Living Room Tour Part 2 – An In-Depth Look at Our RV
Let’s take a closer look at the kitchen slide in our 2018 Grand Design Reflection 312BHTS! This area doubles as both an entertainment center and an almost-fully-featured kitchen. The slide is relatively shallow compared to the two other slides in this rig, but it contains a lot of things that make our full-time life very comfortable. On the left half of the slide you’ll find the TV, radio, and fireplace kind of stacked up in one area with a huge countertop space under the TV. To the right is the overhead microwave convection oven, gas stove top, and gas oven. All the way to the right is our double-wide RV fridge.
Home (on Wheels) Theater
The TV came with the RV and is mounted to the wall on an articulating arm that allows us to pull it out and swivel it around if need be. We recently added the small soundbar underneath the TV and also brought our XBOX One from home. We’re all gamers and we weren’t going to give that up just because we were going to live on the road! That huge run of counter space under the TV is one of our favorite things about this RV. There are obviously issues with blocking the TV if you put too much stuff there, but the TV sits up high enough to allow some good use of the counter even if the TV is in use. There is also plenty of room between the TV and stove top for our Instant Pot, plus all the space if you have the stove top cover down.
Moving down a little bit, the dark tinted piece of glass hides a small storage compartment as well as the RV’s radio. We rarely use the radio and instead have an auxiliary cable running from the Amazon Echo Dot down to the radio’s input so we can stream music or check the weather with Alexa via the speakers in the ceiling of the rig. All the way at the bottom is our electric fireplace, which we use ALL THE TIME when it’s cold out. It can heat up the entire RV to a comfortable temperature even if it’s in the upper 40’s outside. Any colder than that and we start using our central heating, which is a propane furnace, but we try to avoid that kind of weather! You can also turn on the “fire” without the heat if you just want it to look cozy.
Cooking for a Small Redheaded Army
Brian could write many, many blog posts about cooking in the RV, and probably will this year, but for now we’re going to keep this brief. We had no idea what a convection microwave oven was before we bought this RV. Little did we know we would fall in love with it so hard! The short version is it’s both a microwave and an oven. You can microwave some water for your coffee or tea and then toss in some biscuits to bake for 20 minutes. All in the same box! We’ve heard that many people struggle with inconsistent baking in RV ovens, so we’re glad we have this other option. About the oven – we’ve never actually used ours and we basically just use it for storage.
The stove top has a folding glass cover that’s down in the above photo. Three gas burners live underneath the cover. They don’t get super hot so boiling a pot of water for pasta takes quite a while, but they work great for most other things. You’ll notice in the photo that the knobs are missing. We take off all of the knobs so the children and dog can’t accidentally turn the gas on. The knob on the far left is the spark knob that can’t be removed, nor is it easy to turn or dangerous if it does get turned.
Storage for Days
Let’s wrap up today’s in-depth look at our kitchen with a quick discussion about the storage in this area. The two cabinets above the TV are pretty big and hold both electronics as well as some pantry items. Left of the fireplace is a really skinny and deep cabinet and we store the XBOX, vacuum, and a couple other chunky but skinny items. On the right is a HUGE cabinet that houses our Instant Pot, water kettle, blender, paper plates and bowls, and several other kitchen gadgets. Then there’s a huge drawer under the oven where we keep mixing and prep bowls, ziplock bags, foil, and parchment paper.
We’ll cover the sink in a future post, but since we’re talking about storage we’ll include the island here. There are three good-size drawers in the island that we use for silverware, utensils, plastic plates and bowls, measuring cups and spoons, and an entire drawer gets taken up by sippy cups and all of their accessories. The cavernous two-door cabinet under the sink is where we keep our dog food, baking sheets, pots and pans, electric skillet, grocery bags, and cleaning sprays and wipes.
Check out the video we recorded last time we emptied out all of these cabinets and reorganized the kitchen. We dig into a lot of these spaces and you can get a good look at just how much fits into them:
We’re Only Getting Started!
We still have a BUNCH more to cover in our big central living area. Next up we’re taking a look at the rear hutch and recliners. If you’re enjoying this in-depth look, make sure to bookmark our site, subscribe to us on YouTube, and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Patreon.
