VAN CEILING & INSULATION

For insulation, we went with best of the best, at least that’s what everyone is saying.  All natural HAVELOCK WOOL , material looks and feels very high quality and so far it has been great. It is very easy to work with, and since it’s all natural wool, you don’t need any protection equipment while installing it, company even encourages to get your hands on it.

It comes in two options, 100 & 200 sq/f coverage areas, we went with 200 sq/f and we were lacking just enough to insulate sliding door and back doors, otherwise it covered our whole van(ceiling & walls) with just 1 big bag of 200 sq/f coverage. Our van is one of the longest on the market, Mercedes sprinter 170wb extended.

When it comes to ceiling, i think we made the best decision ever! To begin with we were going to use shiplap just like everyone else, and then we’ve accidentally seen these cedar planks in Lowes.

We immediately knew that’s what we wanted on our ceiling, especially later on when we stained it, it looks just like a dark sky  above our bed, and with dimmed light some part’s of cedar shine and make it looks like a stars in a dark sky, We love it!

Photos on slideshow will show you before & after. This project took extremely long(around 2 and half days), but it was soo worth it. Added benefit of this choice was that these cedar planks are soo light, much lighter then shiplap, so it saved us on weight a little bit as well and it looks a lot nicer too.

VAN WALLS

Van walls didn’t matter that much to us because we knew that 90% of it will be covered anyways, for your build it might be different though. We went with standard shiplap planks because even the ones that stay visible, still look really nice and custom, and the ones that will be covered are very good support for stuff being attached to them, for example our kitchen cabinets, wall cabinets etc.

Installation went pretty smooth as it’s a lot easier to match up grooves of shiplap then it was of cedar planks. We probably did all walls within 2 hours, just cut to size and screw it in. It would probably go even quicker if we had a nail gun back then, but we didn’t so we were screwing each one with tiny skinny sinker screws. Later on in the build we got a nail gun which made a job a lot easier for a bunch of other wood projects, so if you’re just starting out, it would be a good idea to get a nail gun, even used one would be good enough.

After putting them all in, we stood back and looked at our work(we did that with pretty much everything, and we feel old doing it lol). Then we went on to paint couple cots of while eggshell paint so it’s easy to clean and dust off. You can check out our full video about walls, ceiling & insulation on our YouTube: https://youtu.be/UbXEPvwWqis

VAN FLOORING

For Van floor we went with the most popular thing nowadays, Vinyl plank flooring. It is water proof, doesn’t scratch easily, very durable overall and very light as well, just what you need for van life. Flooring ended up being the cheapest thing we got for our van, not only for reason that our flooring coverage is small and we didn’t need much, but mainly for a reason that we got 4 packs of this vinyl plank flooring for $10 a pack(regular price was $55 a pack), it was just someone else’s return of brand new packets that they didn’t use, so it was on clearance and we snatched it as soon as we’ve seen it.

Regularly this would cost us around $200, so we saved $160 there, good deal for us! Putting it down is a breeze too, very easy and straight forward, you can cut it with a razor knife and straight edge, then they just click together.
Just make sure if you’re installing this type of flooring, to not put any screws in it and leave about 1/4 inch of space on each edge because it needs space for expansion with heat and cold. We found it the best to do all your framing first, then lay flooring, and then cover up those 1/4 inch cracks around edges with vertical trim on your framing as you can see on 4th photo on the slideshow.
You can watch our flooring video here: https://youtu.be/efehtadKh-M