This page, for the interested, is about our new camper-van construction activities. Obviously this is a bit of a niche interest, and so you might not feel the need to read on, but for those who do, you probably won’t learn much except that camper van building takes ages and costs a fortune.
To begin at the beginning, as some Welsh bloke once said.
It is an ex-library van, purchased by us from a chap in Huntingdon, which was a good thing because it doesn’t rain much down there, so it wasn’t rusty. It cost us the princely sum of four thousand quid, and actually turned out to be a bit rusty, but only a bit, not on the scale of our previous, much beloved van. That was so rusty that the cab was actually falling off, and there were draughty bits where the wind chuffed through the holes.
Here it is.
It is nine meters long, nine whole metres, which is massive. Almost big enough to live in, not that we ever would. I can’t imagine anything more boring than van life, popular as the idea seems to be at the moment. Imagine a life with nothing to do except drive around trying to find a free parking space. It all sounds very lovely when you are daydreaming about tequila drunk by Spanish lakes and shopping for smelly cheese on French markets, but I suspect the reality is chilly and dull.
All the same, we think we would like it to be lovely enough to live in. We have got some vague, unsubstantiated idea that one day we will have a very long holiday and explore some of the world. If we are going to do this then we would like to do it in luxury. Actually I like to do everything in luxury if possible. I want the van to be so beautiful that I don’t feel in the least deprived at not staying in an expensive hotel.
With this in mind we have resolved on a design brief to make it look like the Orient Express.
Actually when I say we resolved, really I mean that I resolved, and Mark laughed but didn’t argue.
We considered this at great length.
Nine meters length.
We printed off some squared paper and marked it out to scale. We thought about what we might want in the van and cut out coloured squared paper to the right size. Then we spent ages and ages moving the bits about and frowning.
It looked like this:
After a while, weeks and weeks, actually, it looked like this. This is, we think, the Grand Final Design. We have stuck it on the fridge in the kitchen, where we have gazed at it constantly, occasionally stopping to modify some small detail, but more or less this will be It.
The blue shapes are skylights, the pink ones are solar panels. There are five solar panels, and there is only just enough room on the roof for all of them and the skylights, so we have had to measure very carefully. Also the roof leaks at the edges, and we will have to glue it up first.
During the process, actually after the process really, because mostly it was so rubbish that it made us laugh, we discovered artificial intelligence, and thought we might see if it had anything sensible to add.
It had got lots to say, some of which was wonderfully sensible and inspiring, and some of which was absolute tripe, like the floor plan it produced which placed the steering wheel and the driver’s seat in the bathroom, and the one which put the shower above the loo, presumably to save time at bedtime. We gazed admiringly at the inspiring bits and laughed at the rest.
Here is one of its creations which we thought was rather splendid:
Obviously AI does not really grasp the idea of Look, It Is Only Two Metres Wide You Idiot, but the idea is a nice one, and is the foundation of our final design. We have worked out how we could achieve almost everything in the picture, and I have ordered thirty metres of blue velvet and started trying to understand how upholstery works.
The thing was, what we had got did not look like the picture above.
It looked like this:
The bottom picture is the workshop space. It has been pre-filled with lots of things that we think we will need. The big white thing is a generator, there is a compressor and the tall thing covered with an old carpet is a fridge. It is an expensively modern van fridge, purchased when we found it cheaply on eBay and stored for the eventual day when we have got a van with a kitchen into which we can install it.
We set to work.
We stripped out the boards on the walls, and the top layer of insulation. This needed to happen because we are going to have to add wiring and plumbing, and, we thought, another layer of insulation. If we are to be comfortable in very hot or very chilly places, insulation needs to be the very best that we can manage to squee
When we had finished, several days later, it looked like this:
The two hatches in the floor are for battery boxes. It will have four enormous batteries. It had four batteries already, but they were all dead and useless, and will have to be replaced. We took them to the tip, it needed both of us to lug them in and out of the back of the taxi.
Careful observation of the master-plan will show you that not only are the current roof lights in the wrong place, so is the door. We had got to take the door out and move it.
This meant, as you can see, also moving the hole in the floor and the construction of some new steps. We would have had to construct new steps anyway, because the old ones are long gone, but they needed to be designed to fit in the newly moved hole, just to the right of the old one in order that I can have the mobile bathroom of my dreams.
This all looked like this:
The bottom picture was taken by me, on the roof. This was a scary adventure, as readers of the diary pages will recall, and you can see if you look in the top left hand corner of the picture what a jolly long way away the ground was. It needed both of us, because the lip that you can see around the window was not only screwed down, it was glued in thoroughly and needed to be set alight with a blow torch before being scraped off with the wonderful Jiggly Tool.
The back window says, for some reason, that it belongs to the Knitting Network. Why the Knitting Network might have needed a nine meter long truck I have no idea, but we have taken the window out now. The bedroom will be at the back, and if we are to replicate the splendid AI generated Orient Express bedroom, we will need to put the bed headboard there. I am going to clean the window up and it will go into the front, opposite the new door.
The bedroom is going to be slightly raised. There will be a door in the back of the van and Mark’s tools will all go underneath it. The base of the bed will be roughly on a level with the bottom of the old window.
In the meantime, Mark has been constructing the new steps. They are built out of an old road sign that we found in a ditch once, and dragged out. It seemed entirely wasteful to leave it there in perpetuity when it could have a newly recycled life travelling the world. Of course I should add that we would have been happy to have bought it from the Highways Authority but the prospect of telephoning them and trying to explain was too difficult, so we didn’t bother.
Here are the steps, newly welded.
Mark has departed now, off to the frozen wastelands of the north, and so progress has been halted, but we are now at the point where reconstruction can commence, and so when he comes back the brand new Orient Express rebuild will begin.
I will keep you posted.