Motorhome Construction

The layout and design.

Never forget the old carpenter's adage of "Measure it twice - Cut it once", to avoid disappointments and wastage!

After the bus is empty, clean, and sealed from the rain, we began measuring, sketching, drawing, and finally laying out our design with masking tape direct to the floor and walls.

Our bus has large windows with smaller sliding windows on top. We had decided that natural lighting and the ability to see outdoors was a must for us, yet we still wanted some privacy from prying eyes. All the original windows were to remain, to help preserve the originality of the bus, as we still wanted it to appear as a Swift from the outside.

The large bottom sections of the windows were cleaned, masked up, and sprayed black on the inside. This still left the smaller sliders for fresh air and visibility! We then sheeted the interior walls in quality plywood, with insulation batts in the gap between the blacked out windows and the ply. The ply was affixed with "liquid nails" and self drilling tec-screws around the edges and along the centre line.

Where the sheets joined directly over a window void, we simply placed a strip of ply behind the butt-joint and screwed each sheet to the strip.

To fill the screw holes and the butt-joints as we didn't want cover strips, we tried several putties and pastes, before settling for "builders bog" for the screw holes and imperfections. We found the builders bog and anything else for that matter began to crack along the butt joints after a few days of the bus expanding and contracting in the sun. Tried every damn thing in the joints, and spent more time gouging out cracked fillers, before settling on a white silicone instead.

We have since discovered that our blacked out windows keep the motorhome cool in summer, yet in the winter they tend to store the heat and keep the interior quite cosy.

The corner stone and foundations

After trying several different designs, we decided that we wanted a very large lounge - dining - kitchen area, yet we were still having 2 bedrooms, a shower/toilet and a laundry room! All this is easy to squeeze into 36 foot if you like "caravan style", but we wanted "open plan" living instead.

After several minor compromises, it was decided to start the build working from the front of the bus towards the rear, as this would either mean we had kept to our measurements or else we were going to have a damn small bedroom when we got to the back.

We actually laid out the space required for the lounge and kitchen and began by building the dividing wall near enough to the center of the bus. This took some actual squaring away, and a bit of trigonometry, but after a lot of "measure twice" we finally had the first partition and doorway up.

This was to be our "corner stone" or reference point for every cupboard, fixture and wall to be built in the bus. When complete, our motorhome will sleep and seat 7 comfortably, with seat-belts for 4 passengers. Just a little provisioning for the Grand-kids that's all!