Now comes the fun part. The time has come to build stuff out of wood! Which means drilling holes. Lots of holes. Each hole I drill is an emotional experience and I find myself exhausted at the end of every day simply from the uncertainty of not knowing what’s going to happen. Is this the time I drill a hole in my beautiful cherry wall and miss the narrow metal stud behind? Or is this the time my drill bit snaps in half? Perhaps it’s not the drill bit, but the screw itself. Or maybe the drill jumps out of the screw head and mars the wood surface? Each of these things has happened and I’ve had to work around each issue. Every hole is emotional.
Building the floor was way more work than I anticipated. Mmm-maybe that’s not correct. Let me back up. Insulating the van is way more work than I anticipated! Insulating the floor is just the latest challenge.
Ivan actually came with a 3/8″ plywood floor already installed. It was completely filthy and I seriously considered throwing it out, but in the end I just cleaned it and modified it. It was already cut to size, which saved some time, and it was made out of a balls hard plywood, unlike the crap at Home Depot. The only problem was that it was mounted directly to the van floor, which didn’t allow any room for insulation underneath.
I decided to sacrifice a bit of headroom and raise the floor by 3/4 of an inch, which seemed like a reasonable compromise. I used 3.5″ x 3/4″ fir boards to build a support structure under the plywood.
This worked quite well, except that the mounting hardware that came with the floor no longer fit. The mounting plates are designed to extend below the plywood and reach the metal floor below. In order to get the mounting plates to fit, I had to mill out the fir with a hand router. I’d never used a router before, but it actually worked very well and now I’m psyched to use the router for other parts of the build!
I applied Reflectix and Thinsulate under the plywood, which should keep my footsies warm in the winter.
The last step was to cover up the plywood surface with rubber coin mat. I first noticed this stuff in Steph Davis’s van. I’ve seen a lot of build-outs that use some kind of hardwood flooring or laminate, but laminate wears really quickly and looks like crap in no time. A hardwood floor is nice, but expensive, heavy, and not terribly utilitarian. I don’t want to have to worry about spilling water on the floor or wearing shoes in the van. So I bought a roll of coin mat from Home Depot and called it a day. It’s very easy to cut with a utility knife and looks great. The seam between the two pieces will be covered by a sideboard.
I was about to put the floor back into the van and screw it down for the final time when my friend Dina happened to walk by. She asked it I was planning to write anything under the floor boards. I looked at her blankly. I’d never considered such a thing… but it was genius! I chose this quote by Don Hertzfeldt from his short film World of Tomorrow. I’d been thinking a lot about this passage lately.
