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.
Pro tip: No matter how cold it gets in the garage, do not bring your project in to work on it on the dinner table, and particularly not if you’re going to be using power tools.
This was a really stupid mistake. Actually, it was a series of stupid mistakes: I was drilling through a piece of plywood with a quarter-inch bit on the dining room table; that’s the first stupid idea I had. I didn’t put a piece of scrap wood under the piece I was working on; that’s the second stupid idea I had. It was about an inch off the table so I thought if I was real careful I’d be okay; that’s the third stupid idea I had.
I always put a sacrificial piece of wood under the piece I’m cutting or drilling. I don’t know what I was thinking. Well, okay, obviously I wasn’t. But it’s such a rookie mistake. I never make that mistake any more. Except this time. Smack my damn head.
At about the time I knew the drill bit was going to come out the bottom, I eased pressure off the drill until the bit was just barely cutting into the wood. The problem with these bits, though, is that they’re very sharp and when they come out the bottom, the flutes bind against the inside of the hole and pull the bit through very suddenly. Which I already knew so I shouldn’t have been surprised when the bit came out the bottom, caught the wood and nearly yanked the drill out of my hands. The tip of the bit cut through the two tablecloths underneath and into the plastic mat as it twisted all that material into a big burly knot around the bit before I could take my finger off the trigger to stop the drill.
I was sure I had drilled a hole into the dinner table. I don’t know how I didn’t. I had to reverse the drill to back the bit out of the twisted-up mess of the tablecloth just to get a look at how bad the damage was. There wasn’t a scratch on the mahogany surface of the table. Not one I put in it with the power drill, anyway. Totally lucked out. Well, except for ruining two table cloths.
We had some good weather today, so I spent some time outside trying to get The Camping Thing ready for the season. “Do you know how long you were out there?” My Darling B asked me, after I finally came in later in the afternoon. “Long enough for me to finish the last 15% of a Stephen King novel!” Wow, that is a long time. (She does not recommend the novel.)
In it’s newest iteration, the bunk for The Camping Thing will be up front, and a chuck box will be in the back next to the fridge. The back end is where I’ve been storing all the kitchen stuff anyway, because the screened-in tent I pull over the open back end makes that the easiest place to get in and out of the van when I want to grab food or the camp stove. With that in mind, I’ve re-oriented the fridge to face the rear, as I originally had it. It worked a lot better that way, even though it was harder to get to from inside the van. I’ll have to work around that if I’m ever stuck inside due to rain or a zombie attack.
Re-orienting the fridge amounted to no more than rebuilding the plywood platform the fridge stands on. I built a platform mostly so it will be more or less level when I drop it into the well at the very back of the van. The well is slightly deeper in the front than in the back. I’m not sure it makes a difference to the fridge whether it’s level or not, but I wanted it to be level. Easier to work around that way.
After re-orienting the fridge I the sun came out and it got even warmer, so I cut some plywood and started to build the box that will span the width of the van in front of the fridge. This box will house the battery, the fuse box, and the electronics that keep the battery charged. It’s a very simple system that doesn’t need a lot of room, so I’ll have room left over to store other items, like maybe the tent for the back end.
I got most of the plywood cut and started to shape it and dry fit it but started to make stupid mistakes, the first sign that I was getting too tired to go on with the work, so I quit for the day, went inside and stretched out on the sofa with a glass of wine to relax for a bit before showering off.
I have spent another weekend cutting up lumber to make what I hope will be improvements to the camping thing. I’m still blinking sawdust out of my eyes this Monday morning.
At it again …
When I built the first iteration of the camping thing, I was inspired by a design I saw in a video on YouTube. I tried to get as close as I possibly could to that design, but the guy who built his camping thing shot a lot of video of his final product but didn’t shoot any video showing how he built it. I had to take a lot of screen caps and make a lot of guesses, but I think I came pretty close to his design.
What I liked most about his was that it looked simple enough that I could build it. It was a bed frame made to fit the floor in the back of the van, two cargo compartments on stilts that fit into the rear windows on either side, and an arch that reached across the width of the van just behind the driver / passenger seats.
The bed frame was made of two straight slabs of plywood screwed to a couple of 2 x 4s which anchored it to the floor — there’s more framing to it than that, but that’s the gist. It was topped by two pieces of plywood, hinged across the middle so I could lift up the front or lift up the back to access the space for storage underneath.
With the two cargo compartments on either side of the bed, there was so much storage space that there was no need to block the view out the rear by installing a kitchen, the way most people do when they adapt their minivans to camping. I could store all the pots & pans and food in the well where the rear seats used to go. I liked this very much because I bought a tent which encloses the back end of the van when the hatch is open, allowing me to look out the screened-in back when I’m inside.
This design also left a space between the bed and the first row of seats, which I thought would make it easier for me to get in and out. After a couple of camping trips, though, I discovered that most of the time I get into the van by simply climbing up onto the bed. Also, there’s only enough of a gap between the bed and the seats to sit hunched over facing forward, which isn’t really that useful.
