Toto the trailer gets a new light fixture.

Last week I finished my work early, and it wasn’t the weekend yet, so I did a small project from my endless list. We needed some light in one of the few places Escape Trailer Industries hadn’t included one… and I had ordered the fixture a few weeks earlier. It’s an LED “pancake” fixture that looks like others in the trailer — almost.

It’s a slightly thicker pancake. Apparently the Escape-provided fixtures are “slimline” models. The one I had ordered is not a slimline. It’s a regular line. It’s okay. And it’s like all the others in all essential respects: same color temperature, same design, same low power consumption. Here it is in its new location:

Nightstand in our Escape 21 trailer, with newly installed LED light fixture above.

We use this terrier-protected area — known as ‘the nightstand’ to Escape 21 owners — to make coffee when we’re plugged into a current bush. Our daughter gave us a small, penguin-shaped Nescafe Dolce Gusto coffeemaker that fits perfectly here. So it needed light, see.

I had to find some 12-volt power from which to steal. The nearest I could find that was reasonably accessible — though still a bit of a pain — was up forward of the new fixture location, supplying a small reading light right above Sooz’s favored sleeping location.

On the left, the new light fixture. Way down at the right, the little “captain’s light” fixture where I tapped into 12-volt power.

I had to run wire all along the inside of that upper cabinet. Lucky for me, there was another (120 volt) wire already neatly run through the cabinet, so it was easy to thread the new 12-volt wire through the larger cable’s hold-down loops.

Now, there’s a pair of not-visible-unless-you-crawl-into-the-cabinet holes (one near the reading light and one near the new fixture) behind Toto’s port-side cabinet doors. The drilling was easy; contorting myself into (and holding) position to do the drilling was less easy. How can a simple wiring job cause perspiration and muscle aches? It does, though, uh huh.

Now, we can make coffee in the morning and see how much non-dairy creamer we’re tossing in. And (bonus!) we get this designer light pattern on Toto’s side wall.