Hippy is correct, I'm talking RVs here for folks who don't wrench their own. Your Silverado has a great Allison transmission that's the gold standard, IMHO. There's a hill of difference in labor between an auto or truck and an RV with an engine in it. The Left Coast is very mountainous and it gets old fast to be on an incline pulling your boat/quads/trailer/horses at 45 and be passed by a DuraMax doing 75. And you'll wish you were getting 12 mpg pulling that horse trailer at 45. The current GMC engines are 200,000 mile designs (Sierra, Silverado, Tahoe, Suburban, Yukon) and the diesels (DuraMax) are 500,000 mile designs. Teardrops will have lower height which will pay off in mileage and many nicer campsites will be an option, where the truck campers (popups and crankups excluded here) will be scraping a few branches or down in the meadow. Of course, it's easier to back up a truck camper so there's a world of options out there. I've sold a ton of GMC trucks and as a Ford man let me say they're hard to beat.

Michael - you don't mention the camper brand so I'm not sure about what lifter system you might have. On my little Starcraft they have the "Goshen" lift system which is a pretty simple (and reliable). What I do is use a 100% silicone spray for the lifter sections; I spray down into the sections after I've raised the roof maybe a foot. Put a rag behind where your spraying so as not to get any of the silicone spray onto the canvas; and not too much, just a couple good sprays will do. The silicone spray will not gather dust like maybe WD-40 would do. Underneath the camper, Goshen lifts have an enclosed sort of flattened tube like affair where the cable runs through. There's a couple of zerk fittings there that require a little squirt of grease every now and again. Usually I have that done when I have the wheel bearings re-packed annually - again, not too mush grease as it will only attract dust and make a mess. The Goshen lift also has a winch where you do all the cranking from and again, I use the silicone spray here a couple times a year or so - just get on my back and spray up into the winch and that lubes the workings there without attracting too much dust. Also, along these lines of "lubes" ... when I hitch up the camper for a trip I also give the coupling ball a very light coat of grease. Always have to remember when you get to where your going and you un-hitch, to wipe off any grease that might be present on the ball as it's nasty stuff to wash out when you brush up against it with a pant leg. Hope that helps you some. Dale

Im sorry no one responded to your post. I don't know anything about RV's but I do know that painting your own kitchen cabinets is a very intense, loooong process, if you want to do a decent job. I imagine that you do it the same as kitchen cabinets. There are diy blogs and websites that give the step by step, but you sure can't paint them in place, especially not in a motorhome. It's so labor intensive and time consuming, that quotes from good painters would probably be $5-8K (dependent on your local market). Every step has to dry for days/week(s?), and only buy the best of products. Just a hecka lot of work. What's wrong with the nice wood tone that's there? It looks really nice. Just paint the walls a soft white, or maybe a very, very soft pale green. That would be pretty.

A few more photos