Arrived at the van at about 10pm on Friday, the much touted cold weekend!
I had been thinking for a while how to use the redundant heat of the car engine, making a makeshift storage heater, with stones/ a hot water bottle. Anyway, in the meantime I thought it would do to heat up my curry leftovers. Wrapped it up in foil and placedon top of the engine. It got warm after 20 minutes.
The temperature really dropped that night, I made a couple of videos to document.
When I arrived the inside temperature was about 7-8 C, this dropped steadily through the night. It did disturb my sleep, at about 3.30am to boil the kettle for my hot water bottle. The temperature reading then was 2.8 C inside. When I woke in the morning it was as below,
Saturday evening, I worked inside the van. A bit of body heat will help right?
I get the mural wallpaper finished and the right hand windowsill.
It's worked out pretty well. Saturday night was not so cold and I think my tactic of working to keep warm helped (it was after 11pm I downed tools). I kept the windows less open, and the CO2 reading was offscale in the morning (>6500 ppm), but the air felt OK, and airing in the morning brought it back to normal.
I have one tiny tear in the paper, and I notice in the morning that a hand sized section on the curve is not in contact with the wood, nothing I can do about either. I will add an angle moulding across the top next time, and varnish the paper for protection.
Now the winter projects need doing- upping the door insulation and adding a heat exchanging vent. In the meantime I will be more cautious planning to stay over!
Now, I am working on adding a wallpaper mural of a Route 66 view to the front curved wall. This was an early idea to go alongside reducing the front windows. I bought the mural in about March, so really want to see this finished...
The front wall is faced with standard 3.6mm plywood on the lower section, this is nailed in place. A couple of joints are not quite perfect. The top section is faced with flexible plywood and is NOT square, this will be an issue with the paper.
I buy thick lining paper and this goes on OK, I have to make several darts across the top to deal with the curve. Some joints and nails are still visible, so I add another layer of lining paper.
I hope I have learnt how to do this shaping with the cheap paper, now for the real stuff.
The mural is in 4 parts that you paste clockwise from the bottom right. The size is about 3 m wide and 2 m high, so I choose which view to go for (van about 2 m wide). I measure it so that the vertical join is down the right hand side of the window.
All through I am pasting the wall, although I am not supposed too; no choice. It just means each piece is a bit slow to put up as I wait for the paper to get damp and deal with the bubbles etc. I got a bit confused with the measurements, obviously it matters with this stuff, but nothing I haven't been able to cope with as I go.
First piece up successfully.
Pretty happy so far. There is a small tear in the paper halfway up the window, it doesn't show in this picture. I hope it will be unnoticeable when I fix the windowsill.
That's all I managed, back this weekend to finish it.
