3 Common Sense RV Housekeeping Tips
When your home flies down the highway at 65 miles-per-hour, things are bound to shift inside. After twelve years as a full-time nomad picking up the pieces on an almost daily basis, I’ve discovered a few lightbulb moment RV housekeeping tips for better travels. Follow along and you can prevent or fix some of the more common domestic hassles in your RV too.
As the traveler responsible for the inside of our RV, it’s my job to deal with the results of interior RV calamities. From spoiled food in the refrigerator, to objects flying out of cabinets, and closet clothes landing on the floor, it wasn’t unusual to deal with all three in one day. But over time I’ve discovered better ways to prevent these RV domestic disasters. My three best RV housekeeping tips acquired after twelve years on the road are so simple, I can’t believe it took me this long to think of them.
1. Keep closet hangers facing forward.
The only wardrobe closet in our fifth wheel trailer is in the rear and far from the axles. I’ve never ridden in back when the rig is moving, but I’m guessing there is a lot of bounce back there. That’s because each time we stop and I look inside that closet, all of our jackets are laying on the floor.
I tried using baby bungee cords to keep hangars from jumping out of the rack, but they were a major hassle. Someone suggested placing a tension bar in front of the hangers, but before I ran out to buy one, I learned one of the most “Duh!” RV housekeeping tips ever: keep all hangars facing forward, and they won’t fall out.
It worked! If there’s a physics geek out there who can offer an explanation, I would love to hear it. Meanwhile, here’s my second best housekeeping tips for better RVing:
2. Keep produce fresh with GreenBags®
GreenBags save me so much money!
Like many fifth wheels, ours has a typical absorption RV refrigerator that cools food with a process using heat, ammonia, hydrogen gas, and water. This finicky operation method is notorious for uneven cooling that promotes humidity and speeds up the spoilage process in fruits and vegetables.
I assumed that we were stuck with the unpleasant, rotten produce surprises unless we installed a residential refrigerator in our RV. Then another RVer told me about produce bags that prevent food spoilage.
Their proper name is “Debbie Meyer GreenBags®,” and these reusable produce bags have been around for years. The company claims that by coating the bags with “the Oya mineral form of Zeolite,” the bags keep produce fresh for as long as 30-days. The mineral absorbs ethylene gas, thought to be the major contributor of fruits and vegetables ripening and eventually spoiling.
The GreenBags live up to their promise, with the exception of tomatoes and mushrooms. Using the bags means we make fewer trips to the grocery store. This is especially handy during our remote boondocking adventures when we try to eat every bit of food before heading to town. We scour the cabinets for dry camping recipes and look in our containers that fit neatly into our pantry. This leads me to the last of my RV housekeeping tips:
3. Choose square containers
Look for right angle food and storage containers.
RVs are usually long, rectangular containers on wheels so it makes sense that whatever you put inside will fit better if it also has right angles. Throw away round containers and remember that the best way to pack your RV kitchen is to think like a square and contain small, loose items in rectangle and square-shaped boxes.
From your refrigerator to your pantry to your bathroom cabinets, you’ll conserve space and keep things tidy when you purchase right-angled storage bins that stack neatly into your cabinets.
RVing really is a simple life, but sometimes it takes going over a learning curve before you discover the best ways to make it work for you. These are my own helpful domestic tips for easy RVing, but I’m sure you have your own. Comment below and share them with us, we would love to learn your tips and tricks too.
Rene Agredano and her husband, Jim Nelson, became full-time RVers in 2007 and have been touring the country ever since. In her blog, Rene chronicles the ins and outs of the full-timing life and brings readers along to meet the fascinating people and amazing places they visit on the road. Her road trip adventures are chronicled in her blog at LiveWorkDream.com.
I loved your ideas. I just recently purchased a cute square bin for the cabinet to contain items. As that one particular cabinet’s latch is broke. It worked really well on our last trip.
Load up your RV with what you think you need. Take a trip or two. Go back through it and take out everything you did not use!
I recently unloaded everything for a thorough cleaning. We found things we didn’t even know we were hauling aground for years. Nuff Said.
We just bought a 26RK and I found Doo dads I had picked up 20 years ago never used. Also a water thief I had left behind 30 years ago in our pop up days. Great memories.
Great thanks for the tip.
Thank you for the great full time and regular rving tips. They will be very useful. Going full time starting next month. Looking forward to the adventure. If you have any comments on best way to store dishes for travelers that would be a great help too.
Because of limited closet space, I have my clothes professionally washed/dry cleaned, pressed, folded, and wrapped in plastic. I store them in stackable plastic bins, one for shirts, one for pants, and one for “other.” I always have pressed, clean clothes for any occasion with easy access.
First of all, please stop “flying down the highway at 65 mph! That is straight out stupid. Sorry, just saying after see two major RV wrecks. Plan your trips better so you don’t have to go at an unsafe speed.
65 mph isn’t that fast IMHO. Unless, of course, your TV is a Honda Ridgeline or equivalent.
What is unsafe about 65 MPH? Unless the limit is 35-40. Drivers going too slow will cause more problems that people who drive too fast. They make other drivers angry and then the angry drivers tend to make extreme maneuvers to get around the slow drivers.
Talking about RV drivers. Several years ago my father-in-law prided himself on being a safe driver.
