subject: The Importance of Good Caravan Repairs [print this page] A caravan, particularly a caravan in the somewhat notoriously rainy British Isles, is a sensitive beast. Dry, and in full working order, a caravan can give decades of wonderful service as the ideal holiday home even sturdy or grainy flat type addition to a property or area of land. Proper caravan repairs are absolutely essential in maintaining that good working order. Without them, even the smallest niggle can become a fatal division in the fabric of the van.
An example: a person discovers a little damp patch on the carpet of a caravan, underneath a window seal. He or she finds the little spot where that seal has broken and repairs it. So far so good? Not at all. What about the water under the carpet? A caravan is a sealed unit, which means that once water is in, it's trapped. If that leak has let in enough water that the carpet is damp when pressed, there's a very good chance that the floor underneath it is rotten to the point where it is going to fall through. There's also a strong chance that, without the caravan repairs necessary to make this discovery in the first place, the water has actually run to another seam in the caravan floor and is currently eating its way through somewhere totally other than the spot under the window.
This example is one of the most common horror stories one hears, when talking about caravans with people who have owned them or used them. Another is the roof hole, which can cause absolutely catastrophic van injury. Caravans are seamed on their roofs, and at some point on those seams one finds small bolts. If one rusts, or works loose, water gets in. That water spreads all the way through the gap between the roof skin and the ceiling. One day the whole ceiling falls down. The proper caravan repairs in this situation involve stripping the roof skin back to locate all water, drying the inevitable lake that has formed beneath it and re skinning the top of the van. A lot of hoo-hah for a tiny hole but far less expensive than buying a whole new van, which is what happens when the roof caves in. And, of course, if that roof caves in at 1 am on a windy wet and horrible night well, that's about the worst end to a holiday a person can imagine.
Unfortunately, a lot of novice, first time or unlucky caravan owners never find out about this stuff until it's too late. Hence this warning! There is almost no situation in which a minor niggle on a van can be left for any time at all not least because the van is usually unattended for long periods of time, or at least uninhabited for long periods of time, which means no-one really knows how long the niggle has been there. Any water, any damp, any creaking investigate and have professional caravan repairs done immediately. Unless, of course, one doesn't mind trying to live for a week in something with no floor.
