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We are heading out tomorrow for our first snow trip of the season to Schweitzer in Northern Idaho. Our friends Aaron and Wendy, their two kids, Aaron’s sister and brother in-law, and their kids will all be there for New Year’s. It’s going to be a full house! We are excited to see them all because it is has been quite a while and our friendship with Aaron and Wendy goes way back and the last time we really partied with Aaron’s sister and brother in-law was New Year’s 1999 when they were all childless! Boy, a lot of things have changed since then!

In preparation for our trip we wanted to get the walls in. In order to get the driver’s side wall in, I wanted to finish up running a couple electrical items. First, the set of four bedroom lights needed one tweak and then to be secured with some type of wire clamps. I also wanted to run an empty conduit from the front where the electrical system will be housed to the rear pillar. You never know what you might want to run later! Sara has been working on the walls with stain and poly so there were almost ready to go.

Boring picture, but this is where the lights will drop through the wall. The refrigerator/microwave cabinet will be right in front of the bed so the switch for the bed lights will be set in it, right in front of Sara’s head.

The conduit set in the rear pillar. There is an access panel on the door side of the pillar and I was able to squeeze my hand in there and grab the conduit. (I remembered to run a string through the conduit first so I can later pull a wire through!)

In some places I used a simple adhesive-backed wire clip to secure the conduit.

In other places I used a sticky pad through which you can insert a zip tie.

Generally I found the zip tie solution to work better because sometimes the wire clip broke. The adhesive on both is quite strong. In a few places I still added a little gaffers tape just to make sure the empty tube doesn’t bounce around.

Once that was all done it was time to put in the first wall. As I mentioned earlier, the driver’s wall was done in one piece because we had already removed the bed.

One and a half walls installed, the bed platform reinstalled, and the van all clean for our trip. The other half of the passenger wall needs another coat of poly so we didn’t put it in yet.

On our way through Spokane we also plan to pick up some more 1/4″ and 3/4″ baltic birch plywood (we can get 1/2″ in La Grande). We also plan to hit West Marine for some more wiring and electrical supplies. Nice to have an excuse to be going through a big city.

We are snowboarding for three days and I think we packed just about all the snowboarding clothes we own. Our stuff was piled next to the back door and my mom asked, “Are you sure you have room for everything?”

??????

Seriously, mom? We have an empty cargo van! I’m pretty sure we can fit our snowboards and snowboarding clothes!

Today we worked on getting the driver’s side rear wall installed. With the bed off things were easier so we did not cut the wall into two pieces. It still required quite a bit of in/out of the van because we had to make a few cuts and  line up holes multiple times. This kind of work also inevitably leads to some minor problems – in this case we had some plus-nuts that were messed up in some fashion so we had to add some new holes as well. It is never particularly difficult, but what should take an hour or so ends up taking 2 or 3 hours. Sara also cut the reflectix so we have the whole thing insulated as soon as the wall is ready for a final fitting.

Sara also started putting polyurethane and/or stain on both of the walls. A camper van is not exactly the driest atmosphere and we want to make sure none of the wooden panels absorb moisture and rot/mold/mildew/etc. On my Ace trip today I picked up some additional bolts called truss bolts – essentially round-head bolts but they have extra large, shallow heads so I think they will work well for bolting on the wall. Normally I try to counter-sink any bolts, but the walls are only 1/4″ baltic birch plywood so there is no depth in which to counter-sink a bolt. These have plenty of surface area to hold the wood but they also sit fairly flush to the wall. They are sure a lot shallower than a normal bolt/washer combo. I randomly found them one day while looking at things in the hardware department at Ace. It is really amazing what all those little drawers hold!

We also rewired two of the factor LED cargo lights. As with any vehicle, lots of lights go on when you open the door. We don’t necessarily want that! Most of the lights are too bright and would be covered anyway once we are done covering the walls, but we do think it would be handy to have some light when we open the back door as that area will not be near any other lights. Our solution was to rewire the factory rear van lights to go under the bed.

This is a look back at how the lights were originally installed in the arch above the rear door.

We had previously popped the lights out of the back wall and they have just been hanging on the wires. We cut those wires and added about 10′ of wire so we could run them down the pillars on either side of the rear door, out a little access hole and up the rear bed posts. At some point we will figure out a nice way to attach them to the post. This will give us light in the storage area under the bed whenever we open the door courtesy of the van electrical system. I suppose it will also be a good indicator if a door is not completely closed.

