TRAVEL DAY HACKS: How to Break Camp FAST! Secure Your Gear and Spend More Time Having Fun in Your RV

We're about to break camp and head on down the road, but before we do we need to secure everything in here for travel. We live full-time in our fifth wheel and we don't want to spend a bunch of time stowing things away and then taking them back out while we're on the road. So we MacGyvered a bunch of cool ways to secure our stuff so it takes hardly any time to get done and get going. And no, we're not going to show you those dumb white tension rods that they sell to everybody that lives in an RV. They're cheap and they don't work. Instead, I'm going to take you on a tour around the house as we pack up to go and show you what works for us. Hey everybody, it's Robin with CreativityRV. Thanks for coming back to check out another video. I'm going to be honest with you. When I was first on the road and then when Doug joined me, it was taking us a lot of time to break camp and secure all of our stuff for travel. We had things stacked in the closet behind pillows. We had stuff in the shower and stuff under the covers of the bed. And sometimes we stay in one spot for two weeks but other times it's only a few days and that was getting really old. So I went on a hunt to find some unorthodox ways to secure our stuff for travel so we didn't have to take it from where it normally sits and it stayed right in place even when we go down the bumpiest roads. So as I prepare the house for travel today, I'm going to take you with me and show you everything that we found that works for us. A lot of you have asked how I store my plants for travel. You can see here that I have an aquaponic system with some lettuce and one with tomatoes and another one with herbs. And up in this window I have three self-watering planters with microgreens and more herbs. Big Bollie, what are you doing? Are you going to help pack up? It's about time. Nope. Lucky freaky travel cat. Now all of these planters have water in them so I was a little nervous about leaving them where they are. These were the items in the house that were taking us the most time. Here's what we came up with to secure the plants right here on the desk where we don't have to move it at all when we go to travel and it can stay plugged in so the plant gets light. If you look really close here you'll see there are a couple of zip ties right here. What I found was cable clips. I got this kit. It comes with these plastic gizmos that you screw onto the wall and then you feed the zip tie right through it and the screws that came with it were actually pretty good. They have a nice tooth on them so they were okay to stick in the wall and they were short which is important when you're securing something in the RV so you don't damage anything. It came with zip ties but that was not going to get the job done over there so I got these bigger heavy duty ones and I mismeasured a little bit so I had to use two but the good thing about this is after double securing it to the wall they don't slide around and if I need to work on the plants all I have to do is cut the zip ties and then put new ones right back on. For the actual planters back here that are not aquaponic you might see that there's a little plastic shelf right here. This is a gap blocker. These are really meant to keep toys from sliding under a couch but they have this nice tall edge and adhesive so all I did was I attached them underneath the plants and nothing slides out while we're in motion. I've also used these in some cabinets where there's a little bumper in the cabinets for things not to fall out but they never seem to work so if I have tall items inside of a cabinet I'll put a gap blocker in there and that way your stuff just bumps up against it and when you need to reach something you just reach over it and pull it out. If you saw our recent tour we had this custom desk mate thanks to Eric at Wonderboom and he also made us what we call the book corral but before this I had a bunch of stuff on my desk that I had to keep putting away. We like to secure the stuff we use most often in its place on the countertop so we don't need to take the time to put it away. You guys may have seen this before if you're used to my channel. I keep my silverware here on the mold. I got this wooden thing for about 10 bucks at an antique shop and I secure it here on the side with command strips here and command strips here but just to make sure it doesn't fall over I don't put anything really heavy in here like heavy cutlery or spatulas or anything like that. I just keep it to the silverware and here in the bathroom you can see that I have some bins attached to the wall. They're just here with some command hooks and we have these filled with washcloths, micellar water, toilet paper, things that we need all the time that we need to reach in and grab and you can see that we've been here a while and it's time to do laundry because this is usually totally full of washcloths but that way every day when we wash our face or we need more toilet paper we don't have to reach in anywhere to grab it and we don't have to stow it away when we're ready to travel. When you look at all these gadgets you think maybe you need to go a little bit nuts when you secure things but we don't. There are still a couple of things that we just put into the sink in the kitchen or the bathroom and then take back out when we get to our destination. For example with this aquaponic planter it is kept on the kitchen counter but there's tile back there so I can't secure it with zip ties so for this one we just unplug it and we put it right into the kitchen sink and for this stuff that we like to keep on the bathroom counter we don't stow it in any special way we just throw it on top of a regular towel so it doesn't scratch the sides of the sink and then when we get where we're going we take it all back out it's super fast. We have this great office chair but it has wheels that were really hard to secure when we were first traveling. Now we tried these little coasters that you can put under the wheels but they're so shallow that if we were going down a really bumpy road they just didn't work but thanks to our friend Badge we found out that we could just put those wheels in some shoes and the chair doesn't slide around anywhere. Now if you have anything in your rig that doesn't have an RV lock that holds things shut really well you have to figure out a way to keep your drawers shut when you're going down the road so we've done that two ways. The first way is that we got some child magnetic locks for all of our desk drawers. Now these are cool because they actually attach with stick them to the inside of the drawer and when you're going down the road you actually lock them and then when you get to your destination you put a little magnet that comes with it on the outside of the drawer and it unlocks and the drawer comes open and then you can put it in an unlock mode so it doesn't lock up on you while you're there in one place using it. The second way is with this easy wooden peg. We have big kitchen storage in our nook here thanks to Eric at Wonderboom so now we have our Instant Pot and our air fryer and things like that stored right down here but we needed to have a way that those drawers wouldn't come open while we were driving so we drilled a hole from the side of the drawer into the wall and all we do is slide this little wooden peg in there and then when we get to our spot we take it right back out. You can also secure almost anything with some little hooks and bungee cords like with our produce storage right here. If you saw our tour when we first got this RV there was actually storage for like letters in here which I don't know why they do that that would just fly out while you're traveling but we knocked out the shelf that was here and instead we got these bins that store our produce and before this we had these big bowls of produce on the countertops that we had to figure out a place to put when we were leaving and then take back out so instead what we did is we put these little silver hooks that screw right into the wall on both sides of the produce and then onto each of the hooks we just attached a bungee cord. I hide these bungee cords when we get to our destination so it doesn't look like this you really don't see anything but what I do is I just put this bungee through the other bungee and attach it to the wall and now these don't slide out. It's worked great. We're all done and it only took us about 20 minutes to secure everything to head down the road but hold on because we're going to get out of here and get to our new destination and then we're going to head back inside to see how everything held up. Well we just went down a really bumpy road and the plants did just fine but we came in and we were like what the hell is that? It's the speaker. It just dropped it right out of the ceiling. So everything that we secured in here that we showed you worked just great. The plants stayed in place, the silverware, all of our produce, the speaker, not so much. We hope that this video helps some of you think of ways to secure your stuff so it takes you less time to go out and have your next adventure. If anybody out there has a cool way to secure stuff for travel please do put it down in the comments below. We'll see you guys next Sunday. Until then everybody out there have happy travels and be free.