I am sitting in a dentist office writing this today. Lucky for me, I am just here for transport. Not so lucky for Miss Root Canal though. She’s back in the back and likely will be for an couple hours. I have irrational dental fears. My favorite advice columnist Dan Savage, talks about relationships having a “Price of Admission”. My price to The Wife is she must accompany me to the dentist. She sits at the end of the chair, holds my foot and maintains a steady stream of distracting conversation. —Something she does quite well just naturally so that part isn’t a huge burden on her. At the end of it, she forgets that she saw me quivering and drooling in the chair. This was my time to offer to do the same for her since root canals are much more serious than the variety checkups. She turned me down, thankfully, but still I am here in the waiting room. You scoff, but even this is a big deal. Usually I am out standing in the parking lot while she is seeing the dentist at our six month appointments.
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| The terminals on the isolator. I wired it before I attached it to the firewall. |
A while back I very briefly talked about installing the battery isolator. One thing I wanted to clarify because a couple of people have asked. The function of the battery isolator is to prevent the electricity usage in the back of the van from affecting the starting ability of the engine battery. It lets the engine charge my house batteries, but doesn’t allow house usage to strand me. The isolator itself has two big terminals and two small terminals on it. It is a pass through device, one side of the big terminals connects to the battery (via a fuse) and the other end connects to the house batteries (via another fuse on the house battery end).
The small terminals may or may not be marked for the positive and negative side. Mine were not. Their purpose is to run the relay that internally either connects or disconnects the two big terminals. When power is applied, the relay connects them. If the terminals are not marked positive and negative then it shouldn't matter. One side attaches to ground, I just ran a short wire and attached it to the body with a self taping sheet metal screw.
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| A piggyback in place. The red wire runs off to connect to the isolator. |
The other end attaches to the fuse panel on some circuit that only is powered when the key is turned on. The easiest way to do this is to buy something called a fuse tap, or piggyback. Ask for it at an auto parts store and they will be able to help you out. The way this works, you pull a fuse and stick this in it’s place. The piggyback has two fuses. One, the original you pulled out and a second fuse for the circuit the isolator is one. It is an easy install but important to know what wire goes where.
This week I was looking at the amount of rust on the propane box I had my son’s friend build. He told me back at the time I should throw a coat of paint on it. But back then it was cold. Then it was warm. Now it is heading toward cold again and I am finally getting around to it. Lots of rust had formed in the meantime. I chucked up a round wire brush into the drill and took off the top layer of rust anyway. Then painted it with some red rust preventing primer and on top of that a couple of cans of spray on truck bed liner. —As a side note, this is the same paint I spray paint on The Wife’s “goth chick” boots so she can look all badass.
Over the weekend I insulated a couple sections of the ceiling. I measure the space between the ribs and cut insulation to fit that space. Then when I have two fit in place, I put a 6” strip of quarter inch plywood over the top of the rib, secured with some self tapping metal screws. The strip will hold the insulation in place, additionally it will provide an air gap which allows me to count an R value of 1 for the foil lining of the poly iso foam. Theoretically this gives me an R value of eight for air-gapped 1” poly iso and 1/4” plywood. By house roof standards that is crap. But, in my 63 square feet it is the best I can do.
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| The propane basket with some paint on it. |
I realized, going back over my prior posts, I never talked about buying the mattress. Originally, during the on-paper-design-phase of this project, I heard about something called a “small full” bed size. It was very close to what I needed. The width of a small full is 48” and the length just three inches longer than what I needed. I thought maybe either this sized bed could be wedged in, or not as fun sounding, maybe possibly I could cut the mattress to length. I was hoping the wedging in would work. What I felt would be handy though, I would be able to buy sheets and blankets in this size and not have a bunch of extra material. I did all this research back in the first building days at the start of this project. Perfect, I thought. I went ahead and built the bed base 48” wide to hold this sized bed.
Fast forward to bed buying time. It seems Small Full beds are a European thing. That’s the trouble with doing research on a global internet. Can you imagine the shipping cost of one mattress coming from Luxembourg? I know I sure can’t. Same trouble with the sheets. Doing a project like this, you have to be flexible. I started to cast around again. I looked into futons first. My idea would be to buy a full sized one of the cotton batting variety, then cut it down. The Wife was dubious of my ability to pull this off. To answer this, I found a company in my Big City that will make custom size futons either of the spring or cotton variety. Cotten futons are still expensive, the custom sized ones not surprisingly are more expensive yet. For the size I was wanting I was looking at ~$900.
