The Camping Thing will eventually be a cluster of five boxes with hinged lids and a flat bridge piece that will double as a table, but right now it’s just one box and I’m still trying to figure out how to fit it into the back of the van. It’s forty-eight inches wide, as wide as it could possibly be and still fit across the width of the space inside the back of the van between the wheels. The battery and electrical system which powers the fridge, lights, and charging outlets fits in half of this box. The other half will hold, um, I’m not sure yet. But there’s plenty of room left over.

I want to anchor this box (and all the rest of the boxes) to the steel bars bolted to the floor because I don’t want all that plywood flying around inside the van in the unfortunate event it should come to a sudden stop, as it would if it were to suddenly meet a tree or an oncoming truck. The sudden stop would be bad enough. So the problem to figure out today (there’s always a problem to figure out; nothing is ever simple) was how to make the box sit level. It leaned back about seven degrees after anchoring it, because the floor is not a flat surface, there’s a heating vent under the carpet, and two edges of the carpet overlap right under the front edge of the box.

I had to cut about a dozen shims to glue to the two by four to make the box lean forward so the top of it would line up with the rest of the boxes I plan to build in the next six to eight weeks. Hopefully six.