Materials/Spend:
- Insta-Stik Polyurethane Adhesive - £15.50
- 3 sheets of ply - £90.98
- 10.8m timber - £29.20
- 2 sheets of insulation - £78
- 4x40mm wood screws (ply)
- 5x80mm wood screws (frame)
TOTAL: £213.68
Prep
Before anything else, you’ll want to make sure the van is completely gutted. I was aware that I still had to do some work on the roof, such as install a couple of roof vents and solar panels which will likely cause a bit of mess on the interior of the van, however we planned on using some hardwood ply for the flooring as a temporary measure, so I wasn't too worried about keeping it super clean.
Like me, you may have (a lot!) of rust on the interior of the van which you’ll want to treat before covering it over.
For a lot of the rust, I scrubbed it with a metal brush/fine sand paper and then applied some rust converter that I bought from Screwfix to all the patches. Rust converter produces a chemical reaction which will make it easy to paint over as well as preventing more rust.
Once dried, I then painted over the rust converter with Hammerite white metal paint, which can apparently be applied directly to rust, but I thought I’d use both just to be sure.
Lastly, one thing I admittedly didn’t do (because I’m short), is measure the combined height of the materials you’re using for your flooring to ensure you can still stand up in your van once finished.
Timber Frame
The first step in the build process for the floor is to build the frame. We started with 3 pieces of 3x2 timber that extended the full length of the van. We aimed to position them over the deepest rivets in the van’s floor.
Then using a tape measure, we measured out the smaller lengths, such as either side of the wheel arches and the footwell and also measured smaller sections for the width of the van and cut these using a wood saw.
Once we had all the pieces of timber formed in a grid shape, we marked with a pencil where each of the pieces joined, making it easy to see where they needed to be screwed together.
We screwed together the frame with 5x80mm wood screws. We did as much as we could outside of the van until we had to screw the rest of the pieces together in situ.
In total, we used around 10m of timber for the frame.
Once the whole frame was fastened together, it was time to fix it to the floor of the van. Because of all the bumps and rivets in the van floor, we decided to use expandable foam to fix it in place.
Insta-Stik Polyurethane Adhesive comes with a thin applicator tube allowing you to squirt the foam into tight spaces. We applied it to every section of the timber to ensure it was fastened tight.
The foam takes about an hour to dry so we put our feet up and had a coffee!
Insulation
For the insulation, we decided to use Iko Enertherm Insulation Board for multiple reasons; it has great thermal conductivity, it’s super easy to cut into shape and it was the same height as the timber frame.
We measured each of the gaps in the frame and cut pieces of insulation to fit neatly inside each one. You can cut the insulation board with a saw or even a knife. Beware though, it gets very messy!
Two sheets of 2400x1200mm insulation board was enough to cover the whole van floor.
Ply
Once I’m ready to insulate the walls and roof, I’m going to vapour wrap the whole lot, including the floor, so we fitted some hardwood ply over the insulation as a temporary measure until then.
We used two full lengths of ply width ways for the rear of the van. To cut around the wheel arches, Calum expertly scribed around them by positioning the ply flush to the wheel arch then measured the distance between the edge of the ply to the van wall. He then cut a bit of scrap wood to that distance.
He then pressed the scrap wood to the wheel arch and then held a pencil at the other end and slowly moved the wood around the wheel arch keeping the wood straight the whole time. This gave a nice clear pencil-drawn wheel arch to cut away with a jigsaw. After a few tweaks both sides fit in beautifully!
As we placed each bit of ply down, we drew marks on the ply with a pencil to indicate where each beam of timber was running underneath so we knew where to screw. We then used 4x40mm wood screws to screw the ply in place.
In total we used three sheets of 2440x1220mm ply.
I'm super happy with the overall result - It should give the interior a sturdy base whilst keeping the van nice an insulated.
If you have any questions at all, feel free to ping me an email or drop me a message on Instagram!
