Oh that's better! Bunks next. After I lifted the main bunk squab to see what was underneath I discovered the vinyl cover had burst it's zip and the foam rubber I could see was, frankly, disgusting. Remove and throw away. Also the pan it sat in has a damp spot in the middle, mine and other's body sweat most likely as well as evidence of an old leak in the front right hand corner. (more on the leak saga later) So a nice new mattress was indicated but in the mean time I'd camp out on one of the bunks and left the mattress tray dry out. No problem, just shift operations to one of the 4 other bunks available. For no reason I chose the one in the left of picture, seemed comfortable enough. Quite neatly the back rest swings up and gets propped to form the upper bunk. Until I tried it. Narrow! Also it had 1 count it 1 cross support, a a curved steel rod about pencil thickness half away long. Perfect for balancing your kidneys on. Bottom bunk it is then. At least now the bottom bunk was 4 or 5 inches wider but the top bunk was just high enough to pull up your knees and no more. One night of that and I removed the top bunk.
Note removed chest of drawers in the middle. The wheel arches (boxes actually) fill the front half of the under bunk space, the rest taken up by a badly thought out drawer on each side. Also byebye.
Time was spent with sketching the insides how I thought I might want it. To start with I thought I might leave in the left-of-photo bunk and put in a 2 person dinette where the right bunks are with the fridge next the side door. Then I thought I would gut the whole thing, put a small wood burning stove in the back left hand corner and leave the rest of the space for a pair of armchairs.
A some years earlier I lived in a camper for 4 months with my then partner and a number of interesting things revealed themselves. First off, the camper you holiday in is NOT the camper you live in long term. Campers are by their very nature 1 big compromise. You try as hard as possible to pack as much as you can into a finite space. In this case living accommodations for 6 people. Living on board long term is a different ball of wax. Right from the outset I planned it to be semi-permanent living for 2 people plus an extra as needed. 2+1.
The biggest must for long term living is a permanent bed always set up and ready to go. When I lived with my partner this was not possible. There was a cab-over bed but due to a debilitating injury she was unable to climb up to it. No major problem, there was a second double bed made by dropping the dining table and we used this instead. All we had to do was choose between having a bed or having a dining table. Tedious. Also when bedtime came, I had to go outside and admire the night in order make room for bed making. Finally and to my mind most irritatingly the bed mattress was a series of seat squabs arranged to make a bed. I ALWAYS ended up in a gap someplace!
The camper itself was modern design Toyota, drove handily and diesel to boot. It was set up as a 4+2 birth and was packed to the hilt with all sorts of spiffy gadgets. Even had an on board bathroom complete with hot shower and chemical toilet. We never used any of it and the space was used for storage and somewhere to put the cat tray. Yup, even had my cat on board. Thus the living vs holidaying thing. At the time I gave some thought about what I would change, but given that it wasn't actually mine I never changed a thing.
So. Permanent bed. I don't mind climbing the boarding ladder up the cab over bed, it's a good size and has a window at each end for good ventilation and views. A trip to Para Rubber for new foam squab came as a shock, a 2 X 1 meter pad costing me NZ$173!!! Ouch! Instead of making a cover for it, I discovered a king single duvet cover was just the right size, so a cheap (NZ$12) one was had and that was that. I move off the horror bunk and back up into the hump. Time to rip some more stuff out.
Stripping away the layers of nice thick ply wood (saved for later and proved well useful) revealed the bunk form. The big square thing is the wheel arch, note awkward storage around it as well as the daft drawer with oodles of wasted space to the right of it. Byebye.
Oh the horror! The photo doesn't show it but in the right hand corner is a fist sized hole in the floor where a historic water leak has been at work. The back window has been leaking for years in the corner, easily noted by the old water tracks down the wall where I peeled back the black lining. OK, I expected this sort of thing, it's a 30 year old camper that doesn't look like it's had any TLC in the last 20. More horror. A gentle push on the middle of the bottom of the window causes the whole back wall, window and all, to bow out nearly 2 inches.......Oi Vay! Ok, finish ripping out and salvaging both bunks, I need to get to both sides of the back wall to see just what I'm dealing with.