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| Looking up at the ceiling, you an see the strips of plywood running across and holding the insulation in place. |
I spent a little time looking for used ones on Craigslist with no joy. You might hear stories of the free futons being given away by people moving. I sure couldn’t find anything being sold for less than a hundred. The ones there were almost always the spring version. None of them looked new. The last thing I needed was a smelly bed bug infested mattress to start off with. I was looking for the cotton batting version but even if I could cut it to size, they have issues when you try to use them this way. You have to pull them out a fluff them up a couple of times a year and you should really rotate them every other time you change sheets. My research turned up they can develop mold because of warming cooling cycles of van life in the wintertime.
Eventually I had to give-up the futon idea. I started looking into foam. People were giving me tips about cheap sources of foam mattresses. I was told Sears sold them but I think they got out of that business years ago. From what I found there are a few different types and not surprising, you get what you pay for. The softer foam is a little cheaper, but won’t be good to sleep on long term. Soft foam allows your body to sink in and doesn’t provide you with the support you need for a comfortable night’s sleep. The other thing, soft foam breaks down and needs replacement. The lady at the foam shop told me I would need to replace soft foam yearly. I doubt that. Particularly since I only sleep on it four nights a week.
I also have heard a lot about memory foam. This is a foam that reacts, softening, from the heat of your body. It holds it’s shape and cradles you, spreads your weight on a long pressure point because the heavier parts of your body sink in deeper. Lots of people love it.* So I priced a 6” memory foam mattress as well I had no idea what stuff like this costs. Twelve hundred dollars!
(*Do your own research. Lots of people hate memory foam as well. They say it is hard to climb in and out of and it is super warm/hot to sleep on. There is no middle ground grey areas for memory foam users. They either love it or hate it.)
What I ended up with is a pretty comfy slice of the best of both worlds. The lady at the foam shop had me lay down on a few different examples of thicknesses and stiffness. I ended up with a six inch thick piece of the second firmest regular foam. The cost was $516. I was pretty shocked that it cost this much. I don’t know. When I started this whole project, I just had it in mind I was going to be able to buy some kind of bed for at the most a hundred dollars. So I considered this a way over budget item.
When I asked her about memory foam she suggested putting a thin memory foam topper over the top of what I had purchased. The price on a 2” topper from her shop was another ~$400 but when I demurred, she looked around, leaned towards me and in a conspiratorial whisper said, “Just go to Target. You can buy and inch and a half memory foam for about $30 and cut it down to size.” Wow, very cool. Thank you!
While I was a Target I picked up two sets of regular bed sheets. Sure, they are a little oversized and floppy but I wasn’t needing to pay shipping from London so I was happy. I had this all put together and in place in time for a Royal Visit. The Wife came and spent two nights with me in the big city. I know she enjoyed the investment because while I was hard at work, she was sleeping in the parking lot until almost noon. As for me, what did I think of it? Prior to this I had been sleeping on three layers of rock wool carpet padding. I thought it was divine!
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| Look how I am sucking my gut in on this shot. I must really be trying to impress y'all. But here, what I am trying to determine is what the table height should be. |
What led to the failure of this idea was math. Once I started looking at how long I wanted the table to be I realized it couldn’t fold down because the length of the table would be determined by its height above the floor. I wanted it longer than that. Additionally, in a folding down design, its edge would have to be beyond the edge of the bed. Any stray bedding would get caught up in the table folding process. I was bummed, as I always am when one of my designs won’t pan out.
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| The original table design with cup holders. |
The wife didn’t like the idea from the beginning. She felt like the cup and napkin holders were wasted space. She made a good point, “are you going to be drinking at the table when you are going down the road?” No. “So why do you need cup holders? What are you holding? They will only collect crap!” Ah she knows me so well.
What she proposed was a great idea. Rather than fold the table down, taking up the prime space of the van, why not make it fold up against the wall? The first thing to begin to test this out was to build a cardboard mockup. We had some big boxes and cut out an initial tabletop. Starting out, I just held this in place. We had one side taped to the side wall. Over the span of two weekends we toyed with a couple of versions of this mockup and could see it’s advantages. The first being, it didn’t take up floor space when it wasn’t in use. The length of the table could now be limited by the ceiling height (being greater) rather than the distance down to the floor.
….Gosh, I’ve never done this before. This post is getting long. Lets continue this in the next installment.
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