Hello! You call this leather?

[herrthreegirls]

Hi everyone!
Newbie here. My DH and I just purchased a Keystone Sprinter 269FWRLS. It stays in a rented lot on the lake so we won't be pulling it anywhere. We are new to camping and look forward to reading through your experiences and expertise! We are looking even more forward to finding a replacement for this so called "leather" sofa sleeper that had a cover on it and when we took the cover off, it was snowing fake leather bits!

[dutchmensport]

If your sofa is a Thomas Payne, it's quiet common for the "leather" to flake.

Welcome to the forums. Other than "flaky" furniture, I hope you are enjoying your new Sprinter.

[CrazyCain]

I work at an Automotive leather manufacture and what you are seeing is called Faux leather, it is synthetic wanna be leather. Real Leather is made from Cow hide and would never flake. If anything, it would be the coating that is applied to make the finish color of the hide that is bad, again highly unlikely, but it has happened I highly doubt the makers are using real leather because it would be to expensive..IMO

[wiredgeorge]

Originally Posted by herrthreegirls

Hi everyone!
Newbie here. My DH and I just purchased a Keystone Sprinter 269FWRLS. It stays in a rented lot on the lake so we won't be pulling it anywhere. We are new to camping and look forward to reading through your experiences and expertise! We are looking even more forward to finding a replacement for this so called "leather" sofa sleeper that had a cover on it and when we took the cover off, it was snowing fake leather bits!

Thomas Pain furniture is a running joke in the community. The material is called pleather (NOT LEATHER). If you don't intend on using the sleep sofa to sleep, go to a real furniture store and purchase something of better quality. If chairs, couch or loveseat, make sure the back removes from the base part and it will easily fit. Typically the design of the "sleep sofa" in an RV was sometime during the Spanish Inquisition and used to make someone confess to something.

[sourdough]

The formulation of the pleather Lippert used for a few years was terrible resulting in what you have. My recommendation would be to take the measurements and then either buy a residential type unit (if you can find one that fits) or look at recpro rv furniture for a similar replacement.

[spicercars]

Welcome from northern MN.

[herrthreegirls]

Well, we have used the sleeper sofa as a bed already which is when we discovered the extensive flaking. We have ordered some leather repair sheets but truly I think it won't last very long. At some point, we will need to replace this thing and would be looking for some other sleeper sofa for when we have guests. Thanks for your reply!

[dutchmensport]

Sleeper sofa? We've had 4 different campers, and 3 of them had some type of sleeper sofa. Our first was a jack knife, the next was a fold out, the current camper has 2 opposing love seat style fold outs. Every one of them were horrible to sleep on.

We attempted covering them with toppers, cushions, extra blankets, quilts, even additional air mattresses. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING we attempted never improved the sleep quality. In fact, all these attempts only make it worse. Blankets and sheets would not stay put. Toppers would slide around, air mattresses as toppers were floppy than a water bed with no baffles, and now matter what we tried, we always felt the hard frame where the things were joined to flip over.

What we ended up doing was purchasing an 12 inch thick air mattress from Wall Mart for our guests and simply put it on the floor! Our current one has a built in air pump that inflates and deflates, making it extremely easy to set up. Fitted sheets and blankets all stay in place. We ended up purchasing a little beefier one so the movement is minimized when two people are on it.

The only "guest" we have with us (ever) is our son and his son. The grandson likes sleeping on one of the couches (folded up), and our son now enjoys the air mattress. It's a Queen mattress and it's so tall, he gets no cold or heat from the floor.

I'm sharing all of this to kind of steer you away from attempting to put lipstick on a pig. Save your money on repairs or attempts to make improvement in the sleep quality of that couch and just plan right now to simply replace it with real furniture. In a previous camper, we took out the kitchen table, two shoddy RV recliners, and replaced everything in that slide with a 3 seater recliner couch with removable backs. I installed wheels on the bottom so it would move around easy. The hide-a-bed was in the opposing slide. We left it, and new house hold couch was not a hide-a-bed style, just recliners. We used the air mattress on the floor from the couch other couch and solved all our customization needs. So, yes, you can replace with non-RV furniture as long as it will fit through the door. Consider a 12 inch think air mattress for your guests and save yourself a lot of financial anguish with the lipstick on the pig.

[herrthreegirls]

Thank you for sharing your experience. Great information. The previous owners do have a rolled up mattress topper for the sofa bed. Our daughter didn't complain about it being uncomfortable but the sheets definitely do not fit so I think just a top sheet we will use in the future. In my experience with air mattresses, they really aren't very comfortable. Would you say this 12 inch air mattress is more comfortable then the mattress topper you have tried in the past?

[dutchmensport]

The air mattress on the floor (no topper) works very well. Put it on the sleeper sofa and it's like riding in a row boat in an ocean storm.

[flybouy]

Like anything, there are air mattresses and there are air mattresses. The original ones for our camper presst much leaked from day one. We bought a quality one with a 120vac blower built in. Sorry I can't remember the brand but it sleeps as well as a middle of the road conventional mattress.

I don't know of any air mattress that will compare to a quality conventional mattress but don't expect a $69 "balloon" to perform well either. IIRC the air mattress I bought was about $200 when I bought it 10 years ago.

[tmihalic]

We have a Keystone Cougar 5th wheel that had the Pleather on the furniture. After a few yers it looked terrible. We found a local upholsterer and he redid everything in the fabric of our choosing. No we get raves about how good the furniture looks. Covers are a plain, so that is why we did it the right way, though it was more expensive.

[Dallasrules]

Originally Posted by herrthreegirls

Well, we have used the sleeper sofa as a bed already which is when we discovered the extensive flaking. We have ordered some leather repair sheets but truly I think it won't last very long. At some point, we will need to replace this thing and would be looking for some other sleeper sofa for when we have guests. Thanks for your reply!

We have a set of recliners in our house like that. We found an inexpensive relatively acceptable solution. We bought a cover off Amazon that is like a microfiber. It looks like leather, but is thin and stretchy. We applied a thin layer of spray Adhesive before we put the cover on as we stretched it into place. We pressed the cover into the Nick's and cranies. The Adhesive makes it form fitting and it doesn't slide around. It covers all of the original parts of the chairs that show. It has been about 6 months with daily use and I have been very pleased with it.
One thing I would suggest is to remove as much of the flaky material as possible before putting the cover on.

We tried it without the Adhesive and it was like car seat covers. It would slip around and we were always tucking them back into place. The spray Adhesive solved all of that.

[crowbar]

You've totally missed the great advantage of having uncomfortable sleeping arrangements, and that is your company won't stay too long!