Yup, the back wall is being held together by the aluminium sheet and not much else. Most of the joints have let go. Who ever built it in the 1st place cheaped out and just glued the joints without putting nails or screws. Go to work with screws and builder's adhesive, fix the pot hole in the floor with plywood and generally fix, glue and screw everything in place. Once that was under control I replaced the insulation and used the tops of the bunk/seats (nice thick marine grade 7 ply) to cover in the back wall under the window, braced on the floor, window frame and walls . Originally it was cheap 3 ply with all the rigidity of wet newspaper. A couple of days worth of cursing and swearing but now the back wall was more like the Berlin Wall. Getting somewhere! I kept telling myself I had passed the 'ripping stuff out' phase and was firmly in the 'putting stuff back' phase. Now I had a nice big open area to work with.
Time for more sketching and masking tape on the floor to delineate furniture. Things to think about. 2+1 people long term. Must be pleasant to look at. Must be fairly easy to do. Cheap without being a cheap skate. Storage. Solid.
I thought about rebuilding in ply and slat like the stuff I ripped out but dear god is that ugly! Not all that cheap either. Then I thought about some of the deeply cool house trucks I'd seen at gypsy fairs and the one thing that always struck me was the beauty and practicality of Tongue and Groove timber. Now we're talking!
New T&G was a daft price for common pine and native timber was just plain silly. Beside recycled timber is and will always be cool. Time to do some research. A trip to the biggest nearest timber yard showed that new timber was waaaay to expensive. However, the nice guy I was talking to said there was house wreaking yard just down the street..........
Was there ever! Old timber from here to there and back again in every shape and wood known to man. The owner was another nice guy (Levin seems to breed them) and knew exactly what I was talking about, leading me from heap to heap pointing stuff out and making useful suggestions. Yeah baby! And best (for me, anyway) of all, the yard was closing in a few months and everything had to go. I could have all the T&G I could eat for *drum roll* NZ$3 a meter!
Float home on a cloud of satisfaction.
The next couple of days were spent finalizing design and measuring out how much I would need. 51 Meters in assorted lengths.
Go back to yard and spend a couple of hours pulling out boards (80X30mm Totora, a New Zealand red hard wood.) Checking them for splits and damage and cutting them to slightly over length. 100 Year old floor boards full of interesting nail holes and rust stains, perfect! I ended up paying the guy NZ$200 for the use of his saw and spoilage. Most of the boards were 4 plus meters long, but by the time I cut the good non-split or damaged bit out, 2 meters or less. Stacked timber in the back of my dad's station wagon and took off before he could change his mind.
Now we can get going!
Built the right side first. This side is a twin seat and storage bin.
Doesn't look like it in the photo, but it's within a couple of centimeters of half and half. This was to work out quite usefully. What isn't obvious is the false wall I put in 120mm out from the actual back wall. In that is a full width gap filled by one of the old seat/bunk squabs. Table (not built yet) up, the squab lives in it's slot. Table down the squab gets pulled out and laid down to make a side to side (almost, 8 cm short but I can live with that) bunk/couch. The bloody awful vinyl is covered by a cut down duvet cover. Remember what I said about hating beds made up of several bits? Not this time. When the squab is being used, the 2 seat squab fits neatly onto the lower part for ad hoc seating. Starting to take shape. Cool!
Built the left side. This one is a single seat and the same width as the bunk/couch squab. The lower part just covers the wheel arch and stops short of the door to make the doorway more user friendly. The timber is covered with dust and gunk in the groove and on the side that was underneath. I used the other side so the board butted up neatly and nearly flat. All of it had to be scraped clean and wire brushed to give the builder's adhesive a clean surface to stick to. A long bead of glue in the groove then tapped into place and screwed to a cross slat and left to dry. Should be strong as all get out.
Once both sides were made I could move onto the bit I was looking forward to, building the table. In the below photo you can also see the end of the table. Seat tops are the last of the ply saved from the bunks. I was going to hinge them, but laziness won out, the tops have slats underneath to locate them firmly in place and stained to more or less match the T&G which I sanded and wiped with linseed oil. Looks brilliant! Seats are oiled, compare to the table top with currently isn't. Note the row of holes in the wall where the old bunk was.
