adventure with val

*Unless something else exciting and Val-related happens and I feel like pestering you about it.

Nearly two years ago, I warned you. I told you to get prepared. And now it’s time to bump up your car insurance because Val is ready to hit the road and no road user will be spared. Prepare to take an extra hour to get anywhere. Prepare to get creative with your swears as you sit behind her on the Great Ocean Road. Cyclists, it’s your turn to overtake. Prepare to come camp with me somewhere that has perfect 2ft right-handers and also allows old dogs to sleep under trees in the shade. Prepare to be, can I say it, slightly impressed, because to be honest, she looks way cosier and lovelier than I had ever hoped (that’s a non-biased assessment).

This week I’m taking Val on a trip to Vic Roads to get registered, and then I suppose there is nothing left to do except enjoy her. Yeww! And I can get back to spending my weekends thinking up other things to pester DOD for help with, such as, how can I build a sturdy yet portable ramp for my elderly dog (BBB) to enter and exit my caravan as he pleases? YES it needs rungs like a chicken coup ladder, YES it needs bumper rails like the ones in Grandpas shower. But also I can’t wait for you to meet her in the flesh, because I’m really proud of her. Recently I got to tow her out of the backyard for the first time in TWO YEARS since I brought her home all that time ago. She towed like a dream, the lights worked first go, the new brakes and tires kept her grounded and everything stayed firmly intact. She even went on a wee holiday to my Gals house in Jan Juc to provide a little home for my lovely friends Ben and Julia during their visit. I have to say that it was something special to see her out and about. It made me even more excited for the time when I get to take her away somewhere for real. Who knows where we will go together?

So without any more waffle from me, here’s some (lots of) pictures of varying quality. Thanks for tagging along!

xxx Maddie, BBB and DOD

 

See you on the road! Adios!

Hola mi amigas and amigos! Time for another little chin-wag about DOD*, BBB**, me and my van called Val. Actually, that’s a way better title than “Another narcissistic brag about my old dog, my old van, and my old man”, let me just…

…Annd done!

It’s been a pretty hectic year for me travelling back and forth between Gippsland (work) and the Coast (pleasure) on a weekly basis. As a result not much has changed in the rhythm of work getting done on Val, which has still mostly been restricted to weekends/ when DOD and I can be bothered. Recently however, I had school holidays, and we’ve managed to get an absolute ton of work done (FYI my favourite bushwalking riddle lately is, “Forwards I’m heavy, backwards I’m not, what am I?” HINT: I just told you. You can also enquire within about my range of cheese, lettuce, chicken and toilet paper jokes).

Many coats of paint have made the interior look light and bright and lovely, and marked a bit of a turning point as we now crack on with being creative rather than destructive or patching-up-ive. In the first week of the holidays DOD and I built a bed, a bedside bookshelf, a wardrobe and a little corner nook with new drawers and cupboards. The bed has a huge amount of storage underneath (think multiple boards, a bike, several slabs, all your camping gear or about a cubic metre of chocolate). Half the bed lifts up for access underneath and neat little sliding doors let you get in when you can’t be bozzed lifting up the bed.

The other totally exciting thing to happen over the holidays was when DOD finally relented to my endless ideas on how to use my giant pile of collected driftwood that’s been taking up space in the garage for about 2 years. We turned them into little bollards for a leather fence on Val’s new window sill shelf, which turned out to be so ridiculously good looking that I immediately needed to fill it with trinkets and marvel at it for hours.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and DOD goes absolutely mental and starts doing stuff when I’m not even there…

Wha-la! Bench seats and bed complete!

The table I made months ago and decided I really didn’t like turns out to look great (I think) and I’m super pleased to now have my favourite southern-sky constellations for company every day and night of the year.

