While I was at the giant RV Open House in Indiana, I received news about one of the travel trailers in my immediate family’s fleet. Our 2007 Thor Adirondack 31BH has been a lovely camper, but water has been leaking in and causing costly damage. The walls are so rotten that they’re physically peeling away, and the floor is buckling. Here’s how much it’s going to cost to fix all of this.
If you somehow haven’t noticed by now, I’m a lifelong fan of travel trailers, motorhomes, and really any kind of vehicle designed to be a little house on wheels. I love the idea of being able to take a little bit of home with you. And you can sleep in places where there aren’t hotels and where conditions may be a bit too uncomfortable or dangerous to rough it in a tent.
I’m not alone in these feelings. Through generations, my family has owned all kinds of campers from Class A motorhomes to pop-up trailers. Much of my childhood was spent traveling the country in a conversion van towing a 1990s Salem travel trailer.
The camper had a major soft spot in its floor, a roof that had a visible leak during rain, and a sometimes faulty water heater. But we had a blast with that thing.
Ultimately, the water damage got too far, and an expert informed my family that the roof was in danger of falling in. I don’t remember exactly when this happened, but the cost to repair the roof was multiple times the value of the trailer. And thus, we went years traveling to hotels and cabins rather than camping. There was even a period when we rented RVs just to relive the experience.
That all changed in 2016, when my parents dragged home the Adirondack. This trailer was cooler than anything that we’ve owned before.
For some quick stats, this towable weighs in at 6,256 pounds, is a total of about 36 feet-long, and has two slides that expand it out into a pretty cozy space. This camper is so big that I had my own bedroom in it.
One of our first trips with it was to Sandusky, Ohio, where we set down at a campground and went to the Cedar Point theme park. There, I got to ride in the front seat in the Top Thrill Dragster, a roller coaster so fast that my hair was stuck in a blown-back position. I felt like I had been sitting in front of a Maxell sound system.
The trip was also fitting, because my family’s 2003 trip to Sandusky was one of the last that we were able to do before the old Salem’s roof failed.
Trouble Bubbling Up
Something concerned me about the Adirondack from our first day of ownership, and it was the bubbling of the camper’s outer skin up front and around the bathroom. This is a sign of delamination. But I was assured that such wasn’t the case.
To understand what’s going on here, you should probably know what RV walls are commonly made of. I’ll let RV Life explain:
Aluminum siding used to be the de facto choice for RV manufacturers, but most have switched to fiberglass siding because of its durability, lightweight properties, and lower overall cost. RV walls are also easier to produce and install.
They’re built like a sandwich; the exterior fiberglass and interior decorative walls are the “bread,” and in-between contains the “meat,” which is two layers of wood and Styrofoam. These materials are vacuum bonded to each other, then the “bread” in order to serve as backing reinforcements.
Those layers of wood often consist of thin lauan, a tropical plywood product also called luan. And when you see the outer skin bubbling away from the luan? It’s a sign that something horrible has been happening, likely for a long time before you even noticed.
As RV repair shop Coach Specialists of Texas notes, water leaks are a common cause of the outer skin delaminating from the luan. Water gets in from a leak at a seam, or perhaps damage from a life of living outdoors. At first, water damage causes cracking in the wall, but the part that you can see looks fine.
The shop goes on to note that by the time that you notice that something is amiss–the bubbling of the outer skin, bowing of inner walls, or soft floors–the damage had likely already been occurring for years.
So when I saw the Adirondack for the first time and noticed the bubbling? Yep, that was damage likely years in the making. And my family isn’t alone. Search RV forums and you’ll find many stories about campers from this era struggling with delamination issues.
But for whatever reason, the dealership that sold my parents this trailer said that the bubbles were normal and nothing to worry about. We continued to camp in this trailer until 2020, when the bubbles got much larger and the floor in the rear of the trailer suddenly got really soft. My fear back in 2016 turned into reality.
My parents expected the cost to repair the trailer to be a fortune, and decided to replace it with a 2022 Heartland Mallard M33, a camper that’s two feet longer, 1,500 pounds heavier, and already falling apart.
