We did some serious damage to our RV. Stay tuned. Welcome to the channel. I'm Paul. And I'm Liz and these are exciting times to push past fear, build confidence and live amazing. And some days it's harder to live amazing than others? That's the truth. I mean we wanted to make this video because we want to share with you what it's really like to be out here living in an RV because it's not all butterflies and roses. Not all the time. So if you don't know, Paul and I have been full time on the road for over two years, probably close to two and a half years now, getting there. I started solo for a year. He started solo for a year and we met. But yeah, we wanted to just share with you something that we're kind of sick about. And so we have a 2020 grand design. What do we have? Solitude 310 GK. It's a fifth wheel. It's 35 feet. We've had it for less than a year. And we've what damage have before this big damage. What damage have we done to it? I put a couple of scratches in the paint. It's full body paint. And I put a couple of scratches in the paint being irresponsible and not putting something on the ladder. And I put the ladder up against the cap and yeah. Yeah, we learned. And then there's a little bit of scratches inside. Just kind of wear and tear scratches. We stored some stuff when we were traveling. And there was something that was sharp that's scraped over the fireplace. Yeah, bounced into, there's a ledge in front of the fireplace and it's wood and it bounced into that and scratched the wood. I'm just realized that we are just a couple weeks away from having had this rig for exactly a year. Up until like three days ago we could have sold this and traded it in and gotten a pretty penny for it. Yeah, sure. And the damage we did probably took $10,000 off trade and value. It might have. Yeah, because that's probably close to the cost of the replace the roof. And that's what we involved. Why don't we talk about what we did to that roof? Yeah, yeah. Well, we're at a park in Acton, California, Solid Ed Canyon, it's a lovely place. And the site that we decided to pull into had a tree at the just back from the entrance. And I didn't think too much of it. Here's the learning. Not every tree is alike. Some trees you can brush up against like pine trees and some trees you we learn you can't. You can't. I'm not an arborist so I don't know what this tree is, but it's it must be a hardwood tree because it does not give very much. No. And our roof is testament to that. It's got a big a 20 foot long gouge in the in the TPO roofing material. And we don't even know it until the next day. So we stayed in that site and then the next morning still didn't know the damage. We saw a better site. We went over to it. And it was then when we were just looking around and we're like, oh my goodness. Yeah, we were actually looking at the side of the rig trying to decide if we wanted to mount security cameras on it. We were going. I was looking at where I could mount them. Yeah, if you are longtime viewers, you probably remember that I got my bike stolen out of a campsite. That's another video that shows you that RV life is not all roses. I mean, we absolutely love RV life. Yeah, we are keeping it real with this channel. So we thought, well, you know, we're going to maybe install cameras on the side of the rig. Yeah, so we're outside looking at, okay, we can mount them there and there. And then I see this spots up on the side of the roofing material. And it's like, what is that? Is that a rip? And we knew right away it was a rip. Yeah, we didn't have rain in the forecast, but we did most likely expect a heavy due. Well, that and with the holes in the side, we were, you know, we're going to be leaving here in a couple days driving to the next, our next destination. And my fear was that, you know, 60 mile an hour wind is going to get into those holes and balloon the roof up. And, you know, we probably get there and the roof would be peeled back. Right, right. So what's the name of the tape that we need? A turn of on. So if you have an RV, unless you have an air stream, you have one of three different types of roofs. And this in Durabon will work on all those types, which are... TPO, which is what we have, EPDM, which is another rubberized membrane comes in sheets just like TPO. And then of course, fiberglass. So you should have it with you. You don't want to have to go out to the store, particularly if you're camping. Because there might be a rip that could happen from a trigger, anything. Roofing material gets cut various ways. But that's the other thing, too, is to get in the habit of regularly inspecting your roof so that you know. I mean, we were lucky in that our damage was on the side of the roof and we could see it from the ground. Now we do inspect our roof and we do it pretty much every time. Pretty much every time. Before you apply the Eterna bond, you want to clean the area with something like acetone. That's what I used. The stuff that we carry is four inches wide. It's a rubberized tape. Once you put this down, you can't just pick it up. You can't peel it off ever, right? No, it's eternal. I mean, the name is as it implies, it's once it's on there, it's not coming off. Not without the material that's under it. It's pretty easy once you want to get the hang of it. So there's a learning curve. So our tip number one should you ever have to patch your roof is start in a less obvious location. So we had a location of the rip that was hidden when our slide was out and then we had a location of the rip directly over the door. So we didn't want to start by the door. Yeah, the most visible spot on the rig, the spot that you're constantly going in and out of. So yeah, we started over the slide, as Liz said, and my first mistake with this working with Eterna bond was trying to work with pieces that were too long. The whole rip area is somewhere between 15 and 20 feet. So it's a long rip area. So the first thing we did was we laid out this tape and we're like, oh, can we do it in one piece? You do not want to work with this in a 20 foot piece, not even a five foot piece. We learned and we decided to start with like three feet and we got to 15 inches. Yeah, that seemed to be the sweet spot for us. It's 15 inch pieces are really easy to work with. It's really sticky and yeah, it sticks to your fingers. Don't try budding the ends together. Overlapped them by about a quarter of an inch. Another thing that was kind of bad the day that we did this repair as it was windy. It was gusting to 20 miles an hour I guess. And so we couldn't wait, but if you have an option, wait when there's no wind. Another thing also is two people. You think even with 15 inch pieces you could do it. If you have another person or a camping neighbor, we need it for hands for this job. Also, it was on an edge. So to do this, you're leaning over the edge of the RV and of course you don't want to do a header off the RV. So one of the tips we did, so we started an area that was over the slide. So we knew we wouldn't fall, the slide would help us. But then when we got over the door, we opened the awning. Now the awning may or may not have caught us, but psychologically it wasn't freaking us out. If the awning was close, we would have been looking down what 14 feet just for psychological safety. It may not be real safety. Do not expect your awning to catch you. But it definitely wasn't distracting us looking down at 14 feet. I think it would have been really distracting for us. So that helped us stay focused. So you want to, before you get started, make sure that you have enough. So roll it out because you don't want to be in the middle of this job. You know, suddenly have to do that. And find out you need more. Yeah. Have a pair of scissors to cut it. And some acetone to clean the scissors because the adhesive on the tape will get on the scissors after we got two cuts and then I'd have to clean the scissors. If you don't know what you have, I mean you know you have a membrane, but you don't know if it's cheap or EPDM. There is a way to identify them. It requires you taking something off so that you can see the edge of the material. And EPDM has a black backing on it usually. So that's how you can tell. If you care. If you care. I don't care. The easiest, easiest place you could access it where you would probably see it is your AC register inside. If you take that down and you look up, you'll see edges of the material. And if it's got a black backing, it's EPDM. So tell us in the comments section below if you've done any serious damage to your rig. Make us feel better than you're not out here alone. Exactly. Because then you know that sick feeling. Oh yeah. Yeah, it ruined the day. Well, it didn't ruin the day. I mean we've got insurance and we're dealing with it. We just got a call from progressive while we were shooting this video. So hopefully it'll just be a memory. Yeah. Something to share around the campfire. Yeah. Well, we will see you in the next video then. Bye.