Replacing Furniture in Trailer?

[buffaloKev]

Anyone ever replaced furniture in their trailer? Assuming the pieces separate for easy entry? Been kicking around the idea about upgrading to bigger trailer due to an unforeseen addition to our household recently. Basically we have a small bunkhouse model with only a 88" round dinette setup right now for sitting. Don't mind losing the dinette, mostly eat outside anyway. Wouldn't mind a larger jackknife sofa or love seat and recliner, again assuming those come apart for easy entry. Long story short, would rather keep the trailer we have instead of trading up as long as I can add some more comfortable sitting. Thanks

[TundraTower]

A few months ago we replaced our original two swivel rockers with 2 recliners for the back. We bought the Vale line of smaller chairs from Laziboy, although plenty adequate.

Laziboy factory web page lists weights of the chairs, and I gave up searching for the original Lippert weights and just weighed the old ones on a bathroom scale. Total weight increase for the 2 chairs was 50 lbs.

Best upgrade we have done!

[nowgrn4]

We're yanking the sleeper sofa out of whatever we're getting (shopping now). It's just the two of us, we're gonna replace it with 2 super comfy mini recliners and a narrow removal pedestal table in between.

[Jframpey]

Check out IKEA, they accent on lightweight breakdown furniture. We removed a jackknif sofa and replaced it with 2 rocking chairs, sooo comfortable.

[noonenosthis1]

What about weight? If you are swapping out a couch for two love seats (and this is in your slide) what is the weight difference? Does it make a difference? I tried to get weight information from Keystone but had no luck.

[MichaelAtShawRV]

Lippert Components makes some really nice furniture in their "Thomas Payne Collection". They make jackknife sofas, swivel recliners, push-back recliners, Euro chairs, tri-fold sofas, and theater seats. I know the jackknifes and tri-folds come in a variety of sizes, but the theater seats you order the sofa in pieces to give you the right length. The sides are 29" in width for the right and left hand sides but the center console with the cupholders measures 8". Or you can get the third person seat instead of the center console but I don't have that measurement handy. Hope this helps!

[myredracer]

We just got a Lambright Harrison double recliner a couple of weeks ago at the start of our annual RV-'n vacation. Wow, wow, wow! It is SO comfortable. Best mod/upgrade ever... 🙂

The RV furniture shop installed it for us. It's designed to just clip together and they had installed in literally just a couple of minutes - no tools required. Each seat section and back comes separately and easily fit through an entry door. The frame is almost entirely steel and has proper steel springs under the cushions. VERY well made, but not exactly cheap. Lazyboy furniture can be more tho.

Our old jacknife sofa was made by Lippert and besides being painful torture to use, it was a flimsy piece of junk. The foam cushions are held in place by a few plastic banding straps (like on cardboard packaging) and 1/2 of them snapped a month or two ago. Need to remove 8 bolts to take it apart to remove. Sold it on CL and got a whopping $100 for it even though it looked like new. That stuff is a tough sell.

One thing I can tell you to watch out for is the overall depth of what you want to install. If in a slide, some slides are not very deep (like ours). Our slide is only 25" deep inside and the Lambright recliner is 38" overall according to the manufacturer, but actually sits a bit closer to the wall. The front feet overhang our slide floor by 3". It's currently sitting on a temporary piece of plywood but when back home will make a frame from angle steel to sit on and overhang the floor.

Seat height above the floor is typically designed for the furniture sitting directly on a floor. Our slide floor is 1 1/2" above the main floor and our feet dangle above the main floor a bit. It just seems to be the way it is. There is "front row" home theater seating out there that is designed to sit lower to the floor. Some slide floors are higher from the floor.

The nice thing about the Lambright recliner is that it is available with 2 different seat back heights which can be a factor if you have a low window behind it. Also comes in 2 different widths. We got the narrower one and it is more than wide enough for our two behinds... We had some friends visit us and stay overnight one night and surprisingly they both slept fine in the recliner (in extended position). Lambright's 58" wide version has approx. the same inside dimensions as our old Lippert sofa (arm to arm) so a person should be able to lay down in it.

Lastly, if you get something with power recline, it's 120 volts only and may want to take that into account. Not good for dry camping without a generator or inverter.

Some have bought ordinary home furniture but you might find that furniture designed for RVS is more suitable in terms of dimensions and features. Most (or all?) home furniture will fit through an RV entry door from what I've read.

[DutchmenSport]

Our Outback came with all stand alone furniture. It came from the factory with a love seat size air mattress fold out bed, 4 stand alone chairs with a stand alone kitchen table, and 2 rocker chairs.

We ended up removing the 2 rockers and the kitchen table and 4 chairs, and got a full size, 3 seater recliner sofa. We never used the table and chairs and the rockers did not have foot rests.

Goodwill got the rockers, the table is in our kitchen as a second table, 3 of the chairs are used elsewhere in the house, and one chair broke (adult kids just don't listen sometimes!)

The backs of the couch remove, and after getting it inside the trailer, I added 6 wheels under it so it would move easily. Our trailer has the rear living room with opposing slides, and windows all around. The couch travels in the slide, but when parked, slides out, the couch is moved facing the back full wall window. We have a 180 degree view of the outside.

If we ever sell this camper, the couch is coming back out! We loved the couch so much, we ended up buying an identical one for the house.

[Merrykalia]

We had an UGLY, UGLY sofa bed in our living room and it completely blocked the door to our bedroom. It was a 3-seater, but only one person could comfortably sit on it. So, I purchased 2 recliners and took that nasty, ugly sofa bed to the garbage dump. It was decently easy to remove since it had a couple of screws holding it to the floor and then we just had to wiggle it toward the door and out. Make sure that whatever you purchase will come through a 28" door (we forgot to check), but they slid right in with no problem.

Be advised that if you do take out the "original" furniture, even if you put in some pretty high class subs, it will lower your trade-in price.

Our recliners were from IKEA and we loved them. They were lightweight, but beautiful and held up well.