Thankfully, the story of the Adirondack isn’t ending with the water damage and my family is getting it fixed. That process started this year, when the water damage had progressed so much that the outer skin began peeling away from the luan. Under the ruined skin sat destroyed plywood. This stuff basically fell apart in your hand and apparently made for a nice home for spiders.
The Adirondack’s floor consists of multiple wooden panels. The panel covering the last fifteen feet or so of the trailer goes from the rear of the kitchen to the back wall, and supports the bathroom, my bedroom, and some of the kitchen. At first, this floor was sort of soft, and specifically in the bathroom. This progressed until it got to the point where you felt like you’re about to fall through the floor.
The last time that I went inside of the trailer, the floor went from being really soft to really soft, accompanied with the sounds and feeling of wood breaking beneath your feet.
And this covered the whole length of that rear floor panel. Every step that I took resulted in the sounds of splintering wood followed by the floor sinking a little. I pictured myself falling through, meeting the black tank on the way down. That was enough for me to reverse course.
How Did This Happen?
The trailer has been in the hands of a service center since the beginning of August, and little by little, they’re bringing the trailer back into its prime. A technician’s explanation is that the shower’s skylight sprung a leak, likely many years ago. Water collected in the walls and around the floor, behind what you could see without tearing down the bathroom. The leak, combined with humidity, worked a number on the camper for a long time. And as the trailer endured in the Midwest, the damage spread outside of the bathroom unit.
Up front, a leaky seam seal is to blame for the delamination. Thankfully, it was caught in enough time that water hadn’t gotten to the front floor yet.
Thankfully, this can be fixed and thus far, it’s not outrageously expensive. The bathroom wall has been replaced and the skylight sealed for just $700. And the estimate for the floor replacement is $7,000.
Of course, the price can still balloon from there as the service center finds and fixes any other damage, including the front wall and the disintegrating awning. My parents don’t remember what they originally paid for the unit, but they believe it was somewhere around $27,000.
When the repairs are complete, my parents plan on keeping it in the family for my brother and I to use. Amusingly, it’ll also mean that they have two long, heavy campers on hand, so if one is broken, at least the other will still be there.
Having gone through some hidden water damage on my used travel trailer, it looks you and your parents found a shop that charges realistic prices.
If they end up happy with the work, your parents should bring it back every to have the check and repair the seals.
This is why I’ve owned the last travel camper I ever will.
I bought a cheap ($2500) 2000 Cabana Hybrid camper in 2015. It was one of the last with aluminum siding. I spent more time rebuilding the damn thing than using it. It was constantly falling apart and in need of maintenance. I kept it going and sold it last spring for a grand more than I paid for it. Sold the truck I had which I mainly kept just to tug that thing around.
There was nothing like driving for a full day or two to camp somewhere, get there half exhausted, and having to “set up”. Having to fold out the tents, remove the dead animals, put a secondary tarp over the tent section because they leaked like a sieve, get the electric and water setup, etc etc.
The only real fun I ever had in that thing was at the race track. Once. And at that it rained most of the weekend.
I’ll stick to flights, rental cars and hotel rooms with reasonably sized showers from now on. If I’m feeling adventurous, I’ll get the tent out.
The quality control in the RV industry is horrible. The warranties are also not what they seem to be…..they may tell you that there are hundreds of dealers nationwide to repair your RV under warranty, but in fact the mfr. doesn’t pay a high enough hourly rate to the dealers for the work so if you’re out of town and need repairs, you’ll be at the end of the line, perhaps (like my situation) waiting months for work. The costly RV my father bought had 22 warranty items still pending resolution a year after purchase. Many people don’t realize that RVs are not covered by the Lemon Laws.
The Lehto’s Law videos about RV’s are very informative, as well as entertaining. Mercedes does mention him, but his videos on the subject should be mandatory
for those thinking about a RV.
It’s interesting to me how unlike a house those walls are. In housing construction (talking about single-family detached homes, here) we very explicitly don’t try to completely seal out water. The basic line of reasoning is that sealing out water is a fool’s game, and that if you try, when (not if) water does get in it’s going to be trapped and will cause exactly the kind of wholesale destruction that can be seen in this travel trailer. (A major exception is EPDM or other membrane-type roofs, which really do completely seal water out and which can cause catastrophic damage if they get even a pinhole leak.)
