Sprinter van: Flooring

The good news: our van has a floor. We're pretty happy with it.

The bad news: (it's not really bad) it took a couple of tries. 'Opportunities for learning,' as they say in corporate America. Seemingly not that long ago, our van had a pretty dirty floor.

Yikes. Yeah, that's awful. It was a tile van we remind ourselves. Obviously, at some point, we ripped that floor out. We saved it, though, because we knew it would make a wonderful template. Then the learning began. We read lots of different blogs and asked friends with vans, 'How did you install your floor?' The trouble was, every blog and everyone had a different method. Skipping ahead, this is what we ended up doing.

Starting with a clean floor after having plugged all the rivet holes with Steelstik and then priming them, we cut 1/2"-thick R-Tech foamboard insulation into strips. Then used silicone caulk to adhere them to the sheet metal floor.

It's worth noting, we ended up replacing the plastic door latch striker plate shown above (and the smaller one at the top) of the rear cargo doors. Both were cracked. With new plates and some door adjustments, the doors shut solid and didn't bang around as we drove. Noise-wise, the difference was actually pretty significant.

To create a solid floor that didn't squeak when we walked on it (one of our problems), we ripped some 1/4" plywood into strips and glued those onto the ribs of the van floor with Loctite PL400 subfloor adhesive. We used that because it's designed for adhering to wood and metal, works well in temperature extremes, and is rated for indoor/outdoor use. All important for what we needed. It's times like these I'm glad there are a hundred options for caulk adhesives.

That disgusting original floor? Yep, we used it to trace the shape onto our 7/16" plywood subfloor. It took three 4x8' sheets.

K makes the cutouts for the to-be bench seat mounting brackets.

We cut the subfloor back in June. When the weather was still sometimes epic. 

That was a focus test for my 100mm lens. It got a little dinged up when I fell off a chair trying to take a photo. Yeah, that's right. Since then, we've barely seen a cloud the entire month of July. It's also been hot. I'm not necessarily complaining. We love night time temps that hover in the 80s while the humidity peaks around twenty-percent. It makes working on this thing quite enjoyable. That and our north-facing garage which tends to be in the shadow of our house.

After testing the focus, I went to California, came back. Right away, we picked up where we left off with the floor. 

Speaking of epic, in the photo above of me contemplating deeply, the flooring we picked out is in the foreground. We literally were at the point we needed flooring when the Costco monthly mailer arrived. Conveniently, there was an option for flooring on sale. For $44.99$31.99 a box, we thought the Golden Arowana Sandalwood vinyl planks were perfect. Not really perfect, but would certainly suffice for a van floor.

For what it's worth, we did a bunch of research and browsed options at Lowe's and Home Depot before deciding on glueless vinyl flooring. It's waterproof and ideally suited for the conditions of a van. Plus, since it's not glued down, we can literally disconnect the planks and uninstall it. Not that we plan on doing that anytime soon.

To cut the floor to the shape of the van, we pieced it together on top of (that's right!) the original floor.

I then took my router off the table I built for it and used a pattern bit to trace the old floor underneath as it cut the vinyl.

Boom.

Then we disconnected the flooring and reconnected it inside the van.

It was really easy to install. Once complete, K sprayed expanding foam around all of the edges.

Making progress…

But there were a few more steps to our flooring. For the garage (the rear portion of the van under our to-be bed), we wanted a coin floor. That'll be where we shove skis and all sorts of gear. It's surprisingly expensive. Our best option (read: cheapest) was to pick up two boxes of coin floor tiles from Home Depot.

Cutting them was interesting. The instructions weren't terribly helpful when they said, 'Cut tiles with your favorite cutting tool.' Uhh… Turns out, I guess my favorite cutting tool is a jigsaw because that seemed to do the trick. For the record, a utility knife was no match for the toughness of these tiles.

Once cut, we had to cover up the subfloor layer cake. Some 4" black vinyl wall guard and metal stair edging cut to fit did the trick.

Since we couldn't find any black metal edging to source, I ended up painting it with leftover black trim paint from our auto body shop. The sliding door entrance was a little funky. With some clever (hey, I'll take credit where credit's due!) cutting and bending, I was able to make it work.

Our astute readers may have noticed the sliding door step is magically much cleaner-looking than in previous photos. Well done! When I picked up a bunch of salvage parts from Bryce, one of the parts he had was this step. Not brand new, but not caked completely in tile cement.

With that, our flooring is finished!

As mentioned, the cool thing about it is only the subfloor is actually glued down. The vinyl planks and rubber coin floor are just sitting on top. If there ever comes a reason, we can just disconnect them and take them out.

All in all, we think it'll be good. There's some insulation and we didn't lose very much height. It's waterproof, rugged, and replaceable.

Next up: driver's and passenger's swivel seats…