Being an Ex-BT van the back of the van was full of heavy duty shelving, cupboards and storage. Way more industrial than we needed and not laid out nicely so it was a case of stripping everything out and starting again, with the help of my Wombat assistant! …Keeping the Orange light though 🙂
We also removed the bulkhead to let more light into the back of the van, we will be adding one side window in the sliding door but that is still to come. We figured that the window should go in the sliding door as that way we don’t lose any wall space for furniture and the kitchen. One it is all in place we may squeeze in a second window possibly in the back doors.
Insulation
Once everything was out, well apart from the flooring we decided to keep the flooring rather than tear it out and redo it, we set to work insulating the van. The flooring we may yet live to regret as if we had ripped it out we could have laid another layer of insulation beneath it. We also decided against KingSpan (or something similar) as we didn’t want to lose the width or height that this would cost us. In the end we went for the silver covered bubble-wrap type insulation. Time will tell if these steps cost us and we are shivering with cold!
The bubble-wrap stuff went on easily enough with spray adhesive but after reading around a lot more I’m not sure if the spray adhesive will still stick after a couple of hot summers! Either way the boarding out will be fairly easy to remove if we need to go back and upgrade to KingSpan.
I have since had to rip everything out to have some welding done on the underneath of the van and as the silver bubble foil does bugger all I’ve chucked in as much Kingspan/Celotex as I can. Its 25mm under the floor, 50mm in the ceiling and 50mm or 25mm on the wall depending on the curves and bumps.
I have filled all indentations and cavities with 50mm foam board backed in silver (e.g. Celotex). I’ve taped all the joins with aluminium tape. Ribs of the van body and any areas where I’ve used lots of little chunks of Celotex, I’ve covered the whole lot with silver bubble wrap and then taped the edges of that. (insulation level = new Aussie Girlfriend!)
Boarding Out
I’ve used various thicknesses of Marine Ply for the boarding out. 3mm for the roof as that will not really be supporting any weight and 6mm for anything that will be load bearing.
The most complex bit was the space above the cab… “The Alfie Cave”. This will be the little one’s bed after we install a cot/cage door to stop him rolling out. I figure that as he gets older we can remove the door and add a ladder for him to get himself up and down.
One other point to not is that I added a mesh hatch to allow the breeze from the whirlygig on top (no idea what they are really called but the thing that spins and lets air in!).
Alfie has massively outgrown the Alfie cage so he now sleeps in the front of the van on a camp bed resting on a wooden frame that goes between the two front doors.