The Doors
The van is coming together nicely now, and I hope to be back to more regular updates shortly.
Making a Start
It was now time to turn our attention to the rear and side doors. Our lovely wooden shell is coming along and we are eager to complete it. This weeks’ task was to get the doors panelled with plywood. We started with the back doors as we felt they’d be more straight forward than the sliding door. We needed to run a final check on the insulation we’d fitted, making sure it was secure we then placed a vapour barrier over the insulation in preparation for the panel to be attached.
Next, we set about creating templates for the passenger side door and proceeded to cut it out. Once we were happy with this we made some adjustments to the template in order to reuse it for the drivers’ side door. The drivers’ side door is a slightly different shape to that of the passengers’ side, the door is recessed much more along the lower part and of course this side also houses the door handle that would need to be cut around. Again we were using the 5mm marine ply that we’d purchased. We’ve become very speedy with the jigsaw with all the practice we’ve had. Apologies for the slightly blurry photo, not sure what I was doing lol!
The Rear Doors
This is where this part of the task gets tricky! We wanted to mount the doors the same way as we’ve mounted everything in the van: by using the existing factory holes and securing the screws with plugs that fit into the holes. We soon found that it became a right game to get the holes drilled into the right place on the door panel. We tried everything we could think of and even measured out the holes, and although it went pretty well, we do have some extra holes in the panel that do not have screws in because there seemingly wasn’t a place to connect to behind.
Ben and I both like to do things perfectly so we are a little disappointed with this, but we have some ideas on how to cover it all up and make it look like nothing ever happened. When you start a project like this and invest so much time, heart and money into it, its sometimes difficult to brush off even the smallest mistakes that are made. Never-the-less we are pleased, and here are the completed rear doors:
The Sliding Door
We saved this beast till last, with the confidence of having made progress with both the rear doors we felt it would help with the frustrating task to come. We’ve long known this door would be difficult to get done for a few reasons
- We cannot buy a single piece of wood that’s big enough to do the whole thing in one go.
- The step that we built covers the lower right part of the door so we need to make a template with the door open.
- We are parked on a hill, so the sliding door wont stay open without propping open with a piece of wood which does dislodge and crash into you at times.
- It’s quite a cramped space to work in, particularly close to the lower part, this will make it a pain when trying to attach the wood to the door
Knowing that we’d need to make the door in two halves we spent some time discussing how we’d do the join. We wanted to make sure that the wood around the window stayed as one piece as we felt it would be easier to get all the measurements correct. We are a tad annoyed that we have to do the door as two pieces, and don’t feel that it’s going to look very nice. Its was rather frustrating to find that the largest piece of wood we could find (2440mm x 1220mm) was just shy of the actual width we needed for the door
At the moment we only have one piece of marine plywood left, at £40 a sheet and with us already having spent over £400 on the materials just for the walls, we realised that we only had enough wood to make the join vertically. It’s not an ideal situation but we do need to keep budget in mind as we still need to stretch the pennies across electrics, furniture, heating etc.
Back to the ever fun task of making ‘templates’ we made a start on the door. The sliding door has a weird handle on it, it’s vertical and comes down in a curve, so that was somewhat fun to cut. We also decided to make a nice small hole in the door panel, which would still leave us access to the door lock. We felt this may become important down the line, and of course we had to cut out the window. This first half went well and we cut a little extra off the left-hand side to give our vertical ‘add on’ piece a bit of space to reach the attachment holes.
With our previous experience of trying to get the wall panels to line up nicely and our planes for the ceiling we realised we needed something like a ‘joining strip’ to make sure that the thin panel didn’t flap around. We’d put in an order for some cladding trims for the ceiling (our next joyous task) and added an extra one to the order. It doesn’t look fantastic but it does the job, we do plan to paint the door so it will hopefully not be so noticeable, however in hindsight I do wish we’d been able to do a horizontal join. After the vapour barrier was applied we found that once again the fitting of the door was a nightmare, and we once again have extra holes!
All in all, a good job that keeps us moving forward! See you next week for some ceiling fun!
