So there has been a slight delay in receiving my shipment of Thomas Payne Furniture. It was picked up in a timely fashion and then it sat in Indiana for almost a week. Right now it looks like the delay is only two days longer than the anticipated delivery date.
So, what Tammy and I did in the meantime is remove the existing Thomas Payne furniture. Let me tell you that it sounds a lot easier than it really is. The bright side is that you can do this yourself. It will be even easier if you have someone like Tammy help, because it is a two person job when it comes to removing the trifold sofa. I would also recommend getting a heavy moving blanket to protect your flooring since you will want to slide the furniture towards the door.
You can remove the back cushions first; they are just held on with Velcro. Next open up the trifold sofa (as a sleeper) and unscrew the hinges on the Stationary Back Assembly and then remove it. The next step involves removing a couple clips from some hinge pins that hold the part of the sofa that has the folding legs. I believe Lippert refers to this as the “Couch Seat Assembly”. You will need to push the hinge pins in with a screwdriver to remove this section. Once that is removed you can remove the rest of the trifold by angling it out the entrance door. You will need a helper or Tammy for this step as it is quite awkward and still quite heavy.
The chairs were a little harder to disassemble. The seats really need to be moved forward to access the clips that hold the back rest on. So if your lower rails are screwed into the floor then remove those screws so you can slide the chairs away from the wall. Quite frankly, I am not sure these really need to be screwed down and in some cases these seats are coming from the factory unattached. Once the clips are pressed (outward) you lift the backrest off. Figuring out how to move these clips took me about fifteen minutes, as there were no directions on-line about how to release them.
Then the lower rails need to be removed as they are bolted to the seats. Once the four foot pad bolts are removed from each chair you can remove any zip-ties holding wiring and remove the chairs. Be careful removing the chairs because they are still very heavy.
As with moving chairs or sofas in or out of a stick and brick house, you will have the same issues with the travel trailer. The approach to the outside must be done so that you can carefully angle the furniture out the door. This is definitely a two person job with perhaps the exception of the individual seats.
Once they are removed, make sure you hunt down any screws that may be laying in the carpeting. My Theater seats were only held down by one screw; the other three screws were laying loose in the carpeting. Keep in mind that any loose screws will damage your flooring when you move your slide room. Also if you decide you want to screw your seats into the floor, use caution. Make sure the screws you use will not go through the floor and proceed to rip your vinyl flooring when the slide room moves.
So, now lets fast forward to the arrival of the new furniture.
As it turns out it was five days late, so it kind of made a mess of our week. It was supposed to be delivered on Monday; then that was changed to Wednesday. then Thursday which then turned into Friday. It’s always nice to stay at home waiting for something that never comes – said no one ever! My hopes of installing the furniture on Friday were dashed when it arrived at 5:00 P.M.
The furniture came on a really horrible looking extra-long pallet. My worst fears were confirmed when I saw part of a pallet board piercing the side of the tri-fold sleeper box. We split the sides of the box and got lucky as we couldn’t find any damage. The next step was to move the tri-fold and chairs into my shop for the night.
The next day we started by moving the tri-fold sofa sleeper out of the box. The back was not attached but everything else was assembled, and that was a problem. The clips that they used to attach the “Couch Seat Assembly” are now joined with a more complicated clevis pin clip then the previous model. It made taking the sections apart very difficult and even harder to reassemble. I would recommend that Lippert go back to their previous clip. In addition I would recommend that they do not assemble any of the couch except the arms to the rails so that everything else can be easily transferred to the trailer for assembly. Putting it back together is much easier than taking it apart. Enclosing directions would have been helpful as well; but no instructions were included for the chairs or tri-fold sofa.
Tammy and I moved everything piece meal into the Travel Trailer and began the reassembly process of the tri-fold sofa. It went relatively easily with the exception of the clevis pin clips. Once that was completed we moved onto assembly of the theater seats.
The seat assembly went along quickly as the backs just need to be slid onto their rails, and the wiring connected. All the wiring is color coded so don’t worry about making a mistake, that would be hard to do. Once that was completed we had to slide one seat into the brackets on the second seat, that was a little bit tricky but didn’t take too long to accomplish. Lastly we tried all the electrical features and everything worked fine. We did not anchor the chairs to the floor. Given that there was only one screw holding the last set down, it just doesn’t seem like these will go anywhere.
I have to say the end product has a nice look to it.
If you compare this picture to the one with our old furniture you can see how the lighter fabric really brightens the trailer.
The next step was to anchor the tri-fold sofa into the floor. This is a little difficult in an Imagine as the flooring is a thin piece of subflooring over a thick Styrofoam material. So there really isn’t a lot for the screws to lock into. I will be curious to see how well the screws hold. If they fail I will come up with a different plan.
All in all I’m very happy with the results of the project.
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