Van Conversion Shower Updates + Headliner Shelf | Van Build Series

If you missed our last vlog we road tripped from Washington to Texas and we're now calling this our home base while we finish the van and hopefully take off at the end of this month. It's gonna be tight so we are leaving for Italy or we're supposed to leave for Italy on Thursday we're still kind of talking about if we're gonna actually do that or not or cancel the trip. I hope not cancel the trip. But we only have like three-ish days to work on the van until we leave and then when we get back we'll have maybe maybe two weeks. We're kind of reworking a few things trying to get this van done because we have to hit the road at by August 3rd at the absolute latest. We have somewhere we need to be on August 6th so it's crunch time but thankfully my mom and dad have been awesome and they've done a little bit of work on the van while we've been gone so let's show you what we've done since our last van video. Okay if you look here one really noticeable thing here the bright red here is called Red Guard and this is a water sealant or protectant for the wood here so and then tomorrow hopefully we're getting to put on the FRP board which is like the the walling of the shower. You might also notice some wires and some boxes on the wall so we've started to kind of get wires running through stuff. Nothing's wired up yet and we're not professionals at electrical so we don't plan to cover that in too much detail. Thankfully my dad's really knowledgeable on it but we do have some wires coming out of some spots where our outlets and our light switches will go which is exciting. Like this one! Something we were working on last time I was here was the windows here and now it's kind of mostly finished now but I'm super impressed with this because it's got all framed out here which is really beautiful to me and then there's a quarter inch gap here all along the inside edge here where we'll make a reflectix so that it'll keep the heat out and keep the cool in and vice versa so it'll go up in there and then it could slide up in there. One big thing that Adam worked on today is getting our headliner shelf made so he made a template and then this is what it'll look like so basically this is the part that will this is the bottom part so this is the part that will like be right above our heads and this is the top part where we'll actually store stuff. So we have done polyurethane on this and the next step is to actually put the headliner fabric on this side that way it kind of blends in a little bit better we also have some brackets that we've painted that will be used to actually attach it to the headliner. So this is the butcher block counter top that's going to go on top of our dresser so we cut it to size we sanded the edges here so that it's it's nice there and smooth and then what this monstrosity of a design is is took a drill bit a certain type of drill bit to drill out these holes and the point of this was to hopefully take some of the mass some of the weight off of this make it a little lighter maybe save a little fuel economy and just overall weight on the on the band super heavy dense and heavy so so obviously this is the part that will be underneath the counter so it's not going to be the part you see just wanted to mention that i think it's obvious but just in case you're wondering what our style is all about there you go so the goal for tonight is to get the headliner shelf done that way we can install it first thing tomorrow and also get going on the butcher block like preparation i guess to be stained so we're going to sand it do the wood conditioning and then hopefully do the first layer maybe two layers of stain tomorrow because it's a really long process through the butcher block there's like after you stain it there's like multiple like 12 hour steps so it's like a multi-day thing so we're trying to get that going yeah so we have a wild monday night on our hands here we're gonna go make some steak and then get back to it so the next step for the headliner is we're placing this headliner shelf on top of the headliner fabric that we bought it is this black headliner fabric from joann fabrics it's like a foam kind of backing and then it's the black fabric on the other side we couldn't really find a headliner fabric that perfectly matched our headliner and without going to see it in person it was just going to be too complicated so we got this because there are a lot of black accents in the van so it should look okay for like a more detailed um video of how to actually do the whole headliner shelf we've been watching this person's video i think their youtube name is our caravan we'll link to them below it's been super helpful we're honestly just on such a time crunch right now that we can't show like every little step but we highly recommend checking out that video if you want to build one yourself as i cut this i'm leaving some space on each side of the shelf a little extra fabric because we're going to fold it over and then we're going to use spray adhesive to attach it in order to make sure this looks nice when we fold it over because on these curves like if you can see like it wouldn't it would be like kind of bunched looking we're going to cut slits all around the curved spots that way when we fold it over there's kind of like a little bit of a gap i guess that makes it so it it lays flat on the side that you'd actually see and our last task for the night before we go to bed is to work on the butcher block we're going to sand it twice with two different like levels of grit and then we're going to put on the wood conditioner and then we're going to go to sleep and then tomorrow morning we will start to stain it so the reason that you condition the wood before you stain it is to basically make it so when you do stain it it's more like an even finish if you don't pre-condition the wood it could be a little like splotchy looking we don't want that it's another day of the van build and we're getting some really good stuff done let me show you we got the headliner shelf all in and we tested it and our two empty backpacking packs fit in here and we can fit two sleeping bags in here and i'm really happy because that was our biggest requirement that's why we built the shelf is we needed to be able to store our backpacking gear and the bags when they're full are pretty large and so we weren't sure if this would work but it does work and we'll just store all the extra backpacking stuff in our closet and i think it's gonna work out perfectly we also now have the kitchen butcher block cut to fit the sink it's really cool one thing that kind of sucks though is um the butcher blocks are not the same so they ended up sending us two different kinds of wood so the thickness of like the wood on the butcher block isn't the same which really kind of sucks and we're trying to not be perfectionist about it but it's too late now to do anything unless we want to spend more money and wait because we actually had to order these so home depot kind of