Hi Jeremy,:wave
Congratulations on your new addition to the family. Believe me, it will feel like that soon!
I can't help with the leak questions - there are those on this site who are way more experienced and lots smarter than me.
But as far as storage, you know there's no one right way. After years of camping in tents, tent campers, and canoe camping, we've gotten ruthless about what stuff is necessary for us to have a good time.
For what it's worth, this is how we work it in Effie (F.iberglass E.gg). Jim has built 2 shelves in the tall closet, each of which will hold a milk crate for clothes and a couple plastic shoe boxes with lids for toiletries & such. The space below the second shelf (where the wheel well is) is left to hold laundry soap, clothes line & pins, and a wire framed foldup laundry basket in the bottom. Our dirty clothes will be dropped in on top of this stuff until we get home or run out of clean stuff on the road. (We did a similar set up with a folding closet in our tent camper and it worked well with the kids. Each person had their own crate and they could take whatever they wanted, as long as it fit in it.)
I LIKE cooking outside, so we are retaining our 'kitchen' box from our tent camping days for regular camp meals, weather permitting. This is a large plastic box which holds everything for cooking except the campstove.
So, in the overhead cabinets above the sink and stove are our travel mugs, small coffee pot, coffee fixin's, a backpacker-type nested cookware set, a plastic pencil box with silverware & a can opener, and enough canned or dried stuff to make a couple of meals inside if it's nasty outside.
Above the dinette/bed, we store our first-aid kit (2 gallon Ziplock bag), towels & washrags, current books & book
lights, playing cards, cribbage board, flashlights, extra batteries, bird ID book, and a couple new magazines for a rainy afternoon.
Under the table/bed we store our bag chairs & folding table when on the road.
Under the front bunk we have our jacks (scissor-jacks are in the works), a hatchet, the
awning, our hibatchi grill, campstove, porta-potti, and in the near future, a
battery operated shower kit!:ola
I know you've got a 16 footer and more room than our 13 ft, but with more people, I'd think your storage-per-person will figure out about the same.
I'll be interested in hearing how others handle their storage, too. So many great ideas to steal here!
Dina (& Jim):reyes :reyes :reyes