Conversion Shevanigans: Panel Van to Camping Car

At some point in life there comes the time when you say, a car is not enough. Man and woman cannot live in a car alone. There is not enough space. So we worked our behinds off for a month and went on the hunt for a Van. To quote Louisa Omielan, "Upgrade, bitches!"

This post follows our conversion process from start to, if not finish, our current, liveable state. It all took far longer than we thought it would, and was more complicated than we believed possible. Doing everything ourselves allowed us to stay on budget, as well as to identify the bits we'd pay someone else to do next time! Our ethos was to reuse/recycle everything that we could, but buy new when we needed to. For example, the idea of using recycled carpet is now laughable, however the insulation, most of the wood and various other bits and bobs were gained from various second hand sources.

Our main goals with the conversion were to have plenty of storage space, so that everything would have a place, as well as to retain some degree of spaciousness - whatever you can gain from a 8' x 5' box. In addition, we also wanted the transition from day to night to be relatively painless.  After two years we were totally fed up with the colossal faff of trying to fit two people and all their stuff into a car and then move it all around between driving and sleeping. 

So please read on for a couple of rookies' account of how to convert a van from scratch.

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