More fun with battens
Still exhausted after the weekend we’ve continued to soldier on this week, not taking our usual break on Wednesdays. I suspect we’ll really feel it this weekend but hopefully with the bank holiday we can spend some time indoors relaxing.
Next stages
It’s been a busy few days, we’ve finished insulating the rear doors and have been thinking ahead to the next steps of the build. There is always so much to coordinate, research and buy. I am looking stuff up every chance I get and learning as I go along. We fancied a bit of a break from the insulation during the second half of the week and decided to spend a couple of days just tidying things up and attaching some battens to the walls.
We’ve been trying to come up with a neat idea for the walls, we intend to cover them with ply, however the ply boards need something to connect to. We don’t like the thought of drilling more holes in the van especially as we had to go over the large number of tiny holes left by the previous owner with POR 15. We also need to create an air gap in front of our vapour barrier to allow it to be effective. On the lower half, the van naturally has some 8mm holes, presumably for securing cargo and the like, so we wanted to somehow utilize those.
After a long long time debating and scouting around in B&Q we decided to use some plugs in the holes, the hooks on the back of the plugs should stop it popping back through the metal, that and a bit of Sikaflex should keep the 25mm battens in place nicely. We carefully marked the holes and set to drilling and getting everything ready, the fitting was a tad fiddly but not too bad and the battens are now secure to the side of the van. This now gives us something to screw the ply wall into. We’ve managed to get a fair bit of the battening done which is helping to build us up to doing the bulkhead. We can already tell that due to it’s shape is probably going to be a right pain.
Telescopic Fun
Our telescopic ladder has arrived, which we’ll be needing to use to get up onto the roof to fit the fan. The ladder will also be joining us on the trip, in order to clean the solar panels from snow and dust. This week has also brought an anxious wait for the windows to arrive, as the week has gone on I was sure that they were not going to arrive until sometime next week. Thankfully they arrived this afternoon. So without further ado watch this space as it’ll be window day tomorrow! Fingers crossed it goes well! We can’t wait to get a move on and finish the insulation it will be nice to get some notable progress for everyone else to see. I am quite looking forward to the furniture building, it’s going to be great seeing all the ideas we’ve had for the interior come to life.