Following on from the vapour barrier progress last week, we were ambitiously hoping to be able to finish up and get the walls up this week.

Our plan was to get out bright and early Monday to finish up the battens and vapour barrier, however it has been one of those weeks where nothing really goes to plan. The majority of the week was pretty slow for us, a whole lot of waiting for things to arrive and not much action, but don’t go anywhere we do have an exciting update for you….

A Tale of Plywood

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Bright and early we headed out for some battening with the bolts that I’d ordered, only to find that I’d forgotten to order the specialist Unistrut nuts that we needed. Unfortunately, there was not a lot else we could do without them, so we had to slink back indoors.

There’s always something to be done with the build so we decided not to waste the day and sat down together to do some research. I had been busy over the weekend looking into the plywood for the walls and ceiling and was left with quite a lot of options so it was a good time for us to start talking about the final finish of the van. We have a lot of cool ideas for how we would like the van to look when finished, but it’s not something we’ve needed to be that clear on until now. We had a lot of fun discussing many a crazy concept.

The walls are an important decision and our options included buying a ready made lining that is already cut to shape. However the quality and type of ply used would likely be questionable. Another option that’s commonly used in camper conversions is either birch plywood or tongue and groove cladding. We’d decided pretty early on that we were not going to use cladding so this meant taking a deeper look into the plywood. Birch whilst commonly used for its nicer ‘face’ and its apparent ease to work with, only offers partial protection from rot, it is not actually waterproof unless you spend the time to seal both sides and edges.

We sat and thought. Given that we went all out with marine ply for the floor, we probably should look into marine ply for the walls. A lot of people seemingly would like to use marine ply but don’t because of the cost. Down here in the south its about a £1 price difference per sheet for Baltic Birch versus Marine ply. It seemed a little silly to get anything other than marine ply, especially after discovering that the old ply that had come out of the van was damp and had gone mouldy in places.

We found some nice marine ply in Deal and decided to take a trip down in Gandalf to collect it, upon arrival we found that it’d only cost us £1.00 to have all 11 sheets of plywood machine cut to the exact length we needed. We’d still have to cut the weird shapes out ourselves but this would be a great help and a bit of a time saver, we left happy and headed home.

Template Time…

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We were back out Thursday and unfortunately the nuts still hadn’t arrived. It’s been a long week of waiting so we decided to spring into action and start to cut the wall ply for the areas that had been covered with the vapour barrier. This would mean that we’d be able to get both of the rear sections of the van completed.

We made templates out of cardboard and set to. Once again Ben was an absolute master with the jigsaw and has yet again done a really nice job of the cutting. The nuts finally arrived on Friday and we took a moment to get the battens in place, before continuing to secure the new ply walls…..

Here’s to closing out the week with a success! We think the walls look really great! We are also now much more confident with the process, which stands us in good stead for next week when we tackle the bits around the windows.