End of Week 10

25 April

There's a week missing from the blog - the pressure to get all the work done was too great. Early starts, full working days and complete exhaustion - what an absolute blessing a glass of wine is then.

So, this is it: week 10 - the last week. I've set next Tuesday as the date for the first trial run, and I'm pretty sure I'll make it. This afternoon (Tuesday 25th) I spent a very uncomfortable hour re-connecting the gas - this time with a regulator. I suppose I should have known the LPG tank would need a regulator but the firm that sold me the kit did not say anything about needing one so I assumed it was part of the tank. Another £60 , More pipe bending, joint making and grovelling under the van working at arm's length: I got the joints tight but decided not to test it this evening - I'm too tired and it's too important to be fuddled by exhaustion.

28 April 

I'm  usually pretty critical of my own woodwork. I see all the little faults, and I'm constantly making small mistakes (and occasionally big ones) which take time to put right. Today though I managed a very difficult job as well as I could have hoped. If you've no interest in woodwork skip the next paragraph!

Having decided to use a mixture of cherry veneer onto poplar ply and solid, locally grown cherry wood for the edges and corners, and having rounded the vertical edges of all the bits of furniture where sharp corners might be a problem, and having decided on a rounded corner on the worktop, I (pause for breath) wanted the table to have rounded corners. I decided to use a burgundy coloured hard laminate for the worktop and the table, glued down onto poplar ply and edged in solid cherry. It's easy enough to do the straight sides with a half-round cherry moulding, but getting 4 clean symmetrical and identical curves on the corners of the table can only be done with a jig and a router. The jig was simply a piece of scrap 6mm plywood with an accurately  rounded corner. It was cramped to the table top 3 mm in from the edge. The router is fitted with a ring fence, 6mm high, surrounding the cutter and offset by 3mm.  More difficult is the matching jig to make the concave curve in the solid cherry wood. My knowledge of geometry is rudimentary so I had to work it out mostly by trial and error. I'd been thinking about this problem for 2 days, but it still took most of the morning to work out all the angles. Once the jigs were made and tested the actual machining time was in minutes. I was hugely gratified to be able to glue the whole lot together with no gaps.  

Sunday 30 April

 The big event yesterday was installing the kitchen and testing the gas water heater for the first time. It didn't light and there was a red light flashing, but reading the manual I found a procedure to clear what they call a "gas lock-out" and ping! A green light! That was a great moment, only partly down-graded by a smell of gas. I quickly switched everything off and turned off the gas, but I was too tired last night to try to identify the leak.

Now I've lit the heater again but shut off the gas to the kitchen area where it will feed the hob and the grill.  So far no gas smells. Then I turned on the kitchen area and soon found the leak - one of the compression joints not tight enough. Now everything is working and there is no gas smell, but I won't use the van until I've installed a double gas alarm which can pick up carbon monoxide and narcotic gases.

Now the mattress is in, the sink and hob are installed, there is hot and cold running water, blown air heating, hook- up power, spotlights, fridge, toilet.  There is still loads to do - it all looks untidy and messy still, but it's on track.

End of Week 8

Just two weeks to go until road tests must start and it's a Bank Holiday Weekend.  Bank holidays - the bane of the self-employed! Why would anyone, if they had the choice, want to go on holiday when everyone else does? Nothing will be achieved until all the traffic jams have been dispersed, the crowded shivering camp-sites deserted, the short-haul flights back and landed, and work can begin again.

In my case, important questions in emails to my suppliers will go unanswered.

And that's another thing. Why do so many people in business simply ignore emails? I use the general term "business", but I had not really come across this until I began buying from people in the motor trade and the offshoot camper and caravan trade. It's a lottery. Some are good communicators in any medium, but far too many simply assume that if you want a question answered you will ring them. A few don't even offer email as an alternative.

I have made good progress this week, but "behind the scenes" as opposed to in the van. I can't install the furniture until I've got the water connected and running, and it took me over a week to find out what fittings I needed and get them ordered. I finally got the order in on Thursday, and got a machine generated email proudly declaring that my goods would be delivered next Tuesday.

I got the gas all connected up and leak tested, but couldn't get the air heater to ignite. My question to the suppliers about this hit the bank holiday wall, and will probably have to be repeated on Tuesday.

Meanwhile I've been making and fitting drawers to the kitchen unit. This is easily the most expensive and time-consuming of all the furniture, if for no other reason than my decision to fit four wooden inset drawers. Most modern kitchens go for the easy option of lay-on doors and drawers, metal drawer runners, ready-made metal drawers with screw adjustments for the wooden drawer fronts, and those big metal sprung hinges which control the movement of kitchen doors. These fittings are designed to have plenty of adjustment potential - wriggle room. Not mine:  all the adjustments are made with plane, sander and screws - you shave a bit of here, test, shave some more, test. If you take a little bit too much off on one drawer it throws all the rest out. If a screw hole is slightly to one side of the optimum position you  have to fill the hole and make a new one. At present all I can see are the faults. I just hope the final appearance will justify all this fiddling. As you can see, more fiddling will be needed before I can do the final coat of varnish:

End of week 7

The workshop is full of nearly-finished pieces of furniture, but I can't install any of them until I have all the electrics, plumbing and gas up and running. Apart from one of the switched spotlights, the electrics seem to be OK, but though I have the gas tank installed under the floor, I made a nasty mistake in soldering up the piping without a cut-off tap, and I still don't understand how to connect the pipes to the tank - that is a high priority this week.

