What to do now?

There is an idea. We have a van. It has a name.

Now it is your time to guess: What to do next?

Cleaning? Would have been a good shout. But we thought there’s still time for that. Let’s first stuff the van with loads of cardboard – great!

Our cardboard model for the furniture in our van.

For us, the cardboard model helped a lot to figure out where to put what. The time on building it was totally worth it. We got a really good idea of how everything is supposed to be arranged inside the van. We checked how large the furniture pieces can be in the end and messured everything out very exactly. In our Instagram post you get a better idea of what piece of cardboard is supposed to be what piece of furniture in the end. (You can follow our instagram account driving_europe to always be updated on our current construction steps!)

Before we were able to build that cardboard model we had to go cardboard hunting. We were asking at different supermarkets for their old cardboard boxes. Some of them were really cooperative and gave us out their boxes. The other cardboard pieces we collected from the trash. We took whatever we could find.

After building the furniture, we were testing our bed and everything – it broke down. So there it went, our transitional furniture. Now we had this whole mountain out of cardboard. Getting rid of all that was an adventure itself. We were driving around a pretty long while and stuffed one public paper trash container after the other with our test furniture. Hopefully they are getting emptied soon! Otherwise the local residents cannot get rid of their paper trashes so soon.

As the header picture already reveals we took out the wooden walls and the floor next. Now we had the chance to check everything for rusty spots (didn’t find any major ones, so our feeling didn’t betray us: we had a good shot with Oswald… We thought so far).

For the next step, we got a helper – thank you Leo for helping us clean everything! This way it did not take too long and all of the sudden we had a shiny van.

Cleaning the van.

It was a great feeling. We felt like we already did some big steps into the right direction. But than there was a little throwback… Before we started insulating Oswald we took him to the car repair shop to get an all-round check. The clutch was damaged and needed to be replaced. And some other (little) things had to be done. It was a huge amount of repair-money which we did not expect.  Plus, it took far longer than we thought it would. That’s why we lost some time. But nevertheless, we guess we are still pretty good on track!

Excited about our next steps?
We will keep you posted with our coming posts – just stay tuned.