During the week I’ve been busy planning the bathroom, it’s been quite the undertaking and has required a fair amount of research and comparison to what others have done and what we could do in the space allocated. After purchasing Gandalf and in our initial discussions over our plans we knew that we’d need to plan a space for a bathroom in. This was an important consideration for us as we hope to spend most of our time off grid wild camping. In our opinion a toilet and a shower would be basic necessities to achieve this goal.

We’ve decided to go with a composting toilet, a comparison of the various toilets can be found here. We really wanted a small shower that can be turned on and off during use to save water, the only thing I managed to find that fit the bill was a bidet tap or shattaf sprayer. I know that sounds a little odd but these are now being used by a lot for vanlifers to negotiate the same problem. Now that the tanks are in, we felt that this would be a good time to tackle this task. I’ve been looking at various bathroom bits and bobs and drawing away in SketchUp to try to make the best of the space we have. Our bathroom is going to be approximately 1.02m in length by 0.63m in width. Whilst these dimensions are certainly modest my plans do show that we can fit everything in.

The biggest difficulty I faced when planning the bathroom was with regards to how to best handle the shower drain or plughole. I really wanted to have the drain/plug hole going straight out through the van floor, trying to find a drain hole long enough was quite the challenge but I did end up tracking one down in the end before unveiling the plans to the guys. Several potential issue were pointed out during our discussions, particularly with regards to installing the shower drain straight out of the van floor. We could see that there could be some issues with drainage, as the inlet for this pipe is at the opposite end to where we’d want to put the drain. As you can see from the diagram below, the red line indicates the path the water would have to travel.

In reality, there is not enough room to pass pipes between the underside of the van and the top of the tank. It would also be too tight of a turn to ensure proper drainage for the shower water and worried that with the majority of the pipe being located outside it could potentially freeze. In addition to this the kitchen sink which is already in place has the fuel tank right below it so we cannot drill out through there to connect the sink waste to the waste inlet either.

Another problem with the design was the different heights of the proposed floor. Initially, it was thought that we would benefit from having the shower area with drainage hole lower than that of the rest of the floor. This layout option would’ve give Ben maximum headroom in this area, something he desperately needs. I also thought this would help with drainage making sure the room didn’t end up with water all around the back of the toilet. This multi height floor did cause a bit of head scratching, after thinking about it we decided that it would probably be difficult to achieve a nice job with the flooring so we went back to the drawing board.

Whatever we do with the floor we need to box of the Truma heating duct which runs along the van wall, we also need to take into account that we’ve had to encroach into the bathroom space on the left-hand side in order to pass the hob exhaust out through the floor of the van. after taking some measurements it also transpired that the toilet would not fit in the gap between them. This left us with only one real option; to raise the entire floor.

As the idea settled amongst us we realised that we could utilize the ’empty cavity’ between the bathroom floor and the van floor by installing a shallow shower drain, connecting this to PVC piping which would then run the length of the shower, and exit out just above the waste water tank inlet. This seemed to be a great idea, which got even better when we realised that we could also connect the drain from the kitchen sink and exit out of the same hole, (as illustrated below, looking from the top down).

Since planning this idea we added a couple if things, the red and blue tubes in the picture above take the hot and cold water to the kitchen taps and the black tube is currently empty but could be used later to thread anything we’ve missed through. Job done!