Blue View - Rethinking Blanche

Note: Last week I mentioned that the topic of this blog would be the total cost of a van conversion. That topic is quite research intensive, however, and I didn’t factor-in that we’d be without cell coverage or internet for most of the week. I’m postponing that subject for another week and, instead, talking about how our thoughts on Blanche’s upfit are changing just a bit…

We’ve been traveling and camping with Blanche for about three weeks now and are getting a pretty good feel for what we like about Blanche as well as some of the things we thought we’d like to improve. It’s good to do this. I have a tendency to over design things and I fear that if left on my own, Blanche would have many features I thought we needed, but didn’t, and only room enough inside for one very skinny person at a time.

Traveling also gives us the opportunity to see a number of other van conversions and how others have done things. Van conversions fall into one of two classes - the home brew, DIY, conversions like ours, which are sometimes quite nice, but more often pretty rough; and the professionally done vans that are beautiful, but have many more features than we need or want. Whether they’re DIY or professionally done vans, however, we’ve gotten some good ideas - as well as seen some things that wouldn’t work for us.

An example of the latter was a gorgeous Pleasure Way Mercedes van conversion. It had a slew of very nice features, including a king size bed that could be opened in the middle to form two Murphy beds. The trade off was that the bed extended from wall to wall, and since, when open, the two mattress halves laid flush against the wall, there was no space for wall cabinets. There was also no way to incorporate a headboard. 

We prefer our extra long, full size bed, which doesn’t fold up and out of the way. This leaves room for wall cabinets and shelves, as well as a nightstand on each side to put our tablets, glasses, water bottles, reading materials, tissues and other bedside essentials. We also have a nice headboard that makes a comfy place to sit up in bed and read, write blogs (which is exactly where I am at the moment),  play cards, or sip our first cup of coffee in the morning.

On the other hand, the Pleasure Way van did have very nice screens on both the rear doors and the slider door, giving us ideas about how to do something similar on Blanche. Screens aren’t all that important here in the desert southwest, but we remember our trip to the north country in Blue where the mosquitoes were fearsome. We’ve seen some screen implementations that weren’t all that great, but the way they were done on the Pleasure Way van we saw was attractive and workable.

In addition to the screens, most of the items on our to-do list of a couple weeks ago still seem like good ideas: curtains for the side window; drawers under the bed footboard to replace the bins we’re currently using; adding a sink to the countertop; adding wall cabinets, for example. We’re once again rethinking one major upfit on the list, however… that darn settee. We want a comfortable place to sit and work or read when it’s too cold, rainy or otherwise unpleasant to sit outside. Originally, we thought we could modify the front seats to rotate 180 degrees, enabling them to face either forward or towards the rear. Then we realized that the seats sit 5” or so higher than the living area, so our feet would be dangling when we were facing the rear. I could probably build a platform to rest our feet on, but I can’t envision a good way of doing this.

Plan B was to add a small settee that backed against the front seats, but the more we talked about it, the more we thought it would reduce the living space too much. Right now, we can both dress and/or move around each other if we’re careful with our elbows, but adding a settee would probably be just too tight. So, we’re mulling over what Plan C might be. In the meantime, the weather’s been nice enough to sit outside… and the bed with that great headboard has been quite comfortable for writing blogs and reading when we’re inside.

Stay tuned next week as we follow the Rio Grande into Texas - and I finish that blog on the cost of a van conversion…