When listing the pros and cons of this design, the feature at the top of the list of cons was that the bed frame was 52 inches from head to foot, requiring an extension which was stowed under the front lid, eating up a lot of valuable stowage space. The extension was a piece of plywood 48 inches long and 20 inches wide. After installing legs and reinforcing it with a rail underneath it was at least five pounds too heavy. I never did figure out a way of getting it in and out of the stowed position that wasn’t awkward and because of that, once it was in place I tended to leave it for the duration of the camping trip, so it might as well have been permanent.
I never did work out a way to sit up in this bed. I tried several different ways to prop open one lid or the other, thinking I might be able to recline on it, but I could never get comfortable. So with this particular design there was just no way for me to sit. There isn’t enough headroom between the ceiling and the mattress to sit fully upright, so if I wanted to write I had to stretch out on one side or the other, propped on an elbow, and if I wanted to read it was that or lay flat on my back.
Having an unobstructed view out the back turned out to be not as desirable as I initially thought. The only way I could see out the back was to lay on my stomach and prop myself up on my elbows, which is none too comfortable so I didn’t do it often. And my position in the van was higher than the screened opening in the tent, so mostly all I could see was the ground immediately outside the van. Even if I managed to lower the bed an inch or two, I can’t imagine I’d spend much time looking out the back.
And whether or not I wanted a chuck box / kitchen blocking my view, the back end of the van is pretty much the natural location for a chuck box or kitchen. That’s the only place in the van that makes sense for the fridge I bought. The minivan I drive, a Toyota Sienna, has a very deep well just inside the tailgate for two seats to disappear into. I yanked out the seats so I could stuff a fridge in there, with lots of room left over to stash food, pots, pans, plates & utensils, a cook stove, etc. So naturally whenever I was preparing for a meal or cleaning up after one, I worked out of the back of the van. Might as well put a chuck box / kitchen back there because it’s there anyway.
Even with all those drawbacks I was reluctant to give up on this design. If I’m honest, I felt that way mostly because I had already spent a fair bit of time building it out and didn’t want to spend even more time starting over from scratch. I tried a couple of really desperate modifications to avoid starting from scratch, like I tried sleeping on a 24-inch-wide mattress, thinking if that worked out I could carve out a place from the other half to sit up, but after trying to sleep on a 24-inch-wide mattress I learned that was a great big nope.
So I’ve started over. And just as I came to this decision, YouTube recommended a video of another design for a minivan camper thing that looked interesting. Stay tuned …
I froze my ass off to get that photo. I hope you appreciate that.
It seems a little funny that you can put on a sweatshirt and long pants and go out in fifty degree weather and think, “Oh, this isn’t so bad,” and you get so into doing whatever it is you’re doing that you don’t notice until an hour and a half goes by that you don’t have any sensation in your fingertips. I had to go inside at one-hour intervals after that just so I could continue to do manual labor. And no, I couldn’t wear gloves because I need to be bare-handed to do the delicate work of stripping wires and such like.
The arch isn’t done. I have to hang a curtain from it, just for example, but I’m so happy with the way the lights turned out that I had to snap a photo of the progress.
I also got the lights installed on the overhead storage compartments:
They are not lit in this photo because obviously they were not installed in the van which means the wires weren’t connected to a live circuit. They’re installed now, but I didn’t take a photo of them with the lights switched on because I forgot, and I’m not going back out now. Each light is at the end of a foot-long gooseneck and is dimmable, which will be very nice for reading a chapter or two before lights out. And there’s a USB port in the base of each light for recharging phones or whatever. I can’t wait to try them out.
All of this (and more!) runs off a house battery in the back of the van that I installed last week. Ran into a little glitch with the charger that I have yet to rectify, but progress! It’s being made!
I spent my lunch break yesterday brushing polyurethane on these pieces, even though I shouldn’t have. The instructions on the can tell me I should wait until the temperature is at least sixty degrees but it was only fifty-two. I absolutely could not wait for it to warm up, though, because the forecast tells me it won’t get warmer than forty-five until next week. I’m so eager to make some progress on this project that I’m sure I’ll burst a vessel if I wait that long, so I cheated, cracked open the can of poly and brushed it on anyway. Checked it several times yesterday afternoon and evening and it looked fine, so I think I got away with it.
After what seemed like an eternity of sub-freezing weather, we finally had a day of sunny skies and temps in the forties. The forecast says we’re supposed to get at least one more week of this, but I’m taking it one day at a time because I know this is false spring and we’re going to get at least one more fall of snow deep enough to shovel off the driveway before winter is REALLY over, and I don’t want it to break my heart.
