We had 45 days to get Ruby inspected (as part of importing from the US). Todd got the inspection list so he knew what to check her for beforehand. Mechanically she seemed good and the only thing he found is a bad air pot driver side rear drive. A few grease nipples not taking grease and some burned out clearance lights. So we dropped Ruby off in a snowstorm (of course) at @ 7:00 am at http://drbmechanical.com/ DRB Mechanical could not find to much wrong with Ruby other that the Brake Pot. They fixed that and all in for under $1000. Finally, Ruby was a landed immigrant!
Now that we had Ruby, we needed to do a couple things:
- Test her out and use her, figure out what was wrong/not working and fix her.
- Get the house ready and figure out when to sell and move.
We were lucky enough to be able to store Ruby at family property by Cremona, AB. The summer of 2018, we started using Ruby for weekends jaunts:
- Kinbrook Island provincial park
- Hunter Valley road (Bush / boondocking)
- Water Valley (Bush/boondocking)
- Three Hills (http://www.threehillscruise.ca/)
- Tofield, AB (https://wildoatsandnotes.com/)
- Camrose, AB (bigvalleyjamboree.com/)
- Revelstoke, BC
After our summer of fun, we had to prioritize a few maintenance tasks, stripped, repainted and resealed the roof, replaced the toilet, and then we parked her and put her on blocks for the winter, because we needed to get the house sorted, decluttered and sold for the spring! We couldn’t believe how much stuff we had, when we started decluttering. After many trips dropping boxes off at the thrift store and staging our house perfectly, we miraculously sold our house (the market in Calgary was the worse its been in 40 years) in Feb 2019. Move out day was May 11, 2019. We had 3 months to get her interior and underside renovations done. Here’s what we did between Feb and May:
- Stripped out furniture in living room and kitchen
- Ripped out original white carpet and marble tile
- Opened all conduit and access panels
- Cleaned everything, top to bottom
- Fixed some old water damage
- Installed glycol heated, and subfloor and installed new vinyl plank flooring
- Home made custom futon couch
- Added new IKEA cabinets and live edge Manitoba Maple counter in kitchen
- Added live edge poplar office desk and cotton wood live edge heated boot rack
- Installed 5 new glycol heat exchangers for heating
- Rewired for ethernet, wifi, stereo, booster
- Installed additional inverter for small peripheral’s
- Reconfigured all basement storage
- Removed original generator and installed a whisper quiet
- 4 solar panels on the roof
You can see some of the pictures in our gallery.