Entering planning mode

With van acquired we began to work on the floor plan of the perfect van. The wonderful, and daunting, thing about this is that you can do just about anything you want which led to a bunch of ideas that brought us to a simple conclusion, for everything you add to your floorplan you loose something else. When planning our van it was really nice to have already seen so many van tours on YouTube which gave us a pretty good idea of wanted and started our quest with a list.

• Bed, this one was obvious but still needs to be here.
• Inside storage for our bikes keeping them safe.
• Indoor shower so we could easily wash up after an event and in the event parking lot if desired.
• A place to sit where we could look out of the side door.
• Kitchen with hot running water.
• No propane (this means electric heating and cooktop)
• Insulation, this is a tin can and every little bit of insulation we can get is going to help.
• “Office” type area for working on the road.
• Awning that will cover the sliding door opening for a “front porch”

We started out with drawings in a notebook. Personally I am a pretty heavy oneNote user while my wife prefers old fashioned paper. No matter the method it was very nice to have these drawings to reference throughout the build. We made several drawings that sounded amazing but became clear that they couldn’t actually be built because in the real world you can’t have two things occupying the same space at the same time. So, after many drafts we settled on one that we liked and then transferred that from the scale drawing onto the floor of the van.

The real world example started to help us tweak our dimensions further as we noticed things like man that shower is not actually large enough to shower in or how large can we make the kitchen counter before the walkway isn’t large enough for is to get by one another. Definitely a worthwhile exercise and also makes it much easier to describe the layout to your friends and family.

Once the layout was ready and we had a loose plan of what to do when began the ardious task of ripping out the paneling to reveal the walls.