Soooooo it’s time for a bit of a different type of build thread for me. I’ve all but given up on esk8 and the next chapter starts with a van.
It’s a 2011 LWB Ford Transit with the extra high roof. It came with the bullbar as well as the full size roof rack, dual battery system with 2 x 100ah AGM batteries and 2 solar panels up on top. It has 3 seats in the front, as well as an extra 2 seats in the back.
As some of you know, I bought this van in August 2023 and in true Al fashion, I have procrastinated heavily on building it out to be my new home on wheels.
When I first bought the van, I had no idea how I wanted to kit it out, but after driving it around for a bit, I knew that I wanted to keep the rear seats. This creates a pretty significant constraint, but at the same time I felt it made it a lot easier to plan how I wanted it to be laid out.
My main priorities for the van are as follows:
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it will permanently house myself, but needs to be reasonably easy to house Jess and Zari as well for road trips
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It needs to be highly functional, aesthetics are of minimal concern
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As many dual purpose items as possible… I don’t particularly like being locked in to a single way of doing things, eg. I’d rather have a table that I can use inside and outside the van than some snazzy built-in table that is attached inside the van and can’t be used outside.
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It needs to be warm in winter. I can deal with heat, but I can’t deal with the cold. A diesel heater is 100% necessary
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While it is just me in the van, it needs to contain my push bike, skateboard and of course, the woofer. It is also a strong want to be able to fit the 3d printer in as well.
Summer 2023 I roughly mapped out how I wanted it and lived in it for about 3 months. It was great and gave me further ideas about how I wanted to kit out the inside.
It did need a little work done to it, mainly a gremlin to do with the heating/cooling in the cab, so as the colder months approached, I stripped out my bare bones kit and took it to the auto-elec, for what I thought would be a couple of days work… max.
Literally 3 months later I got the van back. I had completely lost any motivation to work on it as it was now the dead of winter and it was super easy to find more appealing things to do with my spare time.
This is turning into a wall of text, so I’ll leave this as the introductory post and add more to the thread as time permits! Feels good to have an active build thread again!!!
she gon be toasty in there 
