Due to the unique way I choose to live my life, I am now moving into my van full time. It’s something I’ve wanted to do since I read Vandogs blog and I’m super excited to give it a go! This means the little bits and pieces that I’ve put up with being not quite finished need to be done, and soon!
- Overhead storage for books, phones, bits and bobs
- Coat hooks on rear door
- Fixed cooking gas rings and gas bottle
- Spice rack / tea bag board
- Wooden bench lid at the end of the bed
- Close in the side of laptop table cupboard
- Laptop table charger installed in a useful place
- Finish cabinets and storage boxes so i have places for clothes
- Install leisure battery that has been sitting in my garage for 6 months
- Some sort of easy use curtains to replace the random assortment of fabrics currently used
- Restraint for the fridge so it doesn’t wander around the van in transit
- Sort out the strips of missing floor that are basically just gutters for crumbs
- Tidy the cables in the over-cab storage
- Cover the storage doors so they look less like a 6 year old built them
One of these is purely cosmetic, but makes such a difference! Wallpapering the bare wood expanses. It adds some colour and gives some interesting features to otherwise boring flat beige boards.
A friend recently (October 2017) got married and acquired a load of old maps. She used them to make hundreds of paper map flowers with little LED lights in them. They look super cool and I was lucky enough to be allowed to keep some so these are also part of the decor in the van now. Leftover were many really good maps of some places I’ve been walking and climbing so these are now plastered up.
I used PVA glue, slightly watered down to thin it out, and then pasted the wood and laid the maps onto it. You get a couple seconds to arrange it before the water soaks into the paper and it gets tough to move without ripping. Some more PVA over the top seals it to the wood and gives a satin finish that should be reasonably hard wearing… or as hard wearing as a ceiling needs to be???
The ceiling was a bit of a challenge. Holding a large square of wet, sticky delicate paper overhead is difficult and I definitely ended up with a lot of glue in my hair. But it looks pretty good now.
The only thing I’m not amazingly happy with is how smooth it dried. After I pasted the maps on, they looked really smooth. Then after a while they got crinkles in them and were too delicate to move without ripping. These have now dried in and I cant / dont want to try and adjust it for fear of making it worse. I’m a bit of a perfectionist so they aren’t really that bad but I’d prefer if they were flat like I had imagined.