The lack of space adds to the pressure. I feel it most of the time - the stiff neck, the gut-ache. The whole body feels worn. It's obsessive what I'm doing, and I feel I'm pushing this old body to its limits. I can almost hear those septuagenarian  bones and muscles saying

" Hey- give us a break. We've been around for a long time and need a bit of rest." But the mind says

"Nonsense, you're getting fitter. Against the odds you are building muscle. Keep at the exercises, they are keeping you healthy and holding back the inrushing tide of decrepitude."

Such obsession is a selfish thing. I neglect those I love, miss birthdays, I'm not giving attention to the cares of others, but I am not condemned. What I am doing is comparable to the selfishness of the athlete whose only care is to push the body to its limits, to be the best. We love them for it and we applaud the old person who can still run a marathon or go surfing or cycle up mountains - not that I can do any of those things.

And yet, we all must accept that as each decade passes, each faster than the last, there are things which we can no longer do. We can maintain and improve skills we gained in previous decades, but we can't learn new languages or craft a 6-pack stomach.  I can't cycle for 50 miles - I just don't have the muscle for it. We can't win at anything in competition with younger people. Winning is not a concept that sits well with old age. We have a great contribution to make, but it is a subtle one - that of inspiring, consoling, helping, restoring.

Who knows if this project will inspire anyone. It will be as good as I can make it and that seems to be a worthwhile end.

End of Week 6

It’s a lovely day and the conversion job feels a lot better this week. I’ve even taken some time off to do some gardening. Most of the furniture is now under construction and some almost finished. Many self-builders make their furniture with a softwood frame covered in thin plywood. I’m building glued carcases which can then be removed if necessary later.

My first attempt at veneering (as reported last week) did not end well, but I’m getting into the swing of it now and actually enjoying the work. One big time saver has been the decision to treat the inside or unseen surfaces with linseed oil. It darkens the bland poplar plywood and makes it look almost like proper timber. It’s an easy and durable finish which I have used a lot in the last 10 years. At present the solid cherry parts of the structure look very different from the veneered. This is partly because the species is almost certainly different, the veneer being American cherry and the solid our local version. There are two more reasons though: modern veneer is cut on a huge lathe which takes a continuous sheet of timber from the circumference of the trunk. This gives the grain a much more spaced out look compared to the old sawn veneers. The third reason is that the veneer has been exposed to the air for all the time it has taken to be coated with glue, packed and sold. My cherry timber has only just been exposed to the air this week so it will take a time to darken and mature.

One of the most difficult jobs with the furniture has been fitting it neatly to the vary varied profile of the sides of the van. This involved 6 different templates, each of which took about an hour to make. The technique is usually called “scribing” but that process is for profiles without too big a variation – you position your template (or the actual object) perpendicular to the wall, measure the largest distance from the object to the wall, make up a block of wood to that size and then, keeping the template perpendicular, use the block to guide a pencil mark. With the van the widest point was something near to 100mm so it’s really a question of estimating the distance by eye, drawing a rough profile on the template, cutting it to the estimate and then drawing, cutting bits off, drawing again, cutting again . . . and again and again. They all seem to fit within a couple of millimetres.

The other great difficulty with working in a vehicle is that you can’t use a spirit level. What constitutes upright? You can only use vertical elements like the back doors or the main struts. Sometimes the only way is by eye.

The big black water tank finally arrived this week. It’s just a sealed black plastic box so I will have to drill holes and fit caps to it – not sure quite how yet! I also decided on the lining carpet which will go on the ceiling and any exposed walls – a medium to dark grey called Anthracite.

Today I finally brushed on the first coat of polyurethane varnish on the two overhead cupboards. One of these – the one above the sofa – will be the first piece to be finished and fitted because it will have the switch panel in it which controls most of the electrics.

The really difficult but rewarding work next week will be in deciding on the sequence of finishing work. The carpet will go onto the walls before I fix the lockers, and all the doors will have to be finished and fitted in the workshop before it is screwed into place. Then I install the switch panel and make all the connections. Then I can test most of the electrics, and if all is well I can then do the whole ceiling and at least some of the walls with the carpet material.

The water and gas are more difficult. In normal kitchen fitting you would bring the pipes to an approximate position, fit the worktop, sink, hob etc. and then get the gas and water connected. The problem here is that I need to test the system before things go too far to be easily reversible if there is a fault.

So, next week should be fun!