Instead, we largely just try to guide water down and away from the house, and then make sure that whatever small amounts of water do get in over the years is able to dry to the outside of the building. Shingles and clapboards and the like are not sealed—they have seams where they overlap, which allow the underlying substrate to breathe and any internal moisture to evaporate. In modern construction we also use vapor barriers and one-way membranes to discourage moisture from entering and encourage it to dry to the outside. Also, the first few layers of the wall are all made with water-resistant materials so that small amounts of water don’t just completely ruin them.
It seems like most travel trailers rely on a thin skin of fiberglass, sealed at the seams and around penetrations, on top of the same kind of shitty plywood that you get on the back side of a cheap dresser. Luan has its uses, but it’s only one step up from particleboard. It’s not strong or weather resistant, it’s just cheap and thin and comes in big sheets. It’s very porous. Most people could punch through it. When (not if) a seam opens up from vibration or poor construction or just age, it’s all over. There’s no second line of defense, no contingency plan, just a rotting soup of styrofoam and shitty plywood.
P.S. Skylights are a classic spot for leaks, on houses as well as trailers. They penetrate the roof, which is where most water is trying to enter your house. They’re large, so they provide a lot of opportunities for that water to try. And they’re square, so unlike with a round vent pipe, water (and moisture-trapping debris) will tend to pile up on top of them instead of flowing around. Traditional, square chimneys are another big leak spot for the same reasons. A modern, well-constructed house will have lots of attention paid to those spots in the form of metal flashing, sealants, and sometimes roof features designed to guide water away from the upslope edge of the penetration, but there’s a reason why skylights—roof windows, essentially—carry a warranty that is less than that of either roofs or windows.
Man, everything really is bigger in the US. I think that if you lined up both of the caravans my parents had during my childhood, they’d still be smaller than that Adirondack.
Mind you, us kids had our own tents outside, so only my parents needed beds inside.
Your folks should really consider a load distributing hitch.
Looks to be a chain type WD hitch on the lead photo.
The delamination issue is one reason why I was sold on a travel trailer using Azdel sidewalls, a composite made of recycled materials that is waterproof. More and more RV manufacturers are starting to use Azdel in their standard construction. The RV company that manufactured our trailer used it first.
I assumed you were talking about monopan, but that’s something i’ve never heard of.
Interesting
Intereting material. Basically GFRP (glass fiber reinforced plastic, aka fiberglass) with polypropylene as the resin, I think? Should be tough and waterproof, yeah. It’s not a panacea for water damage, though. Once water gets into the walls, and especially if it can’t get out again, it’s still going to fuck shit up. If your house or trailer or what have you is going to have a completely sealed envelope, that envelope has to be perfect. If water gets in, that’s it. I don’t mean to say that Azdel isn’t better than luan overall, it probably is, just that the main problem is water getting in in the first place.
Yes, Azdel is pretty nice stuff. My Aliner is made out of it. Of course the giant windows on the camper leaked. Thankfully the Azdel panel dried quickly with no long term damage. Those windows need to be sealed again in the spring. Sigh. Those panels are only as waterproof as the skill of the yobbo sealing them.
I dream about the day someone builds a stamped aluminum unibody camper with automotive grade axles, suspension, brakes, windows, closures, and electrical systems. I don’t know how we accept the current quality of the RV industry. Can you imagine anything else built that poorly for so much money?
I wonder if the salesman that sold it to them cracked a celebratory can of Champale as they pulled it out of the lot – got rid of it before the bubbling got so bad no customer would buy a cover story.
Friend of mine used to work for Hertz, whenever they had a car that needed new tires or major repairs or servicing, managers would try to assign them to one-way customers returning to a far away branch, to stick a different zone’s budget with the costs. Imagine it was a similar motivation – oh crap, this thing’s starting to rot, sell it quick and get it the hell out of here.
