Gibbs Gap Year

We were finally adding the finishing touches. Next, we needed to lay the vinyl floor. We chose vinyl because it would be the easiest to clean. After all, we have a mucky pup and we knew that at some point we would be walking in and out with wet and muddy feet. We had a style in mind, but at £15 per square meter, it was more than we wanted to pay. One day while on a mad shopping spree, we went into a flooring shop and asked if they had any off-cuts or leftovers. We needed something roughly 2m x 3m. Karma was on our side, and the chap offered up some vinyl flooring that they had just brought back to the shop because when they laid it they discovered the fire doors wouldn’t shut over it. Squares missing from the vinyl It wasn't the style we had in mind, it was an odd shape with bits cut out, but was roughly the right size and the colours matched the kitchen worktop. He offered it to us for £10, so at that price we thought it was worth a try. It took a lot of shifti...

Hi, this is Matt writing this time :) With time of the essence, our budget started to go out of the window. Things such as the sink, jerry cans, and water pump are items that we would usually save some money on by looking out for them on gumtree or thoroughly searching through the internet. However, with only 10 days to go, it was more important to get them delivered quickly and installed in time. We never actually planned on having an electric water system. Our original plan (due to our lack of skills) was to simply have a metal mixing bowl below a water can that would be fixed to the wall (something Jenna had seen online). Turn the tap of the can to release the water. When bowl is full, throw it out of the window.  But Jamie, with his more technical knowledge, convinced us to get an electric water pump and have proper running water. Admittedly, I’m quite glad he did. The setup is actually pretty simple and a nice luxury to have, but it cost us £110 that we hadn’t b...

So, we now have a kitchen unit screwed into place, a kitchen counter which still needs to be fixed down, and 2 toilet cubicle walls made of ply wood. We’ve also got our deadline. April 14th 2018 ( It was only after booking the tickets that we realised that’s actually the month and day that the Titanic sank. We hoped and prayed that it wasn’t a bad omen!) We needed to get a move on, and so, as well as having Jamie (the dad of Matt’s half brothers) help us out, we roped in our friend Alfie on a Saturday he had off work. With Alfie’s help, Matt managed to get the toilet walls feeling a little more permanent, and Jenna busily cut marble PVC cladding and silver edging to size and affixed it to the ply. Finally, a room was nearly finished.  That afternoon, another friend, Alex, came over to have a look at the van and have a little catch up with us all. As Matt and Alfie struggled to find an easy solution for making the toilet door, Alex suggested we just use a shower cur...

This one is a difficult post to write. Let us begin by saying, she is OK now. To be fair, neither of us can remember much of what happened that day, and we’re happy we don’t, but we’ll tell you what we can remember.  Just a normal day, out working on the van, everyone doing a thousand jobs. Matt’s mum came out of the house and said she couldn’t find Bailey. We thought oh here we go again, how did she get out this time, lets all go and find her. We looked over the field, and she wasn’t there, so we looked down the road. There she was, the little scamp, weaving in and out of people’s front gardens, and she was headed towards a building site in the cul-du-sac.  We could just envision her running in there, startling a bricky with a trough of bricks on his shoulders and causing an injury to her or someone else. A few days earlier, she had pulled the same escape trick (and we STILL don’t know how she was getting out, despite blocking off every avenue we could see in...

It’s been a long while since we’ve written anything as we’ve been pulling 13 to 16 hour days working on the van. Well, a mixture of working on the van, attempting to sell all our belongings to muster up some money and putting the things we need to keep into storage.  The storage area is a large metal shed from Argos, which, no exaggeration, must have 300 screws holding it together. As with everything on this journey, it took us longer than we hoped to put the shed up. We had hoped it would be half a day, but when it was finally finished, it had taken us practically 2 days to build. On the upside, we were finally able to unload the van so that we could begin to work on it once more. It was slow going for a long time. We made good progress on the floor, and had stripped the rest of the interior back to the ply. Then we decided to take the plastic cladding off of the ceiling, as we needed to find out what the wiring situation was like. That was a blessing disguised as a dep...