They were on the west coast and a state trooper gave him a ticket fir going too slow, holding up traffic and being an endangerment to others. Enough said about slow drivers.
Still trying to figure out why so many people have so much trouble with clothes falling off hangers and rods. Never had anything fall off. Ice maker sits on kitchen counter and never moves. Maybe 35 years of truck driving helps. Slow down on bumpy roads and curvy roads.
Never, ever, ever never leave your black and gray water valves open. Never. Yes, you can leave the line connected to the sewer connection, but leave the valves closed until one of your tanks reads full. If you have a blank tank washer start it before draining the tank. Drain black first, CLOSE THE VALVE, drain gray second, CLOSE THE VALVE.
Why you may ask? The solids in the black water get left behind and build up into a nightmare pile that might require removing the whole toilet to dislodge. BTDT.
If you don’t have your gray water valve closed the black water will backflush into your gray water tank.
If you don’t close the blackwater valve before opening the gray water, you will end up with gray water back flushing into your black water tank.
Draining the gray water second, cleans a lot of the black water debris out, leaving a much less odorous sewer pipe to deal with when you do finally disconnect.
We never had our clothes fall off onto the bottom of the closet in our class c or our old travel trailer. We recently bought a Flagstaff 26 fkrbs and the clothes are always falling to the closet floor. I will try the turning the hangers around trick.
I can’t wait to try this in our back closet! Clothes always down, and have tried many tricks, thanks for the help!!
If we can buy cup hooks with a “lock” on them, why can’t we find clothes hangers with that little feature?
Don’t know why the forward-facing hangars didn’t work for us, but we wound up buying “rv hangars” from Amazon. They easily clip over the clothes rod and never have fallen off.
We just started RVing and I read everything I could find about good “hacks”. My favorite is using those empty 33 oz nut containers to store dry goods like cookies, pasta, flour, rice, dog food etc. I stack them on their sides, bottom out and label the bottoms. They stay in place and everything stays fresh and mouse-proof.
We once had a large round watermelon come bouncing up the middle of our Motorhome during abrupt stop due to light change! Bounced up between my wife and I deflected straight up off the dash…..’Hit the ceiling reflected off the ceiling (class C ) and came straight down and landed directly between us and stopped! We looked at each other and just cracked up!
Amazon.com has a hanger that clips onto the closet rod that keeps the hangers on the rod. It’s called Lynx Stay-Put Hanger (6 pack) for about $7. It is white thick plastic.
We use those ultra-thin velvet hangars and nothing ever falls off, at home or in the camper.
As a former class C, long travel trailer, truck camper, and now 2 slide out truck camper camper, I fully endorse the square container packing idea. I use it for pantry and refrigerator packing. Saves a lot of space. I also use square containers for packing my canned goods and what evers in my cabinets. In the end, it helps with organization and the pulling out of things!
The benefit of the thin velvet hangers is that more clothing can be hung in a narrow space. Thick plastic hangers take too much space and clothing has more tendency to slip off.
I also purchased the black velvet liked hangers from Costco, they are slim therefore take up less space, keep clothes from sliding off and also hang them so they won’t fall off the rod. love all the great tips on this site!
I always had my clothes and hangers falling off during travel and I learned the trick of facing them forward about a year ago. Nothing has fallen off since. I also learned how wonderful square containers are for the cabinets quite some time ago. I will need to try the green bags for the fruit because I had not heard of it yet.
Debbie Meyer Green Bags also makes “green” square plastic containers similar to the the disposable ones on the market. They are fantastic for storing items in the fridge. I put all my salad veggies in them and they stay fresh longer and fit with no wasted space. Even mushroom last longer.
We have small drawers in our Class C kitchen, so after a bit of experimentation I found I could store more dishrags and drying cloths by folding the cloths (aka tea towels) in thirds to fit ten along the side of the drawer then rolling the dishrags and placing them on end to fit eight of those into the other side of the drawer. I use extras to wrap coffee mugs and glassware in the other drawers. I never run out of clean dish towels and dishrags this way 🙂
I use the can organizers that you roll your canned goods into.This keeps your round cans neatly stacked.for my plates I have a round plate holder screwed to the bottom of my top cabinet.I have coffee cup hooks with latches on them screwed to the bottom of my cabinet next to my under the counter Mr. Coffee maker. We took and screwed holes in our coat hangers then ran bailing wire though them,& wrapped around the clothes rod.We owned a catering trailer for years,& learned to fasten every thing down.
I wrap baby bungee cords around the 2 knobs of my upper cabinets. Started doing this after half our Corningware dishes bounced out and crashed on the TT floor.
Add paper towels inside plastic bags with your fruit & vegs. My rinsed romaine lettuce lasts so much longer by doing this; than it ever did using those green bags. Plus, it is much healthier & less expensive preservative. 🙂
Same here! I just wrap the romaine head (or whatever else!) after drying off some in a paper towel or two, shove it/them into the dry produce bag and into the fridge. Don’t know where I heard about this, but never have spent money on green or any other kinds of bags for storing produce.
Also, those (clean) socks that don’t have mates are great for glass bottles, to keep them from banging into one another in the pantry. You know, stuff like mineral water, pickle relish, and jelly.