Living Room Tour Part 4 – An In-Depth Look at Our RV
Welcome to the rest of the kitchen in our 2018 Grand Design Reflection 312BHTS! In today’s post we’re going to talk about the kitchen island, fridge, and second hutch that make up this part of our living room/kitchen space. If you haven’t checked out the previous parts of this series, make sure to do that now so you can learn a bit about our convection microwave and oven, also pictured above. Before we get into the details, I just want to clear one thing up really quickly – our RV doesn’t vape, that’s just an oil diffuser by the kitchen faucet. We’ve had some funny comments on several of our videos about that thing! ?
Islands of Adventure
I LOVE our kitchen island! First of all, and most importantly, it’s not plastic or laminated. The entire counter is a solid-surface material with no seams, which means that we don’t have to worry about water seeping into or through it and damaging the cabinets below. The counter surface under the TV is this same material, so prep and cooking over there is also worry-free. One of the sink covers is shown in the picture above, and there is another one to cover the other half of the sink. These covers are made of the same countertop material and are very sturdy.
The sink itself is an under-mount stainless steel farmers sink and is nice and deep and wide with plenty of room to wash dishes. Or in our case hide as many as possible until we run out of spoons! An awesome, super tall goose-neck faucet with a built-in pull-out sprayer towers over the sink. This all makes for a very comfortable and functional central feature of the room. The only thing that makes it better is the roll-up stainless steel dish drainer that we found!
Cold and Hot
As a family of five, having plenty of room for food is pretty much a life-or-death concern. The only larger fridge we’ve ever seen in an RV was a residential electric-only fridge. We love our double-wide fridge though – it has plenty of room for our family and also stays plenty cold on long travel days or while boondocking overnight without electricity. If you want to get a good look at how big this fridge is, check out our video on how to defrost an RV fridge.
The hutch next to the fridge is similar to the hutch on the other side of this room, but the bottom just has a couple drawers instead of three tall cabinets. Grand Design hid the propane heater and power convertor behind that slotted grate, so there’s not quite as much storage here. You can also see that the fuse panel is in that area – we keep our trash can in front of it so the littles don’t get too curious about it.
The two drawers here are really large, and (we’re ashamed to admit this) they’re pretty much “junk drawers” like everyone has in a normal house. They’re just so central, and they’re an easy place to hide things that we’ll need frequently! The shelf right above those drawers is one of our multi-functional spaces. We keep our handheld vacuum on it’s charger, Vector’s treats, our water bottles, hair stuff for the girls, our camera stuff, etc. Again, this is a very central space so it just gets a little cluttered up as we use it.
Time for a Rant
Can we talk about this thermostat for a second? The Dometic thermostat in this rig is garbage. The “capacitive touch” cover on the thermostat doesn’t work AT ALL. Whatever material they lined the backside of the cover with transfers commands from one button to another. Sometimes when you want to lower the temperature, it just switches the display to Celsius. That’s really useful! Or maybe you want to cycle from the A/C to just the fan. It has something else in mind and will start raising the temperature all the way up! The only way we can use this thermostat is to take the cover off so we can touch the individual buttons directly.
Even without the cover, sometimes the A/C will run and then just decide to stop. It will detect and show you that it’s 78 in the room, but even though you have it set to 72 it just won’t come on. A full power cycle will fix it, maybe. But it only does this sometimes and will run great for weeks on end. I’m going to replace it soon, but it doesn’t look like RV thermostats are really great overall… /rant
Food for Days (and Weeks)
The three cabinets across the top of the hutch are our primary pantry space. We have everything from spices and cooking oils to pasta and cereal up there. It holds a LOT of food, as you can see from our Instagram post above. Those white bins from IKEA make everything easier to fit too, and much easier when looking for items on the top shelf. As a quick side note: we like keeping our food up high for two reasons. First, it keeps the kids out of it without permission. Second, it may help cut down on unwanted guests of the bug or rodent variety. Anything crawling in is going to come in around a slide or through the basement, so if they don’t find anything yummy down low, maybe they’ll just move on? That’s our theory anyway!
One More Stop
There’s still one more portion of this room to see! Tomorrow we’ll finish up the living room with a look at the dinette and front door area. 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.