After receiving estimates to have the roof of my 2000 Fleetwood Bounder RV replaced I undertook to do it myself – with one helper. Oy what a job, The old roof had been over coated and it was peeling off taking the outer surface of the EPDM roof with it.
Fortunately under the roof was totally solid decking with no water damage. Still..not a job I’d do again.
As for total rehab, it’s hard to convey how much it’s unlike working on a house. Everything has to be cut outside and carried in – test fit – taken out – rinse -repeat.
All through a very narrow door.
This sounds like a complete and total mess. Dangerous, and almost impossible to fix. It’s clearly time to call…
David Tracy.
There’s got to be a better composite for these applications.
There is. My Living Lite truck camper is all Aluminum and Composite. No wood anywhere. They were deemed “too expensive”. and discontinued.
There is. But not too many people are wanting to pay $20k for a 15 foot long popup. The trailers are wonderful. But not cheap. They also need compromises to be made with how much stuff can be packed.
“…and lower overall cost…”
That and I’m guessing most of these manufacturers are also owned by the Kushners.
You can’t have a single piece trailer more than 4 foot in any direction that won’t eventually have the same issues only worse. They would be considered cheaper to construct but not last a year.
At least with the older aluminum siding ones you can peel it off, replace wood framing & thin batt insulation, and reinstall. Having refurbished old campers at a former job during slow times, I’m wary of them. We learned that the thick white roof-patch coating sold for mobile home roofs worked really well: slit&scrub off all the silicone sealant, pressure wash the roof, and apply liberally. Lasts at least 5 years-unless you flex it a lot on bad roads in the cold: it’s less flexible when below 40°.
Not something you want to do to a new $50k+ camper, though
I was thinking that if you could get the roof sealant I use at work in 5-gallon buckets instead of 10.3oz tube cartridges, it would be perfect. Geocel 2300 is incredibly tenacious stuff that cures tough, sticks to damp and dirty surfaces, stays flexible even in the winter, and is UV resistant. We use it as a roof sealant in PV construction.
In fact, I’ve removed old solar arrays that were built back when standard practice was to take an L-foot, liberally coat the bottom in Geo, and then just screw it straight into the roof with no flashing or anything. Amazingly, this hardly ever leaks (we do things better nowadays though) and when it does it’s usually because the shingle broke down at the edges of the L-foot, rather than the sealant failing. When you pull those L-feet off the roof, the Geo usually takes a chunk of the roof with it even 15-20 years after it was laid down. It’s intense stuff.
Anyway, lo and behold but they *do* sell Geocel 2300 by the bucket, and they even make a Geocel 2300 MHRV which is specifically formulated for, you guessed it, motorhomes and recreational vehicles. Get some of that shit and lay down a good thick layer on the roof of your RV and I don’t imagine you’d ever have to worry about leaks again. Wear a respirator though if you’re going to be deploying Geocel by the gallon, because it’s pretty toxic stuff. I wouldn’t want to be standing next to a pool of it while it’s still wet.
Just FYI, Maxell didn’t make sound systems. The ad you posted was to sell magnetic tape, both reel to reel and cassettes. I had that poster on my dorm room wall. There was also a TV version.
Came here to say that. Thanks.
I prefer the Bloom County version…
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b9/4f/a8/b94fa8444c3c6310d0729022616767f4.jpg
I am going to go out on a limb and say they weren’t using treated wood.
Given what the companies charge for these things the poor quality is absolutely criminal.
As was the dealership that sold that trailer to Mercedes’ parents.
Glad they’re fixing it. It’s much too nice and new campers way too pricey in this market to replace. Plus, that thing actually still looks pretty modern inside!
More camper and RV stuff please, I love the time you dedicate to this genre!
“Water collected in the walls and around the floor, behind what you could see without tearing down the bathroom. The leak, combined with humidity, worked a number on the camper for a long time…”
So THAT is why campers always smell like mildew and funk. There is mildew and funk in the walls. I never considered it was an ALWAYS TRUE condition.
Mildew and Funk sounds like the band playing at the campground tonight. I hope they play their old hits like Popup and RV Key Party.
Didn’t Mushrooms and Funk change their name to Funkadelic?
