Exploring your ideas in cardboard before you start buying or cutting up potentially expensive materials is well worth doing when developing something new.
Planning things out on paper first is a must but, even producing a full set of drawings on computer, never really provides you with a true "feel" of how they will work in practice.
Mocking things up in card and sticky tape will help you get a better handle on the scale, functionality and practicalities of these and how they will relate to each other when the work is finished.
It is a significantly cheaper and quicker way to prove your big ideas rather jumping straight in cutting up wood or fabricating steel.
The biggest physical restraint in any vehicle conversion is the width followed by the height and finally the length of the space you have to work with. I opted for the Hyundai i800 based on all of these considerations measured against the cost of acquisition.
Being a van based commercial people carrier it is BIG. Dimensioned at 1.92M wide, 5.12M long and 1.3M high on the outside, it’s fairly roomy inside.
The uncluttered space from behind the driver and passenger seat slides to the rear up and over is 2.55M by 1.45 ( narrowing to 1.2M between the wheel arches at floor level ) and 1.35M from floor to the head lining.
Enough room to have a bed or two with storage below and still have floor space for a night loo / undressing area immediately behind the front seats.
Physically modelling things with card in the van highlighted the opportunity for a vertical store cupboard just inside the side door behind the passenger seat. This could store things one regularly needs without needing to get into the van to reach. Wet coats, walking boots, day bag kind of stuff.
Having a facility just inside the side door to hang / store wet things also seems to make good sense if I can make it all fit.
The focus for now is on the main things we want to have which directed our decision to buy a van for camping in rather than a tent. Two single beds lifted off the ground, somewhere to sit and relax in the dry. A potty for those “caught short moments” at night and the privacy to use the van anywhere.
Everything else will be a plus to our original wish-list.
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