"You're all jealous. Edward's better than all of you"
"You're right, Duck. Edward's old but he'll surprise us all!"
Duck and BoCo defending Edward, Edward's Exploit, second season Thomas The Tank Engine
In mid April 2011 I laid my eyes on a suspiciously cheap blue Citroen C15D for sale on ebay. It was crazy cheap, it was French and it looked like Postman Pat's van holding it's breath. I fell in love. My fiancée Amanda and I were planning on buying a van and road tripping around Europe once she eventually made it over from New Zealand. So I emailed Amanda some pictures and convinced her I could turn it into a camper, albeit a very small and sneaky stealth camper. I took a bus to Oxford to check it out only to find out that the one advertised had been sold. But the construction company who advertised it had a couple more going, only in slightly worse nick. Blinded by excitement I handed over £350 for a rust filled, noisy, brake broken, un-taxed and un-MOT'd van. Check it out!
How rad is that?
Our future bedroom - Note the little skylights...ew
So as you can see I had a bit of work ahead of me just to make it legal, and a fair bit more work to build a bed space in the back. Over the next month I filled in all the rust holes, had the seized rear brakes reconditioned, sanded off the builders sign writing and sprayed some paint here and there. I have a habit of giving all my cars names. Amanda suggested Edward, as in the little old blue train from Thomas the Tank Engine. Perfect!
Sparkly and no longer water absorbent
Now all Edward needed to be the coolest stealth camper in all the land, was some interior decorating. First things first; hifi. We were planning a giant long term trip in this van so audio was going to be crucial to our continuing sanity. I got a bargain Kenwood CD/line in stereo off ebay and some mid range speakers from Halfords and tripled the chance of having the van nicked.
Next job on the list was bed construction. By buying only off cuts and hitting up businesses for left over pallets and boxing, I managed to get all the wood needed for the construction for about £10. I also found two bedside cabinets from a charity shop for £15. I bought some rubbish tools (drill, saw, measuring tape) from Tesco for another £10 and got to work. Using line of sight and as little planning as possible I somehow succeeded in building a platform about 30cm above the floor. The centre piece could be removed to make it easier to get things out of the drawers in the front. I also built a hinged flap behind the front seats. At night with the seats forward and the flap up we had a full two metres of bed to sleep on. Edward was lacking somewhere to mount my new stereo speakers so I also built a shelf above the two front seats and put them in there. The speaker shelf had the added value of being a storage shelf in general terms. Much crap was stored here during our trip. I managed to score a cheap inner sprung mattress from another charity shop and spent a few hours hacking it into four pieces so we could rearrange the bed as needed.
Decoration is a crucial part of any home, so I set about covering up all the awfully cold white metal panelling with some hard board, sexy op shop wallpaper, and sweet orange paisley curtain fabric. I've uncovered my secret subconscious love of all things brown and orange.
Sans mattress
Travelling mode
Bed mode
Pretty proud of my handy work. Soon I'll start sifting through our diary to try to remember our trip and post whatever I can recall.