The more observant of you will have noticed the table is a funny shape, 2 seats on 1 side, 1 on the other. This partly because I'm trying to make as much open space as possible and partly because I'm thinking of adding a pedestal seat later. The lower right side of the seat is boards laid flat in the wheel arches. Plenty strong enough to jump up and down on. Both sides are the same.
I was going to build the table top by just laying the boards together then cutting them to size, but Pop said 'Why don't you make the front 2 or 3 boards full length on an angle, it'll be much stronger...' He's good like that.
So I made the back section first, glued together and screwed to a temporary brace underneath. Then when that had dried, made the front section, glued and screwed and left to dry then cut n tucked the filler wedge to suit, slathered everything with adhesive and left it to dry some more. A day later the temporary brace was removed and the permanent V brace was glued and screwed. The open ends of the V are against the wall and provide somewhere to put the wall hooks, the sharp end of the V provides a good place for the steel leg.
How to hang the table proved to be a bit of a head scratcher. The easy thing to do would be to put a strip on the wall and sit the table on that with a peg at each end to hold it in place. Only catch with that was that I wanted the wall flat and smooth to be comfortable to lean against. After a couple of ideas I opted for a 50 X 24 X 2mm steel box section bar from one side to the other behind the false wall at table height. This was braced at both ends for downward and backward stress (table and people leaning on the wall) and screwed into place then covered with the 5 ply sheet and stained to more or less match the rest. Worked out quite well. The table itself is held up by a pair of 5mm coach bolts with their heads cut off and bent to a not quite L shape.
Holes were drilled into the front edge of the steel box and the bolts were wound into the table between the table top and the V brace. Totora is a lovely timber but splits at the least excuse. So pilot holes into the table were used and when I put in the V brace I glued the living hell out of it and put half a dozen screws per side in the last foot of timber. I'm building for the ages here, people, and who knows, maybe some day a dwarf might dance the fandango on it, who's to say? Better safe than sorry.
Table finally finished, gaps filled and given a good but not final sanding. I'm going to wait a few months until the table has hardened properly before I finish it. Then I'll plane it back and back until it's as flat as I can make it. I also discovered the builder's adhesive I used isn't that hard and refused to sand back cleanly the way the timber fill did. Here it is together before I added the wall hooks and leg.
Oh you pretty thing! You can see the angled boards at the front of the table fully supported at each end unlike the angle cut ones the way I was going to do it. Much better plan. The brick red stuff is the timber fill, the whitish stuff in the build's adhesive. Now to leave it for a few days to dry out enough to sand and oil.
The busy lino pattern is the original flooring, I cleaned away a layer of industrial carpet and another of white lino to expose this. After I sugar soaped the whole floor twice (oh the muck!) it isn't in too bad a shape, albeit a bit tacky. This can stay till I'm ready to relay the floor in cork tiles later. I'm hoping the cork will be warmer and a bit softer under foot as well as matching the timber better. Worry about this later.
The table leg caused me to scratch my head a bit. In the end I chopped up one of the bunk frames (thin wall 1" box section steel) with the hinged bunk leg visible in photo 3. The hinge was welded to the steel and was nice and strong. I carved out a strip to inlet the hinge pin and screwed the whole thing together. When the table is up the table is supported by the half buried hinge pin, strong as you like!
Finally it's all together and it looks like this:
Oh lovely! At this point I'm feeling well pleased with myself but a couple of things have become obvious.
First and most importantly is the point of the seat that jams you in the calf as you go to slide in the double seat.
Out with the hand saw and truncate the corner as much as reasonably possible. You can see this in the left hand side of the photo. Also it's harder than it might be to actually slide into the seat. I've curved the corners but not enough, also I'm going to cut a 3 inch strip off the front of the table to make access better but I'll hold out on this for a few weeks to see if I get used to it or it becomes obvious that it needs to be done. No rush. Need to think about squabs and stuff next.
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