Splicing our new wire to the original wire.

Taping up the wire that will run down the wall. We put friction tape on the entire length.

Sara did some crimping, too. Here she is about ready to plug in her light. We just kept the stock connectors and added them back in to the end of the new wire so they fit right back on the OEM lights.

The faint red lines show the path from where the lights were to were they are now. They actually run along the wire harness to the corner, then down the wall to the bottom, into the pillar at the back, and out a hole next to the bed post. The wire whole fan wire harness will be reattached to the walls once everything is built up around it.

Not a ton of van progress today, but we got some work done to get back on track.

The morning was spent dealing with snow from yesterday’s storm. This was our Christmas present to Dad.

To be clear, we did not buy him a new snowblower. Our gift to him was to convince him he really needed a new snowblower, and boy did he. His old machine was about 20 years old, it was single-stage, the chute did not even turn any more, and it only ran on half-choke. I am seriously impressed he managed to keep using it because I was fed up with it after only a few inches of snow!

He really started to get the hang of it.

He does, however, need to learn a little about how far it shoots snow. Some lady came up his driveway to tell him he was shooting snow on the road below and he nearly hit a car with a rock. Then I looked at the front of the house. Good thing there were no rocks on the driveway!

When we finally got focused on the van, I spent a while installing some final bolts on the solar system while Sara did a pretty massive garage clean-up so we could keep working. With the bolts installed I don’t think there is any more reason to get up on the roof. Sara also kept putting in more plus-nuts while I made an obligatory Ace run, then we put in our first wall. It actually took quite a while because we had to measure and cut multiple times (e.g. we kind of forgot the van wire harness that needed to be accommodated), then we had to do our trick with the hanger bolts to figure out where all the holes will go. It did work well, though, so we have our first wall temporarily in place. We still need to stain/poly it and run a couple more wires, but we are excited to have some visible progress.

We had hoped to get the wall in without removing the bed, but that wasn’t to be. As long as I had a couple bed posts out I modified them so they can be removed a little easier in the future.  Our original method required either access to the back side of the floor bracket or to remove the whole bracket. Instead, I forced some stainless steel t-nuts in the back so we can now drive a bolt right through the entire post. This will allow us to remove the post from the bracket with only a wrench on the front.

A final picture to amuse those of you in New England used to salted roads and prompt plowing. Driving down the main street in La Grande today reminded me that not all snow-removal budgets are the same! I have no idea why the city had not even bothered to plow downtown for over 24 hours after the storm because I did see a few roads plowed in places, but downtown it was still up to 6″ of snow and now thick packed ice. That’s not going to be clean any time soon!

I couldn’t work on the van until the afternoon today and I dove into making sure the lights were installed correctly. I picked up a small 12V battery so I could test the wiring we did yesterday and finish the other four lights today. Unfortunately, my testing showed the stupid splice connectors we used suck. I had feared this a little because I don’t think the wire coming from the lights is the same gauge as the 18ga wire running from the lights to the switch. Sure enough, the light that was spliced in with the connector did not work.

We have two sets of four lights and each will be controlled with its own 12V LED dimmer switch. The four lights over the bed will be switched on the driver wall behind the refrigerator. The four lights over the galley will be switched on the passenger wall behind the stove.

So, each pair of lights at the same point in the van get connected with a wire running across the van and then those two wires get connected before the switch. This means I need to splice one light into the other for each pair and then one set of two lights into the other set of two lights. Three splices total.

In some of my sleepless hours last night I had watched a YouTube video on how to splice wires inline to existing wires. I figured that technique would work. It isn’t that hard and I am pleased with the results. I used the technique for both pairs of lights and then to join the two pairs to form the 4-light set.

Here is how it works using. These pictures show the last splice joining the two wires that each feed two lights. This splice is in the middle of the SO cord (insulated wire pair) so I had to remove the insulation and then strip the wire.

Step 1: Buy a new stripping tool that can strip wires in the middle of the wire. Fortunately I was able to get one on my first trip of the day to Ace.