Handy Joe has also been put to work, helping with everything electrical, but also painting, sanding, splash-back decision making and floral arranging (for which he has a particular aptitude, dead set, the man CAN choose flowers AND displays them in jars which he’s decorated with electrical tape). I’d say this is how he feels about his skill set most of the time:

Another wee triumph has been making cupboard doors for all the little hidey holes all over Val. Some were made by re-using the old doors and giving them new Sycamore ply faces, others were cut to size from scratch, but all were mostly the work and know-how of DOD while I hovered in the background with screws of various sizes and cut driftwood knobs (hooray for hoarding!) for the sliding doors. They now just await a second coat of varnish before they’re ready to roll and things start lookin’ real classy. I can’t wait to add some little leather handles and open my socks and jocks drawer for the first time.

As usual there’s been lots of other little jobs involved along the way, including dismantling, sanding and painting a million hinges and various bits of metal from the old fixtures to re-use- this was actually a fun job, because unlike every single other lick of paint on the inside AND outside of the van, I got to use a spray can – no brush/roller cleaning required! I’ve learnt that the success of Val is in the small, almost unseen improvements more so than the big, obvious ones. So she would have looked just as good with a new coat of paint had we not gone to the trouble of polishing every aluminium trim, removing, caulking and replacing them; flooding small imperfections with many coats of paint; removing scabby paint and lichen from the roof and spending a handful of days baking on top of it getting enough coats on; panel beating; and sealing and caulking all joints internally. It would have looked good, but it wouldn’t have lasted. Such has been the case with just about everything in Val.

Guys, I know I’ve jumped the gun on this before, (in fact it was probably the first thing I jumped the gun on after buying a saggy old caravan) but its finally, FINALLY, time for soft furnishings. Curtains, couch covers, blinds, cushions and dangly things to hold my tiny pots of succulents are all on the agenda, and it’s my time to shine. Move over Dad, I’m pretty sure this is my territory.

Over the weekend I was at a pretty special little festival called the Happy Wanderer, where we pretty much eat cheese, swim in a creek, drink cocktails and listen to great music with friends for a few days. I can’t wait to take Val along next year and enjoy many happy trips away with BBB, my girl gang and Handy Joe in the meantime. This might be a big claim, but I reckon I’ll have a fully functioning Van to boast about by my next update (perhaps not a hard task considering my lax efforts in regular writing thus far). I’m obviously over the moon at the thought of travelling and hanging out in my van, but I’m also a little sad to think of our big project being finished in the not-too-distant future… although I did spot a pretty rundown ambulance shell for 100 bucks on buy, swap, sell the other day…

Adios!

P.S I apologise for the lack of BBB photos in this post, which I know is what most of you turn up here for, but his new anti-inflammatory arthritis meds have seen him bouncing off the walls like a pup and I just can’t seem to get him to sit still long enough. It’s either that or his nightly mandarins that are doing the trick. Maybe just one more though…

P.P.S Maybe (definitely) I’m getting a bit cynical because there are literally many thousands of different people who are all pretty much doing the same *totally unique* thing as me, but I can’t help but wonder again and again: why can’t we just be awesome and not need to have it validated by strangers? The ‘downsizing/tiny house’ section of the internet seems to be partly a really great space for interesting people to share their stories and common interests, and partly just a giant mozzie puddle of toxic ego feeding and a “my tiny house life is far more epic than your tiny house life” kind of attitude. Maybe it’s about the intention behind sharing your stories? Maybe that’s just representative of the balance in social spaces in general? Or maybe there’s no difference and I’m just trying to make myself feel less like an ego feeding mozzie puddle. Anyway…it’s late (it’s 8pm) #Irealisethehypocrisy #likeforlike #tinyhousedreams #thehousethatnarcissusbuilt

Much has happened since my last update! Barney has consumed 194 chicken wings and at least 10 dinosaur bones; I have been heated to boiling point on the Sri Lankan coast and then cruelly plunged into the ice bucket that is my totally non-insulated-yet-highly-ventilated house in Gippsland; and Val has waited patiently between work sessions, getting ever so much closer to her debut on the frog and toad.

Over the summer, DOD and I (firstly) unsuccessfully and then (secondly) very successfully painted the outside of Val in what was a wonderful period of learning and growth (or, alternatively, many instances of trial and error; a plague of small black bugs who seem to thrive solely on fresh and wet paint work; and of course, my dodgy painting skills which were inevitably fixed up by DOD). Safe to say Dad took the reins of the paintwork after my initial attempt, after which I was relegated to the stirring stick and cleaning brushes- an integral part of any successful painting team.

