Keeping Your TP Dry in RV Combo Bathrooms

RVers enjoy a tremendous advantage over traditional campers, that being the RV bathroom. This important RV feature allows you to stop anywhere and relieve yourself. An informal survey revealed that women RVers appreciate this particular feature far more than men. Men tended to rank the refrigerator as a higher priority item, but overall the RV bathroom is a high priority item to both sexes. Our first two RV’s didn’t have a bathroom. Purchasing a port-a-potty for a pop-up trailer seemed a waste because you couldn’t get into the pop-up while you were traveling and once you were at the campground you had access to the camp bathroom facilities. So we just made due until we purchased our first RV with it’s own bathroom. It was a Komfort Lite travel trailer and we quickly discovered how great having a travel along bathroom could be. It’s so much more convenient to be able to pull off anywhere instead of having to wait until you come across a rest stop. The bathroom was a combo unit which means that you could sit on the toilet seat while you took a shower. These small RV bathrooms are a great use of space, especially when space is a big factor such as in truck campers and other smaller RVs. They were certainly easy to clean, because you could use the shower head to hose everything down once you were done, including the toilet. However there is one major drawback and that is the problem of keeping the toilet paper dry. We had a shower curtain that was supposed to “guard” the area where the TP hung but it didn’t work. If you’ve ever tried to use wet toilet paper you know it’s a complete waste of time. Several ideas have come along that attempt to alleviate this problem in the combo environment. This roll-down protector seeks to keep the TP dry using the "roll-top-desk" method. I’m not sure how well this works, so if you have one of these, please leave a comment and tell us. The next method is the “safe deposit box” method that locks the roll inside a dry cabinet. This seems like it would work well, but again I don’t own one, so if you do, let us know how it works by telling us in the light blue “comments” section below. The ultimate way to keep your TP dry is to remove it from the combo room or keep it in a zip-lock plastic bag. The problem with this is that it eliminates the convenience of having the roll ready to go. You may also forget to put the roll back and that would cause more problems than I care to contemplate. Regardless of how you keep your TP dry, isn’t it great to have an onboard bathroom? Too often I take things like this for granted, but it wasn’t that long ago we didn’t even have indoor plumbing. Helping you to keep rolling along - Jim Twamley, Professor of RVing, Dr. of RVology and ROAD Scholar