How to Repair Interior Water Damage to Your RV

The first sign of trouble might be a small area of delaminating fiberglass side wall at a lower corner of a window. A bubble, or blistered spot, maybe 6 inches across, where the outer fiberglass layer of the wall has separated from the plywood inner layer.

You cross your fingers and hope, just maybe the glue has let loose and things won't get worse down the road. Sadly that just isn't the case, the problem is moisture getting into the wall. This is where things are going to get messy.

When the blister appears the glue between the individual layers of the plywood has let loose. The fiberglass outer layer is still firmly attached to the thin outer layer of the plywood, but the rest of the plywood is saturated with water, causing the remaining layers to fall apart.

If your RV is a wood frame unit you may have some serious structural problems to take care of. Anything wood in the area is going to be junk. The problem can even be worse if the insulation is fiberglass bats because it will just remain saturated with water expanding the problem area.

RVs with aluminum frames and Styrofoam insulation are generally easier to make repairs. Once you stop the water from coming in, if the blister isn't too unsightly you can just leave it alone. Of course you need to rip open the interior side of the wall because all that water is still trapped behind the vinyl coated wall paneling.

Don't go nuts ripping things apart on the interior, just take a utility knife and cut open the area where you have rippling in the paneling. Odds are you'll hit water at that point, and the plywood paneling will crumble and fall apart as soon as you split the vinyl coating.

Remove any loose plywood and rippled vinyl. Place a fan in front of the wet area and let it run at least over night. Once things are well dried out you can start the rebuild right over the old wall paneling.

Be sure to cover the exposed area with a layer of plastic, taping it securely around the edges to the old vinyl paneling. That vinyl layer on the plywood is your vapor barrier, you need to restore what you removed to expose the wet area.

Matching new wall paneling to existing paneling would be ridiculously expensive if not impossible. You can find something similar at a local home center. For my project I choose to go a whole different direction.

Looking to go with a log cabin theme, I chose 4" tongue and groove pine boards. Going with a lesser grade required me to cut out sections with cracks or missing knots, but the cost savings out weighed the small amount of waste. An air powered brad nail gun was used to attach the pine boards over the old paneling. To trim out the windows, creating a neater appearance, I chose to cut square corners rather than try to match the radius corners of the RV windows. This made it easy to use a contrasting colored corner trim to dress up the windows.

Because my RV has water damage on both sidewalls, I decided to redo the whole bedroom in tongue and groove pine.

By using 4" wide boards, cutting to fit was a much easier process than working with 4'x8' sheets. Using a lesser grade of pine made this a very inexpensive project as well. Total cost for the bedroom remodel came in at under $75.

Tackling a water damage repair job might seem scary at first. If you take it one step at a time, measuring twice while cutting once, you might just realize that making it different than what it looked like from the factory might actually be better. Their is nothing more satisfying than putting your own personal touch on your home, even one that rolls down the highway.