The bugs, the research, the time and effort, the taping, the scraping, the tedious detailing and fix-ups were all worth it however, because the end result is, I believe, truly excellent. Val looks shit hot.

After the painting was complete, there was somewhat of a lull in activity as other things like paddling the Franklin River in Tassie with my extraordinary mates and eating my weight in rice and curry in Sri Lanka with the HCW’s, took over. I made a kitchen table from some of DOD’s scrap timber, and burnt into it the constellations of the Southern Sky using hot wire and a blowtorch. It didn’t turn out exactly as I had imagined, but perhaps Val will like it anyway, and I really enjoy being able to make my own things just as I like (or sometimes don’t like) them.

Recently, DOD and I have cracked on with the interior work, and Val now has newly insulated and (mostly) fresh new walls, as well as working power points and 240v / 12v electrics thanks to these helping hands!

As always, I’m way ahead of the game and have already picked out my paint samples for the interior, which I hope to get a start on this long weekend. I’ve also inherited a huge roll of ex-ford factory light blue upholstery material that I plan to pair with a stack of canvas that I found on the side of the road, genuinely, to cover the seating/second bed cushions. I love coming across my materials through happy coincidence or plain good luck. Last weekend, I hauled out of my cupboard a small amount of awesome fabric I found in an op shop ages ago, planning on making some cushion covers. Dad pulled out some heavy duty cotton drill fabric that he had found years ago abandoned somewhere or another, and kept for an occasion just like this! Now my new covers wait patiently until they become useful and bright additions to my beautiful little van Val. It seems that somewhat-unnecessary (yet at times highly useful) hoarding definitely runs in the family.

We have also planned and re-planned for most of the remainder of the work. After the painting inside has finished, we will be able to begin building the bed, the wardrobe and the kitchen table area, as well as putting in some nice flooring and building and installing some new cupboard doors to replace the old daggy ones. I’ve also got plans for a little herb/succulent garden for the window sill which I’m really looking forward to.

I feel like at last the list of jobs is starting to get smaller, not bigger, every time we work on her, and that’s pretty great! Until next time Friends!

HI Spring! Thanks for bringing sun, daylight savings and hay fever. And, some renewed excitement that one day (maybe soon!) I’ll have a beautiful old van to traipse around the seaside in. I’m so so excited, and Barneys pretty stoked too, ‘cos his bucket list is getting bigger and who knows how long that old fella’s got left in him…. probably ages.

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Val has had some pretty cool treatments lately, typically spread out over the last few months. Even so, the D.O.D (Dear Old Dad) and I have gotten some big jobs completed and we are creeping so much closer to what really excited me about the van in the first place – hanging pot plants, coordinating tea cups, and hand making door knobs. YEW!

We have successfully panel beated or replaced most of the dodgy dinted bits of the cladding, leaving Val looking real neat and tidy, and most importantly- waterproof. We got a few nasty (expected) surprises along the way, with more than a few rotten pieces of ply and some pretty shoddy looking workman(or woman)ship on parts of the van. Some new vents, some crafty cut and pasting of some panels, and a completely new front end later, and She’s good as gold. The only job left for the outside is to give Val a new paint job, and put to use the little colour samples I’ve been hoarding all year. I’m thinking the ‘Arctic frost’ with a touch of ‘Summer breeze’ would look a treat.

So the windows, the wiring, the cladding, the lighting, the waterproofing are all pretty much complete, essentially leaving the interior (and much funner) jobs like flooring, cabinetry, bed and painting to go.

It’s comforting to know that at the end of the project I’ll not only have beautiful van, but a sturdy, safe, clever and functional one as well. So I’ll forgive D.O.D for demoting me to drill lackey and bucket apprentice for some of the trickier/actually important jobs.

Tell you what though, I’m pretty great at poppin’ rivets. Next time I get round to writing one of these maybe I’ll have a bed to sleep on and a shelf to place my tea cup. Maybe.