“Black Water Boogie”
“Did Something Die In Here Ditty”
Honestly, I’m shocked that thing cost $27,000 in 2016, when it was nine years old. My folks bought a 28′ Frontier (built by KZ) pull behind with a side couch slide out and rear double bed slide out brand new for about $14K in 2003. They ended up selling it in 2014 for around $4,500 and that thing was immaculate; my Dad had caught and promptly fixed all of same the water issues over the years too.
It’s cool that your folks are fixing up the Thor for you and your brother, but honestly I wouldn’t have dumped a minimum of $8,000 into a 15-year-old poorly built RV. The same issues are going to continue to happen with greater and greater frequency, especially if it continues to be stored outdoors. That repair bill is also quickly approaching what the thing is honestly even worth, repaired, if they haven’t already exceeded it.
I reckon that the selling dealership overpriced the trailer. I try to be with my parents whenever they buy something expensive (and would have recommended against one with such visible bubbling) but I wasn’t able to in this case.
And agree, if it were my money, I’d be on the fence on repairs versus replace. But my parents really love the thing, so I suppose it’s less about the money.
I would also argue that, generally speaking, even if repair costs are close to or exceed the value it’s often still cheaper and more fiscally manageable than replacing something. This is why a lot of people drive old cars – a thousand a year in repairs is still cheaper than payments on a replacement.
Of course, my argument in your parents’ case is weakened by the fact that they already own the replacement, but still….
It seems like it’s getting to the point where someone with a decent amount of fabrication and construction skills and tools could build one of these for less than they cost new and with much better quality work. I mean you’re building a large trailer and then you’re building a small manufactured home on top of it. The biggest difference would be the exterior with most residential options being too heavy or unsuitable for a moving vehicle. Riveted aluminum or maybe fiberglass panels I would think.
Dude you’re forgetting the awesome swish paint job. Can’t just build an RV and paint it 1 solid color gotta have that Mountain Dew feel to it. That’s worse $10k minimum right? S/
I don’t think people understand that the swish is load bearing.
For sure! People do it all the time, just usually with cargo vans or school buses, rather than trailers. It helps to start out with something sturdy and durable as a base. There’s no reason it couldn’t be done as a trailer though, building a big strong waterproof box isn’t all that hard.
“But for whatever reason, the dealership that sold my parents this trailer said that the bubbles were normal and nothing to worry about.”
I think I could posit a few semi-educated guesses on that one. 😉
Well to be fair to the dealer as trailers age this stuff happens so it is normal. Like DTs rusty jeeps, like a crack on a foundation, like me moaning every time I sit down or get up.
We don’t need to be fair to the dealer, since they are rarely fair to us. But to be fair:
“It’s normal” is a true statement. “It’s nothing to worry about” was a lie.
They bought the thing for $27,000 and I don’t think it was that old. It’s really unacceptable to have water damage at that price. They knew what was up.
And water intrusion in a camper is not normal, it’s an indicator of far worse issues.
Something along the lines of “lying thieving sacks of shit” comes to mind.
I helped my in-laws did a bunch of repairs to their Thor motorcoach over the summer. I was stunned at how shitty the construction was in that thing. I swear they used old pallets to built the interior. There was water in one exterior part, and when we took it apart I realized the only thing between passengers and the outside world is an inch of plywood and some thin square tube members. What a deathtrap.
I had a motorhome with a particleboard floor open on the bottom and the only protection was some black paint
“the dealership that sold my parents this trailer said that the bubbles were normal and nothing to worry about”
Unfortunately, the first part of his statement was true.
I’ve been in porta potties that were better built than most of these things.
Stuff like this is why I am looking at fiberglass trailers since the one piece roof is inherently more leak resistant and the monocoque is more rot resistant.
Yes but depending on the size of the trailer, and any flexing during driving or uneven placement fiberglass will crack, and it will crack the entire length of the piece.
Heck, I’m in one right now.
There could be room for a cottage industry manufacturer of converted Porta Potty RVs. Let that sink in for a moment.
Ewe, have you really looked at the sinks in those things?
Did you know that a lot of ladies think the urinal in porta potties is a very convenient purse shelf?