Planning the worktop
After working hard on the struts and having the majority of the furniture framing done we took some time to catch up on some design aspects of the build. I personally had been looking forward to figuring out the final look of the kitchen.
Decisions, Decisions!
It can be hard to know quite where to start with a kitchen in a camper van, and in general there are a few things to figure out before pressing on:
- How many people are you going to be cooking for?
- What type of meals are you going to cook?
- What appliances can you not live without?
- Is cooking a passion?
It’s quite difficult to know exactly how much space you’ll need to allow for cooking, but for us, being that there is only the two of us and cooking is not particularly a passion for either of us we decided that we did not want to allocate too much of the precious space that we have available for this purpose. Although we do not intend for the kitchen to be the centre point of the van, we still need to produce a sensible, equipped and stylish area to fuel up in.
After much research we made decisions on the hob and fridge, which in turn gave us a few key measurements helping us to find a starting point and a way to focus our kitchen design. It was time now, to sit down and try out some looks for the kitchen, finding a suitable sink and tap to complete the area was our next main challenge. Though on the face of it this seemed an easy task we soon found that finding a sink to our specific size requirements to be a little difficult. We were really after a smaller width sink but one still deep enough to wash up in. I had hoped to order a ‘butler’ sink that I had found through some of the camper groups I belong to on Facebook. However in the end the price and weight of the item really put a crack in that idea! Moving on from that and eventually after many days of searching I found a brushed stainless steel sink on Amazon that would fit!
Next up was the matter of deciding what material and colour to use for the countertop itself. Without a finished van in front of you it can be hard to imagine the final outcome and pick designs that will compliment it, and be within budget. We also didn’t realise that with our dimensions we would only have a choice of two surfaces: wood and solid laminate. It turned out that solid laminate was out of our budget and too ‘sparkly’ for Ben, so we’ve chosen a Beech wood option, which should hopefully bring an earthy tone to the van.
All in all it has been a bit of a mastery of planning with the worktop because the hob, although compact it has a large box underneath with all the components. That box needs to fit exactly into place between two struts, as does the sink and tap on the left hand side. It took me a little while to get all the maths correct and it was a relief when I sent the designs off to Ben’s parents, who then passed these onto their local cabinet maker, John who has stepped up to help create a little piece of Gandalf’s dream!
It’s nice to have parts of the van come together whilst we are free to work on the other tasks that still need looking into. With the worktop cleared from the decks Ben and I have been looking into various things, mainly the electrics which we plan to tackle next. So watch this space for some electrifying updates!