I took two really long walks around the neighborhood today, one this morning and another this afternoon, and wow am I out of shape. I don’t mind walking in the snow but I really can’t abide going for a walk when it’s cold enough to make my nose and teeth hurt just because I’m breathing in and out (it actually seems to hurt more when I’m breathing out – how the hell does that make sense?), and as I mentioned already temps have been hovering around zero for weeks and weeks now, so I’ve been lazy. I’ll have to make myself get out there every day. Lucky for me that budding trees draw me like a moth to a flame.
In between my morning and afternoon walkies I worked on the camping thing some more. It felt so good to get outside and work on it for more than five minute without losing sensation in my hands. It’s not quite warm enough to brush some poly on the finished pieces, so instead I figured out how to set up the arch across the front of the van between the driver’s cabin and the rear compartment. The goal is not to wall off the back from the front, just to give me something to hang a curtain from. In the original design it’s a combination curtain rod and coat rack, festooned all over with coat hooks, and it even has overhead lights. I’ll definitely do the coat hooks. We’ll see about the lights.
I cut out the uprights from half-inch plywood about a week ago on a day of warmish temps (maybe in the low forties?) but didn’t get a chance to finish them until today when I screwed a piece of 3/4″ poplar to the back of each of the pieces that look like half a spade. The arch doesn’t have to support a lot of weight, unless you hang a lot of coats and backpacks from the hooks. The poplar’s there mostly to stiffen the back of the plywood and to make each upright a little prettier.
It took me a while to work out how to build a piece that would clamp the uprights to the grab handles on the B-pillar. I thought I had it figured out about a week ago, but after re-watching some video shot by the person who originated the design I tried a different, simpler way to do it. That got way better results.
With the uprights firmly anchored to the B-pillars I could lay a batten across the tops, attach a piece of cardboard roughly cut to fit the contour of the ceiling, and joggle-stick a template for the cross-piece. I’m pretty new to the idea of using a joggle stick to make a template for unusual shapes so I’m still getting the hang of it, but it so far it’s been working well for me. I joggled the shape of the uprights so they would follow the profile of the window and clear the door handle, and joggled the face of the overhead bin so it would fit against the sloping ceiling in the rear.
After cutting out the basic shape of the cross-piece, I had to use a belt sander with a loop of extra-gritty sandpaper to smooth out the irregularities of the jigsaw cut, which was a little easier to do than I was afraid it might be. I still have more sanding to do, but that comes after I figure out how to join the two halves in the middle. The bit of scrap wood holding them together in the photo is temporary. That part will get cut out anyway to make a little headroom in case I want to climb into the back from the driver’s seat. An overlapping piece up front and a shelf in the back where the lights go ought to do the trick.
The dry fit of the overhead storage bins is complete. I had to take the right-hand bin apart four or five times, trimming off bits here and there each time, reassembling it to check the fit, marking places where it needed further trimming, then taking it to pieces again. It has to sit snugly in the window so it doesn’t get in the way of the lid for the rear storage space. Took me about an hour and a half, but I finally got there. The left-hand bin was easier because I already had a pretty good idea where to trim and how much. Only had to take it apart twice.
Now that the dry fit is done, I have to take both of them apart again, sand all the pieces smooth, reassemble them (this time with glue), and finally brush a couple coats of clear polyurethane sealer on them. I never thought about painting them because I like the look of wood grain, even when it’s plywood.
They don’t look like much from this angle, but each one of the bins is large enough to hold as much as those rolly bags you can carry on a commercial airliner. I could pack a week’s worth of shirts, socks, and undershorts in just one of them and still have plenty of room left for toiletries, a book or two, something to write with, and I don’t even know what else. That leaves all the room under the bed for food, utensils, and other essential camping gear.
My woodworking “skills” boil down to tinkering. I cut a piece of wood. I cut another piece of wood. I discover one piece of wood is too long so I cut it again. I fit them together. I repeat this process until I have something which resembles the thing I had in mind in the first place. It’s not exactly what I had in mind, but it’s close enough as to make no difference. At least not to me.
The piece above is a perfect example. I started by cutting the piece at the bottom of the photo, standing edge-on to the camera. Its length was a total guess, but it had to be a certain width. Then I cut the piece that’s laying against the workbench. It used to be the same length as the first piece. I should have cut it to be three-quarters of an inch shorter, because there are two end caps made of three-eighth-inch plywood. I didn’t realize that until I tried to fit the pieces together, even though the end pieces were part of the build from the start.
To anyone who would say, “If you drew a plan ahead of time, you’d catch these rookie mistakes,” I would say, “Yeah, no.” I’ve drawn plans before. Trouble is, I think in two dimensions. If I drew all the pieces fitting together, my brain would think of them as having length and width but no depth, even while it knew that one piece is half-inch ply and the rest are three-eighths-inch ply. It’s this cognitive dissonance that lets me cut each and every piece to the wrong length, so that I have to make multiple trips to the table saw to shorten pieces up as I tinker them together.
This Is Drivel 