messed up a bit it's kind of a bummer but we'll just say it adds character to the van okay so my big project today is to get the walls in the shower so what this brown paper is is a template of the back walls of the wall that you're looking at right when you're right when you're facing it so i made a i got some paper i kind of cut it to size and then where the parts that don't fit along the edges i added some tape here to try to kind of fill in the gaps and so now this paper is laying on top of the it's called frp board this is the shower walls so i'm laying this on here i'm going to trace it and then i'm going to take this bad boy and cut it out so the frp board that i was practicing on is thinner than the actual frp board that we're using so the uh the metal shears here this is kind of difficult so we're another exciting thing that we've done today which is a continuation of last night's activity is staying our dresser butcher block this is after the second coat may add a third i'm going to compare it to the flooring and see how it how it looks compared to that we have the first wall of the frp cut now we're going to put it in we're using this frp adhesive to attach it to the shower walls in this v-notch trowel once we got the frp board on we used a j roller to push the frp board against the wall and the adhesive compress it and just make sure it was evenly spread out and now we've put some wood up to hold it in place and let it sit overnight and we're going to start making templates for all the other parts another late night at the van build central uh so we just i made templates for the walls of the side walls of the bathroom and then we laid the templates out onto the full sheet of frp board traced it out and then cut it out with the jigsaw and then we placed them inside the shower to make sure that they fit they didn't at first so we made some modifications and now they fit really really well so it's dark now we don't really feel like applying the frp adhesive in the dark so we're going to wait till tomorrow to get the shower finished but things are looking really good for the shower we should have all the walls up tomorrow morning so our next step is very similar to last night we are going to be sanding and conditioning our table and also the piece that goes next to the table that makes the bed so this is not butcher block it's just regular wood i don't remember what kind of wood it is but we still need to sand it condition it so we can stain it tomorrow we bought a fancy new sander today because the other one wasn't doing so hot so excited to try it out i've learned that i don't really like sanding it's not the best sensation on your hand as it's like vibrating and it kind of hurts getting all the pencil marks and glue off isn't as easy as i thought it would be that's a wrap on tonight it's time to go to bed all right so a big step forward so our first task for today was to get all the shower walls in yesterday we got this back one on uh and so first thing this morning got this guy on the one over here and then i cut the rest of the trim pieces all around so all that's left to finish it off is to add the caulking around so that it's water tight rain delay so one thing that has gone wrong today is i stained our tabletop and noticed that there were scratches all over it and we don't know how it happened because we swear that when we sanded it last night we we did it the correct way so we're not sure if something else happened or what but so now i get to sand it down again which is a lot of hard work it's a good shoulder workout and then restain it so kind of a bummer to get delays because we're already behind but that's just how it's been going so the next fun task of the van build is installing an isolator so this will allow the as we're driving the alternator will charge the house batteries so it's been a uh quite a process even just learning how this works it's actually a simple thing but trying to figure out what i actually need to do it so uh there's a diagram that connects the alternator to the battery to the back batteries the house batteries so the seats are off because i had to get to the battery to unplug the battery basically so that i could unplug the airbags and so it doesn't set off like a sensor alarm which you'll have to pay for if and you have to go to the dealer and pay for them to re redo it so to fix it so uh we learned that last time and they helped us out they give us a free one yeah yeah they gave us our freebie so the seats are off and i'm running these thick wires up under uh from the battery under the driver's seat under this channel here under the passenger seat the heater's in there and then up under through here under this uh casing i guess it's gonna go up and over and back to our control panel back there and then eventually to our batteries so with the isolator this gives us three options to charge from so we've got the isolator so while we're driving it'll charge the house batteries the solar will be charging the house batteries and then if we're in a pinch or a pickle we can plug into the isolator for shore power like at a campsite or a house a friend's house something like that so we are taking care of on power which is good because if say we're up in the pacific northwest for a long time and the sun's not really out i'm sure the solar the solar powers still do charge but maybe just not as well so it's nice to have options so we can charge all of our electronics and work from the van and all that fun stuff so that's a wrap on another day of the van build i'm exhausted are you exhausted so tired it's been a long few days yeah so we actually have half a day tomorrow to work on the van before we go to italy we're so excited we are doing it we we're maybe gonna cancel but we're gonna go you might notice adam got a fresh new haircut for our trip snuck away can't go on vacation looking like a scrub so we do have half a day tomorrow to work on the van before we have to catch our flight and it's the fourth of july so we're both off tomorrow but we don't want to have to wait to post this vlog until we're back so this is the end of this vlog we do hope that we'll have one more van update vlog for you before our van tour huge big exciting goes live which we're nowhere near ready for that yet so we'll see what happens but ways to go just so you know to expect the next few weeks we're gonna have tons of italy vlogs like a ton of them so stay tuned for that and then when we get back from italy we're gonna have probably two weeks to work on the van so we'll try to squeeze out another van update vlog for you guys but yeah it's gonna be crunch time when we get back we have a lot to do we don't have much time so we'll see what happens but wish us luck yeah we're gonna enjoy our time in italy try not to stress about the van then we get back we're gonna hit it pretty hard and it will get done and it's gonna be awesome and we cannot wait can't wait we're back if you missed our oh this is a kind of our sanding our love you know what i got time for splotchy butcher block