RV Interior Remodel for San Clemente Owners

The scope conversation is the most valuable hour of the project and it happens with the coach in front of us, not over email. We walk it with you and sort every item you want into three buckets: cosmetic, structural and mechanical. Replacing a dinette cushion set is cosmetic. Removing the dinette and building a desk is structural, because the dinette base is usually anchored to the floor and often hides plumbing or a heat duct. Moving a sink is mechanical, because it moves supply, drain and vent. Owners are routinely surprised by which of their wish list items lands in which bucket.

Then we take the coach apart on paper. Where do the water lines run. Where is the heat duct. Which walls carry roof load and which are just partitions. Where does the slide travel and what clearance does it need at full extension. Those answers set the boundary of what is possible before we discuss finishes at all. A galley island that looks perfect in a rendering is not possible if it sits in the slide path, and you want to know that on day one, not on day thirty.

You get a written scope with the work broken into phases, hours per phase, materials specified by product and a price per phase. That structure lets you cut before you start rather than mid-project, which is where remodels go badly wrong. If the full plan comes back at $34,000 and your number is $22,000, we will show you which phases to defer and what deferring them costs you when you come back for them in two years.

Refresh tier runs roughly $1,500 to $8,000. Nothing structural moves. This is flooring, paint or wall treatment, new countertops on the existing cabinet boxes, new hardware, updated lighting and often a furniture swap. It is the highest return per dollar in the whole category, because you are changing everything the eye lands on without touching anything the eye does not. A refresh on a 2015 Class A takes ten to twenty working days and makes it read like a coach ten years newer.

Renovation tier runs roughly $8,000 to $35,000. Cabinet boxes come out or get rebuilt, layouts change within existing walls, plumbing fixtures move short distances, the dinette becomes something else, and the whole interior gets a new material palette. This is where most serious remodels land. Expect four to eight weeks and expect a real design phase before anyone touches the coach, because at this level decisions interlock. Changing a countertop material changes the cabinet build, which changes the electrical rough-in behind it.

Full gut and custom build-out runs $35,000 to $80,000 and up. Walls move, the layout is redrawn, everything gets replaced down to the subfloor, and often the electrical and plumbing systems are rebuilt with it. Full-time living conversions and vintage restorations live in this tier. These are eight to twenty week projects with a design phase in front, and they only make financial sense on a coach whose chassis and structure are worth building on. We will tell you plainly if yours is not.

A remodel done in the wrong order costs more than the same remodel done twice at a smaller scale. The sequence is rough-in, then substrate, then finish, then trim, then furniture, and each stage gets inspected before the next one buries it. Electrical and plumbing rough-in goes in while walls are open. Subfloor repair happens before flooring. Cabinet boxes get set and leveled before countertops are templated, because a template taken from an unlevel box produces a countertop that never fits.

Countertops are the most common scheduling bottleneck. Solid surface and quartz get templated after the boxes are installed, then fabricated off site, and that fabrication window runs one to three weeks during which we work around an unfinished galley. We plan for it. What we cannot plan around is a customer selection made late, which is why we push hard for every material choice to be locked before demolition starts. A single undecided backsplash can hold a $30,000 project for two weeks.

Flooring goes down after wet work is finished and before furniture is set, and it runs continuously under slide rooms with the slides retracted so the visible seam falls where the slide covers it. Wall and ceiling panels go up before crown and trim. Lighting gets rough-wired at the panel stage and fixtures land near the end. Furniture and upholstery are last, because everything before them generates dust you do not want in new fabric.

The most requested layout change of the last few years is the dinette. Factory booth dinettes are uncomfortable, waste floor area and rarely sleep anybody well. Converting one to a desk and cabinet run, to theater seating, or to a pair of recliners with a table between them changes how the coach lives more than any other single move. The complication is what the dinette base was hiding, which is commonly a heat duct, a water line run, a 12V junction or an inverter, and every one of those has to be rerouted properly rather than tucked somewhere out of sight.

Bunk room conversions run a close second. Kids grow up, and a quad bunk room becomes wasted square footage. That space converts well into an office with a desk and full-height storage, a gear garage with a tie-down floor, or a proper primary bedroom on smaller coaches. On a fifth wheel the bunk room often sits over the pin box, which means anything heavy going in there needs a weight check against the hitch rating before we build it.

Full-time living conversions are their own category. Two people living in a coach year round need real pantry volume, a workstation that does not fold away, laundry, better insulation, upgraded electrical capacity for actual appliances, and storage designed for possessions rather than camping gear. Those projects run $35,000 to $80,000 and up and take eight to twenty weeks. They also require a hard conversation about whether the chassis under the coach is worth the investment, and we will have it with you honestly.

Cabinetry work splits three ways and the prices are very different. Refacing keeps the existing boxes and replaces doors, drawer fronts and hardware, which runs $500 to $2,500 on most coaches and takes three to eight days. Rebuilding boxes with new faces and interiors lands mid-range. Fully custom cabinetry built to a drawing runs to $7,500 and beyond and takes weeks, because every piece is fabricated for one coach. Refacing gets most owners eighty percent of the visual change for a quarter of the cost, and we say so before you spend the rest.

Countertops in a coach have to tolerate flex. Solid surface handles it well because it can be seamed and repaired in place. Quartz and granite are attractive and heavy, and they need a properly supported and isolated substrate so the slab never carries a twisting load from the cabinet box. Butcher block moves with humidity and needs sealing on all six sides including the underside, which is the side everybody forgets. Laminate is genuinely fine and costs a fraction of the rest.

Flooring is where LVT has taken over for good reason. It handles flex, it handles moisture, it is quiet underfoot, and it can run continuously under slide rooms so the joint disappears when the slide is out. Real tile grouts out in an RV within a couple of seasons unless it is set in a flexible system, and we generally talk owners out of it. Flooring replacement runs $750 to $9,500 at six to forty hours depending on square footage and how much subfloor repair surfaces once the old floor comes up.

Vintage restoration is a different discipline from remodeling. On an Airstream, a vintage Avion or a 1970s Class A, the goal is usually a coach that reads period-correct but functions like a modern one. That means the shell, the frame and the skin get addressed before the interior, because there is no point building a beautiful galley into a trailer with a rotted floor rail. We take a vintage project in structure-first order every time, and we will not skip that step for a customer who only wants the inside done.

The honest duration numbers look like this. A refresh is ten to twenty working days. A renovation inside existing walls is four to eight weeks. A full gut or custom build-out is eight to twenty weeks. A vintage restoration with structural work in front of it is three to nine months. Those ranges assume decisions get made promptly and materials are in stock, and both of those things are partly on you. Late selections are the single largest cause of overrun on remodel projects.

Deposit terms follow the same schedule as any job here. 50 percent at authorization on anything over $2,000, an additional 25 percent when parts and materials arrive on anything over $10,000, and the balance at pickup before the coach leaves the property. Special order materials, which on a remodel means most cabinetry hardware and any custom slab, require a 100 percent non-refundable deposit at order. That is standard for made-to-order goods and we flag exactly which line items it applies to before you sign.

Body and paint labor is posted at $210 per hour. Mechanical and electrical is $260 per hour. Diagnostics run $285 per hour with a one hour minimum that is credited back against an authorized repair. Ranges below reflect jobs we have actually completed.