Diary Of A Camper Conversion
Now to tackle the bottom half of the doors. Here I’m going to make some open shelf storage for things like extension leads, shoes, tools, bungee straps, frisbee, fire pit, and all those other bits that are useful in a van.
This took way longer than I thought it was going to. Basically the only part of the van that is not pristine are the back doors. In it’s previous life a load of something must have crashed into the back doors and so they are dented quite badly. Only on the inside so you can’t see it, and they are still functional, but it means there are no flat or straight edges it work from. This meant that each of the plywood boards had to be scribed to fit the door so I got that neat edge I’m looking for.
I took some time just holding up bits of wood and thinking about how I would do it. Eventually I settled on gluing and screwing some batons to the door and then making the frame around it. I’m conscious that should anything go wrong with the door locks I will need to access this area. So the batons will stay on the doors forever but I wanted to make the shelves and backing removable.
The plywood frame and shelves are all linked together and screwed to the batons from the side so they can be removed. The back panel is completely separate and simply screwed to the door directly onto the batons.
It’s a very basic frame of plywood and then two plywood shelves. But I have sized it so that the top edge of the storage box is level with the bed platform. This means that when the door is shut it can act as some more of the bed platform to prevent pillows from falling down the gap to the door.
Unfortunately I did not finish even one of the door storage shelves today as it took a long time. But part of that time was thinking how to build it. And now I know, the next door will be much quicker. We also stopped work a little early today to go and get ice cream on the motorbikes, which was an excellent decision in this heat.
