A Boy and His Van: The Nasty Work

When contemplating building out a camper van, one's mind goes to the finishing touches that will make the plain vanilla, blank slate cargo van you start with into a tiny home on four wheels. The queen-sized comfy bed with storage room underneath for a couple of bikes. The electrical system that will work its photovoltaic magic and convert solar power into reading light, cold beer and food in the fridge, and induction burner cooking. The hardwood table that slides out from storage below the bed. The beautiful exposed wood everywhere. The composting toilet, and yes, the hot shower.

Before getting to these desired ends, though, less glamorous work has to happen first. Insulating the walls, ceiling, and floor. Installing flooring, siding, and ceiling treatments. Building storage compartments, seating, shelving and cabinets.

The adventure van in its work-life configuration

Before even the less glamorous work can begin, however, the truly nasty work must be done, and that's where I've been for the first few days of the van buildout. In its previous 10 years of life, the Sprinter was a working rig, the first nine years as a Ryder fleet van, and the past year hauling stuff to special events. I've described the van as a blank slate, but that's not entirely true, since it had battered, thin plywood flooring, cheesy ceiling material, hard plastic sidewall, side door, and rear door interior covering, and a carpeted built-in thingy of indeterminate purpose glued and screwed in place along most of the driver's side of the cargo space wall. All of this had to come out. There's also some minor surface rust in numerous places on the van's exterior, which will need to be ground down, sanded, primed, and painted.

"Oops, I just ran over a boulder. I think I'll just ignore that."

The cancerous rust at the base of the cargo side door and one of the two rear doors will need to be dealt with, too, and I've elected to have Valley Autohaus do professional repair of this nastiness. They will also be doing the welding repair required on the frame front cross-member that was badly damaged. How can you do this kind of damage to your frame and just ignore it?!? Oh well. My friends at Valley Autohaus will make it stronger than original. While I intend to do just about everything else on the van myself, I'm happy to pay someone else to do major work affecting the safety and longevity of the vehicle that I lack the skills to do myself. Yay for Valley Autohaus!

The first order of business for me was tearing out the ceiling (simple) and sidewall/door panelling (easy). Ripping out the built-in, carpeted thingy was a bit more difficult and heavy to drag out of the van on my own, but very doable.

Removal of the flooring was more time-consuming and difficult. A number of the bolts holding down the thin, battered plywood were badly corroded after 10 years of hard use. Even after soaking with penetrating oil, two bolts proved impossible to remove, so I fired up my angle grinder and cut them out. First fun with power tools! Success!

Under the plywood was an asphalt-based underlayment, some of which pulled up easily. However, a fair amount of it was stuck to the flooring, and had to be laboriously hand-scraped and removed bit by bit. Eventually, all the nastiness was successfully removed from the floor. Ten years of accumulated crud was scraped from around the perimeter of the plywood flooring base, and the interior of the van was now fully exposed. This leaves the van ready for the next stage of the nasty work, dealing with the exterior surface rust. I'm going to wait on that until Valley Autohaus has completed their work, probably sometime late next week, so actual work on the van will be on pause until then.

The few days of nasty work was broken up by garden work, biking, and other semi-retirement pandemic fun, so it wasn't non-stop nasty. I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of work I can do with my grinding, sanding, and painting skills to get the van looking reasonably good on the exterior. It won't be perfect (in the right lighting, you can see ghost lettering from the van's Ryder incarnation), but I don't want to go to the required effort, time and expense to repaint the entire rig myself. When I asked Valley Autohaus for a ballpark estimate for repainting the entire van and was told it could be in the $10,000 range, Anne and I decided we could live with a tiny bit of cosmetic imperfection.

The slate is now pretty much blank

After Valley Autohaus' work, and dealing with the minor surface rust myself, the next steps will be more dramatic: I'll be installing two new windows (t-sliders to allow cross-ventilation; one in the passenger-side cargo door, the other on the driver's side a bit further back in the van), and insulating the entire interior.

Installing the windows will involve cutting precise window openings in the van, the prospect of which is a little bit daunting, but I'm game. I figure I can carefully follow a traced template, with small guide holes drilled along the way, with a jigsaw without too much trouble.

Insulation I know. When you travel down the rabbit-hole of camper van buildout recommendations on the interwebs, all manner of insulation is recommended and debated. One of the intriguing possibilities is sheep wool, which is touted as a natural, non-toxic alternative with attractive moisture-absorbing and -release properties. However, I'm opting to go with a higher-performance, less organic option, the tried and true two-part polyurethane foam which I've had contractors installing in home rim joist spaces and other home insulation applications for many years. It has an extremely high R-value (6.7 per inch), provides a moisture and air barrier, and is recommended by many in the van life community. I've never actually installed it myself, but I'll pick up a kit from Menards, along with the required spray gun, Tyvek coveralls, nitrile gloves, and P100 respirator, and have at it once the windows are installed.

Onward!