Step 2: Strip a section of wire in the place where you want to add your incoming wire. In this picture I have also already stripped/removed a section of the insulation. It would have been a bit easier if I had stripped a little more insulation.

Step 3: Use something pointy to carefully divide the wires in half.

Step 4: Strip a good 1.5″ on the wire you are going to splice in. Insert that exposed wire into the gap you created.

Step 5: Hold the two wires together and tightly wrap the end of the wire around the area of stripped wire you exposed. Here I have already wrapped the negative and partly wrapped the positive.

Step 6: Wrap it up in good electrical tape. The internets recommended at least three wraps. You can solder the connection if you want, but this method does make a very strong connection. I messed up a few of the wires on one of the splices (not pictured!) so I did add solder. Of course, I barely know what the heck I am doing using solder so it is not all that likely I improved my splice!

Step 7 (Optional): If you have access to one of the ends of the wire you can slide some shrink tubing over the connection.

You can see I did the same thing to add the lights. It seems like an especially good technique for joining two wires when they are not exactly the same size. Because I was also connecting two wires here using butt connector I slid some shrink tubing on these as well.

Boom! Lights!

Sort of. The very last board on each side in the front is not going to go in without a serious fight. As it stands we can’t get them in without either breaking something or cutting something major so we backed off. Both boards are short and will likely be covered by either trim, cabinets, or some foam blocks that cover the side curtain airbags. We are definitely calling it done for now! All of the supports are still up until the glue *really* sets, but it looks nice.

With that finished I also took a bit of time to install the floor trim on the rear door. This was a little more complicated than the slider door because the rear door arcs. I ended up cutting five pieces of trim with a few degrees of angle to wrap around the curve.

My dad came by to check on our progress so we have a couple group photos. Here Sara and I are deciding which board is going to go in.

Installing one of the last boards.

Wall to wall ceiling!

Measuring one of the rear trim pieces.

Trim installed. It looks nice, but I’m not sure the effort to extend the floor all the way to the end and make it look nice was worth it! It definitely added quite a bit of extra time compared with most builds that just end the floor short of the rear doors. Also, we didn’t bother at the time to cut a hole to access the spare tire mechanism so now we have to find where to drill the hole. Probably should have just done that when it was visible!

With things essentially finished on that project we owed the dogs a nice walk. We also wanted to get a Christmas tree for the van. So, we headed out to the snow to play. My dad came along because he wanted to get some sunset photos at a park up in the hills above La Grande.

Setting up the family photo.

Explaining to the pups how they needed to behave.

Family photo with the van Christmas tree!

Tanzi posing with Sara.

Kenai just posing for the sunset.

The ceiling work actually went pretty well today. The planks on the curves at the front went in a lot better than yesterday. When the first one slid right in we looked at each other in amazement. I don’t know if we got better or if the curve lessened, but I don’t care, it was much less frustrating. Most importantly, we are almost done! The back 38″ IS done! The middle needs another plank, and the front needs two or three planks to the edge. The edge will be covered by cabinets and/or trim pieces so we only have to get close. It really looks fantastic and although there are some places we will always look at be reminded of the mistakes we made, I’m sure we will be happy with how it turns out.

We did get somewhat sidetracked today by preparing and installing the lights. We are using eight LED lights recessed in the ceiling. The lights are super low profile and snap nicely into holes in the 1/4″ cedar. I was a little worried about how the 2 3/8″ hole saw would cut the planks, but it cut very clean.

The front four lights in the galley will be on one 12V LED dimmer switch and the back four over the bed will be on a second dimmer switch. We used regular butt-connectors to attach the LED wires to red/yellow 18ga automotive wire on one light and then ran it over to the light next to it. There we used splice connectors to add in the second light. The wire between the two is wrapped in fabric friction tape. After the splice the wire connects to Ancor 18ga SO cord, which acts as a conduit through the wall to the switch (or where the switch will be some day).

Sara learning to crimp butt connectors. Let’s just say we went through quite a few and not all of the mistakes were Sara’s!

Wrapping the crossover wire in friction tape.

Installing the lights.

Connecting the SO cord.

Looking at the back with wall-to-wall ceiling!

Of course, there are still some braces making sure it is tight as the adhesive sets.

Looking at the front. Still a little work to do, but we are so close!

Fingers crossed we will have a finished ceiling tomorrow!