We have filled in the back window.
There is a photograph.
We slid the sheet of aluminium underneath the skin of the van at the top and over the skin of the van at the bottom. Mark had put a very, very lot of glue on it, so we were be very carefulling indeed in order not to get covered in black sticky.
It mostly worked. Mark is blacker and stickier than I am which is completely his own fault for not being able to resist poking the glue to see if it would come off, which of course it did.
You will see that there is still a hole on either side, making it look as though we were not concentrating when we measured for the bit we stuck on. In fact, of course, the holes are for the little windows, one on each side of the bed head.
We will have to cut them out a bit more when the glue has dried but if we are lucky we might get them in before Mark goes away on Sunday.
We might not manage to achieve that because he has got to go back to Elspeth’s tomorrow. He was in a rush when he finished the van and did not put the drive shaft back together properly, and so he has got to go and fix it tomorrow. It is not a difficult job but it is a nuisance and he is cross with himself about it.
I am sanguine about it. We have managed to fill in the big hole. I am very pleased with our efforts anyway.
Elspeth rang up during the sticky difficult bit whilst we were balancing on the ladders and shoving. I hope she did not think we were ignoring her on purpose.
Also we have had an exciting moment today.
We have purchased some epoxy resin.
We have been contemplating this for ages. We have been watching lots of videos on the mighty Internet of people making tables that look like rivers. If you have not seen them then just google Epoxy Resin River Table and you will instantly get lots and lots of junk videos that look amazing but that Oliver says are all AI generated and not to be trusted, but you will get the idea.
We do not want to make a river table, because even I can see that it would be shockingly tasteless, and not at all a thing to put in our Orient Express camper van, which is going to be the epitome of high-class sophistication.
However, we do want to have a marble bathroom in it.
This presented something of a challenge, because marble weighs tons and tons, and the van has got to be very lightweight so that we can fill it with lots of our own stuff without getting stopped by VOSA and made to go on a weigh bridge.
Hence we have cooked up an exciting plan.
We are going to make pretend marble panels out of epoxy resin poured over the insulation panels we took out of the van.
Oliver rolled his eyes when we told him about this and said What Could Possibly Go Wrong? but we found a roll of plastic sheeting in a skip that we could use to put on the floor whilst we do it and determined to have a go.
This morning we found a chap in Kendal who sells epoxy resin. Mostly he uses it to make boats, so we went and had a jolly good poke around his shed to see what they looked like.
He had not made any marble boats, but he had made lots of wooden boats, and they were all covered in epoxy resin.
We liked the look of them very much indeed.
We told him what we were doing and to his credit, he hardly laughed at all, but nodded sagely and talked about panels with Mark, and then sold us two small bottles of resin which he said would do to have a trial run.
He gave us some fibre glass sheet as well, which he said would help to keep it all rigid.
We are very, very excited about this, and had to be very self-disciplined not to dash home and try it straight away, although of course we didn’t, because of filling in the window.
We are going to have a go tomorrow, if Mark gets Elspeth’s van done in time.
The taxi passed its MOT, by the way.
We were very glad about that. It would have been such a nuisance to have had to waste our time fixing it.
