Floor Prep and Insulation

So we finally had the original floor out and now it’s time to prepare the surface for the application of floor.

During all of our research we learned that something you want to figure out early in your build is whether or not you want to insulate. Once you’ve installed your floor you really can’t change your mind. We plan to go to some places where it is cold so this was a pretty easy decision for us. The insulation will also do a lot for helping keep down road noise too which is a nice bonus.

The goal is to lay down furring strips that will serve to provide a surface for attaching the plywood subfloor as well as give us an air-gap that we can fill with insulation foam

Quick trip to the hardware store for supplies and we’re ready to start building

Once we had the supplies it was time to get the surface as prepped as we can get it so we won’t have anything interfering with the insulation or the furring strips.

Preparing van floor really was quite tricky to do. There was a lot of brute force with pliers before I got the idea to continue the use of heat gun. Even using the, “apply heat until I can smell burning and then pull the glue off” method this took a ton of elbow grease, but eventually we got it cleaned up enough.

We elected to hang some plastic before painting to make sure that we didn’t get any paint in the cab. Once the plastic was hung we applied white rustoelum anywhere we had scratched during the demolition process.

We let the paint dry over night and resumed our work in the morning. Tomorrow’s mission… Get furring strips built out. This can’t be that hard right?

Nothing about this van is a square…. Everything…. is rounded in some way. This will prove to make almost everything a might bit trickier.

There were so many pieces that had to be made like this. Thankfully a machine built this vehicle so the angles are re-usable once you figure them out. Once I could put my straight edge across any two boards I wanted and have no gaps we were ready to move on to getting the plywood cut.

Now I would like to take a quick detour and mention that the better next step would have been to secure down the furring strips but that’s not what I elected to do.. I wanted to cut plywood next and then save the gluing for later. If you’re venturing out to build your own van I would highly suggest that you glue down your strips and insulate first. This is why. What we found is that the glue and the insulation changed where plywood hit against the wall, remember that nothing is square and it’s all rounded. In the end.. I had to redo all of this work.

So now we have the floor all cut out, just needed to circle back to glue down the furring strips and then add some insulation. Again.. you really really should glue your furring strips and insulate first.

Quick tool tip

If you don’t have a table saw and you want to make a long perfectly straight cut you can use any straight edge clamped to the workpiece. This is also helpful if you just want to break down plywood sheets into something significantly safer to manage at the table saw. You can see in the picture on the left there is a line that is measured to the exact distance from the right side of my circular saw’s table, so all I have to do to get a perfect cut is keep the saw against the straight edge.

Now that the insulation is complete we can secure the subfloor.