Diary: 7. Starting The Conversion From Van To Motorhome

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 depressing mistake. Once the cladding was down, it was revealed to us that there was a serious leak in the roof of the van. The ply was teeming with mould, and was so warped that it made you dizzy to look at it. 

The leak was a two-fold problem. It turns out that the people who owned the van before us obviously knew there was a leak as there was duck tape all over the place. The main culprit was a huge hole in the roof, where we assume a mushroom capped air vent had been. It looked as though they had lost the cap, and instead of sourcing a new one to guarantee water tightness, they had stuffed it with a fleece blanket, covered that with a plastic bag and then duck taped the entire thing. 

The other entrance point for rainwater was around the roof hatches. Again, these had been duck taped over rather than having a permanent fix. Yet again, it was our job to create a permanent fix, and rectify all the damage that had been done by previous owners not actually caring about their health, or the integrity of the van. 

After two failed attempts of attempting to seal it around the edges with mastic, we ended up using a 2 part paint which is used to cover the underside of boat hulls. If it’s good enough to keep the sea out of a boat, it’s good enough to keep the rain out of our van. We slapped the paint on and around the outside of the roof hatches and hoped for the best. For once, it went our way, and the ceiling was now leak free. It’s not pretty,  but it’s only the roof. The back corner where the floor meets the walls however, wasn’t. As the boat paint was in white, we opted to use a clear mastic to fill in any dents around joints where the water could be coming in. 

As we had learned already with the van, if something’s going to fall off, it’s best to let it happen as it’s likely hiding a surprise. While we were working our way around the van with various sealants, we saw there were a few areas where previous owners had patched up body work and painted over it. These parts, as we discovered, were very sensitive to pressure, and they began to crack off when challenged! So off they came, and down to the car repair body shop we went, in search of a decent bodywork filler. Again, it was a two part mixture, quite similar to Polyfilla to apply, with the added pressure that the little pink tube we added would set hard within 10 minutes. It took a few applications and an awful lot of sanding to get the holes filled correctly, but once they were, they actually looked better than the rest of the van! Now, for the real test! It was time to wash the van, to get him ready for his new coat of paint. Using a pressure washer that Matt’s mum had, the wash down was started. It worked really well, in fact, a little too well in some spots, as it began to strip a few areas of existing paint. 

With everything set, sanded and washed, I got to painting the van, by hand. The paint which was on the van was a khaki green, and the tin of paint we had been left in the back box was the same colour. Naively I poured some paint into a tray and began to brush and roller it on. Turns out, this military type paint is something like 2 parts tar to 1 part green colouring. It took 2 days and 2 coats of paint on the entire of the van to get it all roughly the same colour. I was working till after the sun set both days to get it painted, but the paint would become more and more like setting glue as the temperature dropped. My arms and shoulders were in absolute bits by the end of it, and I refused to do anymore exterior work, or intact anything where I had to lift my arms up. 

With the exterior finally up to par, and the paint doing a pretty good job of beading the rain off, it was back to re-fitting the internal structures. It probably took us a good week to get the van from empty corked shell to something resembling a home, but in the timescale of the van, that was pretty darn quick. 

We already had a dresser unit which we wanted to modify into the kitchen area, and I had done some furniture up cycling before, so I put on some decorators overalls and set to work sanding the unit down, ready for it’s new paint job. While that was going on, Matt set about making the supporting plinths for the unit to sit on above the wheel arch. Matt’s mum came out to see the progress, and remembered that she had an offset of kitchen countertop in the shed, which might be useful. It was the perfect size for the van, and only needed a little trimmed off the depth to ensure we had enough space to move about. 

We had already bought a little gas stove, and were desperately trying to find a sink that fitted with minimal loss of cupboard space and that would be delivered quickly. By this point, we didn’t have the luxury of time anymore, as we had bought our tickets for the Eurotunnel. We had a week and a half. 

Jenna x

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