Before work on the floor began we decided to take a week off van work. It’s been a hard slog to get to this point and in addition to my shoulder needing some rest after the ceiling, we also we felt that we were owed some time to do things we enjoy.

Back to work….

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After a nice week off it was time to get back to it. This week we plan to get the floor down and hopefully make a start on the furniture. A portion of our ‘week off’ was spent discussing our final visions for the decor of the van. This will be our home, our workspace and our happy place for the next year and it kind of has to be versatile enough to suit all those different uses. At home you have different rooms, to express this but we will have just the one room.

As a visual person and an artist I find that colour plays an important part in setting mood and in how you use a room. For instance, you will always work and focus better in a room decorated in a black and white colour scheme, you will always be more creative if there is green in the room and you will always feel warm in a room with reds and oranges. Naturally this means that the floor ties heavily into achieving an overall feel for a room. It was a hectic week of us changing our mind on floor colour more than one occasion in an attempt to make it work with the unusual way that we plan to decorate the van.

I am currently writing a post to explain our ideas and show you the decor as it progresses. For now we’ve chosen to go with a white floor, this will give the illusion of space and allow us to add some necessary colour to the walls. I know some may think it’s odd or will easily get dirty but we feel it will work wonderfully at the end. We also don’t plan to be wearing outdoor shoes around in the van, as we at home. We were also pleased to have managed to get a good deal on the floor, a necessity as we head ever closer to our budget for the conversion. It was not atypical for some of the floors to clock in at around the £200- 300 mark, more than we really wanted to spend.

Laying the floor

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Having found the floor, and receiving a timely delivery it was time to get out to the van and get it down. Neither Ben or I have ever laid a floor before, we watched few videos on good old YouTube in order to prepare and picked up some hooked blades for use with a Stanley knife, that came in very handy. We were due to head over to Ben’s parents’ house at the end of the day to start the weekend of Birthday celebrations for Ben’s mum Linda, so we were really up against the clock. We got straight down to things starting by emptying the entire van out and giving it a good hoover, we then proceeded to get all the cutting done around the wheel arches and the step.

Carefully does it!

As usually happens people stop by to ask about the van, this time someone not from this area, whose friend is doing a conversion. It’s always great to talk about the van with anyone who’ll listen, particularly people who are interested in the process. After the 30 or so minute interlude it was then a quick scramble to paste the plywood floor and gently unroll the vinyl sheeting bit by bit. We had a lot of fun getting covered in the Evostick flooring adhesive, which felt almost like being stuck in cement! We’d set the target to get it done by the time we had to leave and hoped that we still would, keeping in mind that we had to re-pack the van after. Thankfully, the task went well for us and after flattening out a couple of air bubbles the floor was down! We could hardly believe it Woohoo! We had just enough time to admire the work before the frenzied re-pack of the van.

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Isn’t it lovely?