Nothing Beats Sleeping In Your Own Bed

Current Location: Tualatin, OR

After several delays and a lot of frustration, we finally took possession of our home on Monday afternoon. Our primary frustration centered around the lack of and mis communication by the RV dealership.

All week long, we were led to believe that the repairs would be completed by Friday afternoon at the latest. When we talked to the dealership on Thursday afternoon we were given the same timeline. On Friday morning, however, we were given a new twist to the story. Long story short, we wouldn't be able to pick up the rig until Monday, but were told that it would be ready first thing Monday morning. I don't know why we believed them because when Monday morning arrived, we were told it wouldn't be ready for a couple of hours. Those couple of hours spanned into most of the day.

We finally were able to do a walkthrough around 1pm and found several issues. Although we made sure that they fixed everything to our satisfaction (mostly), we were extremely frustrated because most of the issues implied (to us at least) a lack of care to our home, which equates in my mind to a lack of quality. The good news is that the tech who was doing the majority of the roof work seemed to know what he was doing and was very conscientous. I wish I could say the same about the rest of the staff. Needless to say, our nerves were frayed by the time we finally pulled out of the dealership at 3:15. So much for getting an early start to the day!

This was certainly not ideal because we still had a 3 hour drive ahead of us. We were headed to Portland and we needed to be there so that Tracy could start a job on Tuesday morning (which didn't work out, by the way). We really didn't want to set up in the dark, but ultimately didn't feel like we had much choice.

We had a couple of things on our side, however. It was MLK day so the traffic was pretty light and it wasn't raining. Luckily, we had toured the RV park awhile back, so we kind of knew what to expect. The roads within the park are fairly narrow which made manuevering a little difficult, but we finally got parked with a huge sigh of relief.

We did the minimal setup for the night, had a quick dinner and fell into a wonderful night's sleep in our own bed. After sleeping in a hard, creaky hotel bed and cooking in a less than ideal kitchen, being back in our own home is heaven! Sometimes, it's hard to appreciate what you have until you are without. I sincerely hope that we are never without our home again.

The one bright spot in this whole ordeal has been our insurance company. I have been very impressed with them. Our adjuster has been responsive, pleasant and exceedingly quick in processing our claim. I mentioned in an earlier post that it all seemed way too easy, but they really seem to have their act together. For anyone looking for insurance, our policy is through Victoria, the RV specialty branch of Nationwide. We bought our policy through Miller Insurance. I would highly recommend both companies.

I wish I could say the same about the RV dealership, Fife RV. We had some warranty work done by them in October and were pleased, but I think that in part that might be because we gave them 3 weeks to do a 2 day job. Now that we asked them to handle a much larger job, many of the problems became obvious. It seems like it's a poorly managed shop. I'd like to believe that the techs are skilled (we saw nothing to the contrary), but they definitely seem to work at their own pace. And the endless runarounds and poor communication certainly did not exude much confidence. We will not do business with them again.

But we hope that it is all behind us now. We are slowly getting settled in Portland and are eager to explore this city that we've heard so much about. The weather is even improving. They are predicting 5 days of dry, partly sunny weather. That's about as good as you can ask for around here in the winter!