Zazbot Discount Shopping

It amazes me how cheap they make these RV beds. The mattresses are fairly lame and the under structure is usually thin plywood. Not only are the bed frames and mattresses usually cheap in quality, much of the components used in RVs are inferior.

So what can you do about it? What we did was reinforce the bad frame by taking off the cheap plywood (thin stuff) and replacing it with 1 inch plywood. We also reinforced the under frame of the plywood with a few 2×4 pieces.

Our original bed, in our 23 foot Sunseeker RV made by Forest River, used to sag in the middle because of the lack of support and the thin 1/2 plywood that lay directly below the mattress. It’s doesn’t sag anymore but the mattress is still cheap in construction. We would like to just replace the mattress with a new one (that would be easy right) but alas; the mattress is custom designed to fit the RV lower bed area. It has one corner rounded off more than a standard mattress to fit the bed area of the RV so we had to think of another plan for superior comfort.

So what we did was buy a big chunk of think memory foam and laid it down. The memory foam is 8 inches thick so it’s really a mattress in itself. We laid the stock RV mattress down on the memory foam and used it as a template. We traced the shape of the RV mattress on to the the memory foam and then cut the memory foam.

Then we simply put the newly shaped piece of memory foam over the mattress, sheet it all down, and you’re done. Now the bed does not sag in the middle and it’s so comfortable you almost feel like you are going to melt when you lay down for a nap or bed time.

I can understand why RV manufacturers cheap out on some of the interior construction. Their overhead and liability costs, labor, materials, etc. are very costly and to turn a profit they have to keep down costs as much as possible.

Honestly, I don’t think owning is a good idea if you don’t have someone in the family who is “handyman” in some degree. Upgrading and customizing some of the interior amenities isn’t bad (actually allot of fun) but you need to have a work area of some sort, tools, and experience working with your hands. Otherwize customizing your RV is way to expensive.

Tags: bed reinforcement, customizing rv interior

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.