How We Pack a Motor Home for Full-Timing - The Outside Perspective

Blog readers that are preparing to go full-time have asked us to give some advice about packing the motor home. We would have loved to have access to someone's personal experience in this area before we retired. So we decided to include pictures and a few comments on the outside storage in our Tiffin Allegro RED motor home. Denisa has already written a blog about our interior storage. She encouraged Mark to write about the decisions he made in determining how to organize the outside (also called basement) storage. When he wrote, "Here's some pictures of the crap we put under the motor home" Denisa decided to do some editing.

We are glad to have one pass-through basement compartment. As the name implies, it goes all the way from one side of the motor home to the other, so long things like brooms and a foldaway ladder can be stored here. Tubs help to keep it organized, but it is still tricky to retrieve things from here with the living room slides out. Some motor homes are equipped with slide-out trays that make this easier, but we have found that the sliding mechanism would take up precious space. So for now we are nimble enough to retrieve what we need.

With a 40-foot motor home, we would have gotten two of those large pass-through compartments. But with our more limited storage on our 35-foot unit, we had to learn to make use of all the nooks and crannies. Since we drive a vehicle whose tires need to be inflated to around 100 PSI, Mark decided it was important to carry a good air compressor to keep them properly inflated.  This is the back passenger side compartment, and we found stacking tubs that exactly fit the space left over from a heavy-duty air compressor. The top tub in this compartment carries everything we need to hook up our tow car to the motor home. It is easy to get to this tub, and together we can hook up the car in about three minutes. (By himself Mark can hook up the car in about two minutes--haha)

From the outside, it looks like our motor home has lots of storage. But some of those basement compartments hold the water hookups, or the propane tank, or the electrical hook ups. But even in these compartments, we have added some tubs or tool boxes to make use of precious space.

Some of the big compartments are also quite shallow, but some tubs with locking tops can be set up on their sides. It's also a good place to store spare parts for the motor home.

The back storage unit on the driver's side is where Mark stores all the things used for leveling the motor home. It was almost empty at the time we took this picture, except for two of the yellow jack pads. We bought these plastic pads when we first started, thinking we would replace them with heavy duty ones later. A year and half later, they are still working for us, and are light and easy to transport.

The other pads that are normally stored there were in use when the picture was taken. When we pull into a site that isn't level, we must back onto these pads to help level the motor home. Mark cut them to size from a 4'x8' horse stall pad. We have bigger ones that  fit under the dual wheels, and smaller ones for the front tires and jacks. All those pads will fit into that single storage unit pictured above with no room to spare.

We originally had our inflatable kayak in our basement storage, but now it seems to live in the back of our car. That way it is always with us when we want to go for a float. We also keep our back packs, hiking boots, and rain coats in the car. That keeps them handy for being used, and we have been very glad for that extra storage that the Honda CRV gives us.

Mark had to give up most of his power tools, but we still have enough toys to keep him busy. We are glad for the basement storage, but just as important, we are glad for the heavy-duty Freightliner chassis that can support the weight of all the things we can poke into that storage. We have had our motor home weighed twice in the last year and a half, and we are still below the cargo carrying capacity of our frame, axles, and tires. Having a safely-loaded motor home is more important to us than having too much stuff as we travel down the road to another adventure.