Improving Comfort and Functionality
Like many RV’s, ours came with a U-shaped dinette that could be converted into a twin bed in the dining/living area. There’s a picture below of what it looked like. The construction of the seats was basically 3 inches of foam upholstery on top of plywood. No springs. It seemed fairly comfortable in the early years, but after five years of use the foam started to lose its resiliency and the seats became less comfortable, especially when watching a movie. We started to look at options to upgrade the area at that point. Since the only use the bed had had was by our son’s dog, we didn’t feel it was necessary to keep the ability to convert the area into a bed.
Design
Our dinette space was about six feet wide by two feet deep at the floor. There’s an outside storage area that we didn’t want to lose that’s about one foot high and one foot deep so about a foot off the floor the depth becomes around 3 feet. A lot of manufacturers offer a reclining loveseat or sofa as an option (There are quite a few available under six feet long.) which is nice when you’re looking to put your feet up at the end of the day or watch a movie, but those options you wind up eating your meals on the couch and we really wanted to keep the ability to enjoy a meal at a real table where we sit across from one another.
After some research I found some barrel chairs on shop4seats.com that are only 24″ x 22″ at the bottom. They’re available with a swivel base which would allow us to turn them toward the TV if we wanted to watch a movie, another consideration we had. After taking some measurements it looked like we could fit the seats so we placed an order. About five months later the made-to-order chairs arrived
Next we needed to figure out a setup for a table.I had been intrigued by the possibilities of the Lagun table leg system (LagunUSA.com). The Lagun system mounts to a wall and allows you to swivel your table as well as move it up and down, which would allow us to move the table out of the way when it was not in use, another advantage. For the last piece of the new dining area we chose a folding teak table that goes from 39″ long x 13″ wide to 39″ x 26″ wide from teakdeckcompany.com.
Removal & Installation
Step one was tearing out the old dinette which went pretty quickly. It was constructed of paneling stapled to either aluminum or wood framing. The construction of the outside storage area at the back of the dinette wasn’t very sturdy, so I built a plywood box beam to give a rigid support to the Lagun wall mount. After lagging the chairs to the floor (We decided not to install the seat belts since in 7 years we’ve never had passengers in the motorhome.To make them legal seatbelts would have required a steel adapter plate to fit the existing mounts.) I then installed the Lagun arm and table. To finish things off I added a shelf across the back of the area just under the window and another one on top of the outside storage box. On one end I built a small cabinet with a tambour (garage) door for a little more hidden storage.
The Verdict
Overall we really love it! The chairs are really comfortable since they’re constructed like real furniture with springs.The table is actually larger than the original one. The shelf across the back gives us a lot of room to put things on them while we’re parked and the extra space below has allowed us to move some items from storage up high where they’re not so accessible to where they’re easier to get at. The acid test was watching a movie on a rainy night. With the old cushions it would have been painful, but the new chairs were solid comfort. Well worth the time and expense.
Leave a Reply