Diary Of A Camper Conversion
So today I picked up some plywood and cracked on with the rear door cards.
Yeah I should have gotten straight on with the planned floor install but I was more excited to do the rear doors. And I figured – how hard could the floor be? I was just going to be copying the existing flooring as a template. They should slide straight in – right?
The rear door cards are one place where I’m not doing the vapour barrier. They have so many hole in them anyway for cables, lights, handles and locks that there is really no point. This will also be a good test to see if – in x many years – we have a condensation problem in the doors but not in the rest of the van. Like and subscribe to find out! haha!
Some people carpet straight onto the metal of the doors. I don’t like this because you have to precisely finish the carpet at the rubber door seal. Go to far and the seal wont work and you’ll end up with a wet wall. And even if you get it exactly right, there will be bits of fluff that went too far and you have to cut back and clean off all the glue… its a pain. So I’m going to make door cards, cover them in carpet and wrap over the edges so its neat, and then screw in place. I normally try to avoid seeing fixing wherever possible. But this is a place where I’ll not have a choice, So I’m just going to use as nice, even and neat fixings as possible.
First I templated the outline of the door card with black plastic. Turns out I WAYY over ordered damp proof membrane vapour barrier so I used some of this as its easy to trim with scissors. And yet, of course the shape did not fit exactly when offered up in the 3mm ply. There was quite a lot of jumping in and out of the van to trim and re-fit these pieces but in the end I was very happy with the gap.
Becasue of the way i want to finish the doors, and the locks and hardware installed on them I had to use some permanently installed ply strips alone one edge. Here I cut back a step in the edge so that when I do have to carpet these in place, I can tuck it in and hopefully end up with a neat edge.
So it was suddenly 2pm, I’d not had lunch and, not event started on the floor…
It was not a quick job after all…
Yes, using the old floor as a template was quick and made it easy to get the right shapes, but there was still a load of trimming to fit. This is basically because I wanted to move where the join in the 2 panels was located. The original floor used a full width of ply on one side and then about half a width of ply on the other. This would land the join right on where I wanted to land the edge of a unit. I wanted to spread the load out and so opted to move the join to nearly the centre of the van. I also wanted to tighten up the fit around the wheel wells – not that you’d see them, but it made me happier knowing it was well fitted.
This meant there was a bit of jumping in and out trimming and then re-fitting. This was a lot more work with full sheets of 12mm ply. But eventually they all fit and I was ready to glue and screw them down…
… but wait!
Last minute decision made to include a piece of conduit in the floor. This would link the left and right side of the van. I had planned that if i needed to do this, I’d go under the van, but as I was here, it made sense to at least give myself one internal option. I vary carefully set the depth on my circular saw and dropped it into the timber batons to cut our chunks. The PIR was cut and plucked out with a knife.
I also added a rear edge baton at this point as I realised I’d need a solid edge for a heavy drawer I have planned out the back doors. Of course I forgot to mark up the centre line of the batons before installed it, so finding them will be a bit trickier than planned
Conduit install, the floor was now glued down and kicked and pushed into its final position. I’m glueing it becasue where possible I want to prevent squeaks as mich as possible. I then started screwing it down just as the rain started patting onto the van roof. I got in the minimum number of screws I could to hold the edges and centre down and then rushed around to get all my gear inside the van.
It was finished way later than planned, but I got 2 jobs jobbed today which was satisfying. However, my body was complaining later that night after humping around large sheets of ply all day….