How We Pack a Motor Home for Full-timing - The Inside Story

Now that we’ve lived in our 35-foot motor home for a year and a half, we feel very comfortable with its interior space and storage. In the first year we have moved some things around, and gotten rid of a few things. But we have found that we did a pretty good job in our initial organization of the motor home’s nooks and crannies. We are also still pleased with our choice of the Tiffin Allegro RED 33AA for a full-time rig. We have been asked to provide some details of how we packed our things into such a small space. So today’s blog isn't fun and games and beautiful landscapes. Instead, it will focus on some of our ideas for packing a motor home that are still working for us a year later.

There is wonderful overhead storage on both sides of our living area, and we found that it is best to have it filled completely. This area has few partitions, so things will shift when driving if there is space between them. We even have some empty containers in these overhead bins, just to hold the space to keep things from shifting on the road. Having containers that are labeled, and can be pulled down to look through their contents is important.

In the Allegro RED 33AA, we found that even though they look identical, one side's storage is around an inch deeper than the other. So when choosing storage containers, we couldn’t use the same for both sides. Mark's shoe boxes would fit on one side, but only Denisa's would fit on the other.

In the Tiffin 33AA, there is a only one overhead shelf with a partition. So this is where all our glasses, plates, and most of our bowls landed. They ride quite nicely here and can’t shift around because of that partition.

When packing a motor home, we tried to put things where they are handy for use. But we also tried to think about weight distribution. Because we have all of the heavy appliances (refrigerator, washer, and dryer) on the passenger side of the motor home, we try to pack heavier items on the driver’s side. We have also found we can store our clothes washing supplies inside the washing machine.

The area around the dining room table and chairs has some great storage, but some of it is hard to get to. The left hand side is set up for computer and printer storage. We are comfortable with our decision not to bring a computer printer with us, and we simply go to a public library if we ever need to have a paper copy of something. This section also has a built-in file drawer, something we would be hard pressed to do without.

There is more good storage in a little cabinet in the hall, but it didn’t have enough shelves to use it efficiently. So we had more shelves made, and now we can get almost twice as much into that space.

We also have an upper and lower slide-out pantry that is right beside the refrigerator. These two pantries can hold an amazing amount of food items. But more importantly, we can actually see everything in these shallow cabinets.

We have a convection/microwave oven combination that sits above our gas cook top. That means we have two sizable drawers under the cook top where a gas oven is placed on other models of motor homes. We store all our pots and pans in one drawer, and all our bake ware in the other. That makes them easy to get to, and close to where we use them. We don’t know what we would do without these two big drawers!

We like that Tiffin makes their kitchen drawers extra long. Even though there aren’t many drawers, we found we could get everything we need in them. In some of the drawers we used organizers to keep them partitioned.

We were surprised to find that the bottom drawer on the right hand side is just a mini-drawer. But it was the perfect size to keep all the glass and dry measuring cups and spoons organized.

Denisa doesn’t like things left out on the kitchen counter. But we bought some counter storage things that work well. A container keeps the most-used kitchen gadgets close at hand. This goes under the sink when we are traveling.

A wooden rack for the most-used spices can ride on the kitchen counter right by the stove. 

The rest of the spices go in the tiny cabinet to the right of the microwave. It would be impossible to get to things in the back of this narrow cabinet without putting them into baskets that can be slid out.

Moving back to the bedroom, there is a good amount of storage in the cabinets over the bed's head board. Mark prefers to put his folded jeans and shorts here.

This cabinet is deep enough to fit two tubs. So Denisa can keep the tub filled with hiking pants in the front when it is cooler, and switch the shorts and bathing suits tub to the front when it is warmer.

The narrow overhead cabinet on the other wall of the bedroom seems to be just the right width to store rolled-up t-shirts.

We had to whittle down our hang-up clothes so they would fit into the closet than runs across the back of the motor home. We also had to slim down the shoes stored on the floor of that closet. There are some fancy shoe organizers available, but most of them also added unwanted weight. Denisa just uses cardboard  boxes with dividers that we picked up from a liquor store.

But we have found that it easier to keep the most-used shoes on the ledge in front of the four drawers across from the bed.

The smallest area in our motor home is the bathroom. Besides having little floor space, it also has little storage. Any extra towels have to be rolled to fit into a shallow cabinet on the wall. But there really is a good sized storage unit behind the mirror for other things.

After moving from a master bedroom suite with 26 drawers, and a walk-in closet as big as our entire motor home, we definitely had to do some down-sizing. We also had a kitchen with a walk-in pantry, and custom cabinets that Denisa had designed to fit our 30-year-accumulation of dishes and gadgets. We obviously didn't bring all of that with us, but we did bring enough that we are still very happy with our decision to down-size into this full-size lifestyle.