Hi i'm claire and this is Craig and right now we were supposed to be traveling around Australia
and New Zealand in a campervan but since we had to cancel those plans we decided to buy our own van
and have a go at self-converting it into a campervan. Neither of us have a huge amount
of DIY experience and being in a wheelchair adds another challenge so it's going to be an
interesting experience. In this episode we finish off our second cabinet before adding the final
touches to the van. First of all we need to cut out all the wood for our doors. For this section
of the cupboard we're going for a pull-down door so we've cut out our door here we've
got these hinges and we're just going to drill the holes for the hinges now and screw them in.
We're ready to hang the doors for the sink cabinet now we've painted the wood which
we cut out earlier and now we're going to attach some hinges and put them up.
We're now cladding the side of this cabinet here and it's a bit more complicated than
some of the other claddings we've done because this wall here is curved so what we have to do
is measure out the size of the cladding first and take it over to the table saw and cut it to size
then we have to bring it back in and then we have to scribe the edge of the wall
with the cladding to get the curved shape that we need then we have to take that back
over to the saw and we're cutting this this time with the hacksaw to get the curve
and then once we've cut the curve out we're then bringing it back and nailing it on.
We finished cladding our wall yesterday but it went dark so we couldn't show you the end of it
now, we just need to add the finishings.
We finally got around to putting some handles on this cabinet here which has
been in the van for months now without any. We finally put a front on this cupboard here
which was open for absolutely ages we just happened to have an off cut from
the countertop which was the right size so we thought that would look quite nice here
and now we need to add some handles to the cupboards on the other side.
we're now installing this countertop which is going to be a flip up countertop.
We cut this out a few weeks ago when we did the rest of the countertops
but we haven't installed it yet so we're doing that now using these flip up hinges.
Today's task is to cut out some more doors for our cabinet
Now that we've cut out the doors we need to add handles and hinges
We're going to be painting all of the doors on the bottom but we've decided
that we're going to oil the upper door instead as a bit of a feature.
Today is a nice sunny day which means it's finally time for us to paint these cabinets.
I'm going to be painting the cabinet in the van and Craig is going to paint the doors over here
Now that the paint has dried, I'm going to attach all of the doors onto the cabinet.
We designed this cabinet so that these cupboard doors could double up as
tables so all we needed to do was take some timber and cut it down into some table legs
and then we simply just place the table leg down on the floor and pull the cupboard doors
down on top of the timber and then we have a nice sturdy table. We did originally have one big table
but in the end we decided to cut it down in two so that we could access both of these cupboards
independently because it was a bit clunky to have to pull the whole table down every time
we wanted to get in it but it also means that when we're sitting here one person can use the
table and one person could just sit if they want to rather than both having to do the same thing.
So we're now making our curtains for our van with a bit of help from Claire's mum.
We've measured the width of the curtains and the height of the curtains out allowed a bit of
extra width so that they can gather a little bit and now Claire is cutting them to size.
So what Claire is doing now is cutting the thermal backing for our curtains
So we've got this as a separate roll we've measured it all to size and now we're going
to cut these and then we're going to stitch them together with a curtain so that they
form a better thermal barrier over the window and then they'll also make the curtains black out.
I'm just going to drill a small hole into the side of the van here so that we can
try and put some curtain hooks up to fit our curtain rails.
We went away for a few days to test out the van and see how it is in practice and most stuff
was all right but we did notice a few problems and one of the problems was this drawer here. So
we've driven around before and the magnets that we'd installed had always held it closed but we'd
always been driving around with an empty drawer so as soon as we added the extra weight of food in
the drawer we suddenly noticed that the cupboard door started flying open as soon as we went around
bends which is obviously not ideal so what we're doing now is we're adding some extra hooks to
keep it closed while we're on the move and then we're also going to add some
extra hooks to these cupboards over here as well just to stop them from having the same issue.
And now it is finally time to do something that I've been waiting
to do for absolutely ages and that is to put this map on this wall.
One of the other changes that we've made since testing out the van is that we decided to cut
this other smaller cushion into two so that we can operate the pull out bits of the bed separately so
we can have one person lounging here at the back at the same time as somebody else
can sit here at the front using their one table and it also means that we can get to
one set of cupboards without having to move the whole bed across as well. Another change we've
made is we've added a few extra shelves in this cupboard here just for better storage. And that's
it, we've finished the van conversion we're now off to the lake district so we'll see you then!