Sprinter van: Overhead cabinets
At one point, a couple weeks before our trip, I was just being realistic with Katie. We’re not going to be able to get the overhead cabinets installed before we had to leave. I could tell she was disappointed. Rightly so, because that was the bulk of our storage. They’d also make the van feel more finished and livable. Rather than digging around in storage bins under the bed, we’d have a lot of stuff easily accessible in overhead cabinets. We had already bought the cabinets, another (what we thought) clever use of ready-made IKEA cabinets: the Trofast. Each cabinet was $30 (when we bought them back in the summer) but, like the galley cabinets, would all have to be custom cut to fit into the van.
The one side had a different pattern to it, but we liked it. The panel would also provide an accent of bare wood. The shot below was taken, well, before the galley cabinets were installed.
Rather than accept not installing them, we pushed back our departure date to give us one more weekend to push through. It would be worth it...
During that week, with J helping and us pulling long days donning N-95 masks due to the near-toxic air quality from wildfires burning up and down the west coast, we got to work. The first step was figuring out how to attach them to the van. I measured and tested before grabbing J and running to Home Depot to pick up a pair of twelve-foot 1x4s. I trimmed them to length before we lined them up to install the first one. The plan was to drill two holes through the lumber into each ceiling joist. I’d then use M6 rivnuts and flathead bolts to ultimately provide a solid strip in which to attach the cabinets.
As in just about everything with this conversion, it took learning from the first one to get the second one right. With K and J holding the first one while I drilled, it inevitably slipped. When I went to line up the bolts with the rivnuts, some of the holes were off. It meant having to file and re-drill the ones that didn’t line up. That was kind of a pain. How to avoid that for the second one? J came up with the brilliant idea: Drill one hole, tap in the rivnut and screw in the bolt (which would hold the 1x4 solid) before drilling all the rest. It worked like a charm. The only pain was in having to remove (again) the headliner so we could attach the front end of the lumber to the furthest-forward van joist.
With ten M6 bolts holding each 1x4 to the curved joists, they weren’t going anywhere. The old grab and shake the van test confirmed we were good to attach our overhead cabinets to them. Onward. Oh, we also installed the partition we cut from the 4x8' sheet of 3/4" plywood we got for the galley cabinet countertops. It would separate our bedroom a little bit from the rest of the van. Thanks for the help tracing and cutting it, J!
I cut a notch out of the bottom to A) tuck it up against the wheel well (we needed every inch!) and B) provide space to run the 4-gauge battery cables coming from the engine bay for our electrical system.
Next step: Figuring out the shape we needed to cut the overhead cabinets to fit that upper part of the van’s walls and ceiling. Tedious, but nothing we hadn’t done already. K has become our template expert and took care of getting that done. It ended up being two angles that we just cut down using the miter guide on our table saw: 17º and 30º.
Once all of the vertical cabinet ends were cut to fit, we had to rip down the tops.
Lastly, we had some custom cutting to accomplish: The cabinet next to the slider door needed to be notched for the door’s track and the cabinet over Sefton was too long and needed to be cut shorter. Oh, and cutting the 2-1/2” holes for the under-cabinet lights. Always something, this build…
To hang them, I used a combination of the mounting hardware that came with the cabinets along with additional brackets I picked up at Home Depot.
Once hung, they weren’t-slash-aren’t going anywhere. Solid. We made the electrical connections for the lights, secured the wires, and… Thankfully, we had overhead cabinets! Umm, the pegboard and its accessories are also from Ikea. Basically, most of our van is from Ikea. Or, as S calls it, The Big Blue Building. : )
K didn’t waste a second it seemed beginning to organize them and deciding what was going where.
Of course, they didn’t yet have fronts. Like I mentioned in our post about the galley cabinets, we had picked up a piece of wood in the As-Is section of IKEA for $10 that was marked ‘Crafting Person.’ We’re crafting people, I think. This van conversion is essentially one giant crafting project after all. We ripped it down and used it for the drawer fronts of our galley cabinets and got three fronts for the overhead cabinets. I got one installed before we just, exhaustingly, ran out of time. We had to start packing. Accepting that as okay, we picked up a bunch of ten-inch bungee cords and eyelets. We’d make use of them to hold everything in place and get to installing the other two fronts this coming winter.
Actually, the bungees worked really well. Fronts may end up getting in the way, we think. So we'll see if we end up installing them.
All that remained were some details. Exhausted, frustrated and elated at the same time, we knew we were on the home stretch. We had, somehow, converted a dirty old tile van into our camper van in under three months. Two-and-a-half months, really. Insane. I have no idea how we did it. We could finally start to think about our trip as we hurriedly shoved a months worth of stuff into our van. The details would have to wait...
