether we would even be taking the trailer that day. The techs were running in and out of the trailer testing wires, testing the fuse box, testing testing testing. And during this time, the employee that was supposed to be demoing for us kept running in and out of the office, so our conversation and the demo kept getting derailed.

We tried to continue checking through everything, but we were distracted by the fact that something hadn't been working. The drive between the dealer and Winnipeg was several hours. Driving back and forth was a cost that we would have trouble absorbing. And we still needed to replace the toilet (more on that later - you'll always have a reason to come back for more). We were moving into the trailer on June 1st. We had less than two weeks to do modifications, while both working and while it was stored a half hour drive from home. We didn't have the time to come back.

We did our best to check everything, but it wasn't the full and complete test that the trailer needed.

Thankfully, they repaired the lights. Then when we went to leave, we discovered we'd left the license plates at home.

So on top of everything else we had to buy temporary registration just to get the trailer back to Winnipeg.

But we got it moving by golly gosh darn!

We took the trailer back and stored it at a friend's place while making renovations. When we got there, we opened it up and took a look. Despite what had gone wrong so far, the trailer already felt like home. We owned a home and were moving from an apartment into our tiny house. There was work to do - just like any new home - but it was ours. We made the modifications over the next ten days, then moved into the RV park on June 1st.

My wife is older than me.

Which is when we noticed that two of the tires were bald, that we couldn't make several of the outdoor lights work, and that the hot water didn't work!

We were already parked and living in the trailer. We couldn't just pick it up and go back or take it somewhere to be looked over. We'd even told the salesman that we were going to live in it full time and yet he still told us to take it somewhere. Luckily, the dealer had a mobile repair truck.

It took two weeks for him to show up.

Two weeks, both of us working, no hot water.

And when he did finally show up? Well, if you own an RV, you probably already know what was wrong.

No one showed us the on/off switch on the hot water tank.