Moving In!

Hi everyone, time for a long overdue update on this build! I’m actually writing this post in the van, as we’ve been living in it since the end of last week. Time has kind of gotten away from us though, hence the lack of recent posts. We’ll give you a quick look now at the things we wrapped up in the past several weeks, then later this week or early next week we’ll get out a post on our first week in our little home.

We left off with showing you the installation of our flooring, once that was in we were ready to finally move in all the furniture we’d already made. The bed was the first thing to go in, followed by the benches and then the kitchen cabinet. For the most part, everything fit in how it was supposed to. In the next two pictures, you can see how the bed slides out when we’re ready to use it, and slides in when we want to use the benches and table.

If you look closely at the left side of the counter in the picture below, you can see the sink covered with the piece we cut out. This gives us so much more counter space when the sink is not in use, and it’s been a great place to store our soap and sponge so we’re not wasting that space.

As we moved in the furniture, we could finally start moving in some of the things we’ve underfoot for a little while, like the bench seat cushions. These are made to fit under the bed when it’s pulled out, then stacked behind us when we’re sitting at the table.

Once the furniture was secured, Matt installed a few electrical things we’d been holding off on. In the front of each bench, we have outlets we can use to charge our laptops, and there’s a carbon monoxide / propane monitor installed in the front of the passenger side bench.

Getting the bed in the van also meant we could finally make our table, which is mounted underneath the bed and slides out between the two benches. For this table, we used heavy duty drawer slides mounted on strips of ripped 2×4, attached to the underside of the bed.

For the tabletop, we went with the same wood as the kitchen counter. Rather than use the same stain and have the two match entirely, we used the same dark stain we had used on the benches.

Another thing we just wrapped up was the little storage box on the step by the sliding side door. We have a piece of wood already cut and polyurethaned for a door, and we have the hinges, but after getting this part in we’re not sure if we really need or want the door. We’re leaving it off for now and if we change our minds later we can easily throw it on. This little box was finished off with more step edging around the top.

One of the more tedious tasks we had was sewing the roman shade rings onto our large curtain, the one between the cab and the living space. This curtain has taken quite a while overall, but it’s been well worth it.

This seems like as good of a place as any to wrap this up for now. As I mentioned earlier, we’ll try to get another post up soon to show you all a bit from our first week in the van. So long for now though, and thanks for following along so far!