interior design curtains and carpets
hey this is mike with backroads vannerand thanks for stopping by. we had such an overwhelming response on our videocargo van to camper van and people were writing in saying "how did you insulateyour van and how do you upholster your van?" so today i'm going to give you sometips and some tricks on insulating your van and upholstering it to make it looklike a professional did it. so stick around and check out this video! welcome back. the purpose of today'svideo is to give you some inspiration on how to finish out your van and give itthe personality and the flair that you want. it's really easy to do. i can't tellyou how many vans i've seen where they
leave the insulation as the interiorwalls of their van... whether it's the reflectix or styrofoam, sometimesthey just put rough pieces of plywood up there and leave it like that and that'sgreat if you're using it for a cargo van but if you're going to live in your van ortravel in it and camp in it and spend a lot of time in it, it takes just a littlebit more effort to finish it off and give it that professional look. i reallydon't know why people don't take that extra step and do that. it's probably oneof three things... they probably got impatient and couldn't wait to get in itand start camping and traveling in it or they didn't know how, which we're goingto address that today, and i'm going to give
you the information to show you how youcan finish it out make it look professional... or the other one is thatmaybe they thought it was going to cost too much money and it was a financialdecision for that. so today we're going to address those issues and i'm going toshow you how you can finish off your van and make it look like a professional didit, all the while adding your personal flair and personality to your van. i'veseen vans that are paneled with really nice paneling, stained... i've seen somewith plywood and they've even done some wood burning on the sides of theirplywood and if you're going to use paneling or plywood - a finished plywoodinterior - i'm going to recommend once
again that you get 4x8 sheets ofcardboard and cut that cardboard as your pattern. it's a lot easier to trim off alittle bit of cardboard with an exacto knife than it is to trim on a piece ofplywood. so get your 4x8 sheet of cardboard, use it as a pattern, lay it on top of yoursheet of plywood or paneling and trace around it and use a fine-toothblade jigsaw to cut around that and do that. now if your finished interiorfinish is going to be plywood or paneling, your cuts need to be prettyprecise so that's why i recommend using a pattern for that. if you're planning ondoing something else to the interior, let's say you're going to use shagcarpet which is what they used back in
the seventies - the hippies - youdon't have to be as precise with your cuts and you can glue shag carpet allover to the inside of your van. i've used this - i call this a speaker cloth - butit's more of an industrial grey cloth and i've seen a lot of vans finished offwith this where they just glue that to the inside so it's another great alternative.some of the other interior ideas that you can use is material. material - you canbuy it in all different colors and all different patterns and everything likethat and it works great for upholstering the inside your van. i used this for my seatcushion but i could have just as easily used it on the walls. you can use vinylbut i've seen people even take material
and quilt it together and upholster theinside and give it a quilted look. i've seen people use velvet and got a greatresult with that. i've even seen things as wild as animal print which reallyshows off the individual's personality. i've seen industrial looks with diamondplating, it makes it look more of futuristic look. i've even seen bamboo orsomething as wild as a mural painted on the inside of the van. so a lot of greatideas. i want your personality to dictate how you're gonna do yours. pick thecolors that you want and and i'm gonna show you how to put it all together andmake your van look great. one of our favorite vans is the bears den. it givesyou an idea what your imagination can
dream up. it's like being inside a logcabin. it took a lot of work and probably a lot of artistic ability to come up withthat but it just goes to show you ... if you've got an imagination and you candream it, you can build it. well, i'm not going to show you how to do the bears dentoday but i am going to show you how i upholstered this van .... and whether you'regoing to use vinyl or cloth it doesn't matter. carpet? i'm gonna show you the easiestway to do that and make your van look professional. butbefore we can do that, we've got to talk about insulating your van. anybody that'sturning their cargo van into a campervan
knows it's imperative that you insulate itfirst. that's going to determine your comfort throughout the year ... whetheryou're traveling up north and in the snow or down south in the heat. so todayi'm going to show you how i insulated my van. to insulate your van, most everybodyhas probably heard of reflectix. it's a foil with air bubbles in between it. it'sfoil on both sides and i apologize, i have a piece of reflectix at home and iforgot to bring that so i'm going to use what i put on the inside of my fantasticfan cover to represent the reflectix but it's foil on both sides and what a lotof people will do is they will glue this to the inside of their van which wouldbe against the metal and i gotta admit
i've done that myself too and found outthat the heat transfers through this. this is a great product. it works as avapor barrier. it works as a radiant barrier. but when you put it right on theoutside of your van if thats sun is heating up the side of your van or theroof of your van, you can feel the heat transferring through that. so what i didis i took a big sheet - i have sheets of this leftover from a job where i wasputting vinyl siding on the side of a house - and this is just about 1/8 of an inch or maybe even less than that thick styrofoam and it's a little bit brittleit's easy to cut and it's easy to form but i put this inside on the wall andglued that on the wall and i recommend
the 3m eighty [spray adhesive]. it's for rubber and vinyl and it costs a few dollars more but believe me it's well worth it and we'regoing to be using this throughout upholstering and insulating this van todayso i would spray this on the metal wall of the interior of your van and spray alittle bit. follow the manufacturer's recommendations for using this and makesure it's very well ventilated but if you stick this tothe interior against the metal of your van and then you spray some glueon this and put the reflectix over top of it you won't feel that heat transferthat you did before. so this makes a huge difference and i don't know where thebest place to buy this is... i bought it at
a supply house for roofing and sidingbut i'll look it up and see if i can find a link for this from home depot andif i do i'll put it down below so that you can get this and i really think thatthis little bit of styrofoam makes all the difference in the world well then next i would put the reflectixin. and this comes in a big roll. i would recommend getting the bigger rollbecause you can use quite a bit of it to cover all the inside of your van and putthe reflectix over top of it then the next thing i would do is once againspray some glue on here and i would use a piece of styrofoam...they use this for home building. home depot sells a bunch of different
varieties of this - i've seen the blue,i've seen the pink, it comes in all different thicknesses but i wouldrecommend about a half-inch thick. i think that's plentyand put this on the inside of the van as well i use this just on the end inbetween the cavities a lot of people will run strips of wood down along theinside bracing and i just want to let you know that the more you build yourvan in from the top and in from the sides the less space you have inside there. soif you really want to insulate it, i mean you could literally put two-by-fours insidethere and put four, six or eight inches of insulation inside your van but what'sthe sense? it's taking up all the space
inside so i wouldn't get too crazy withit but you do have a couple inches of room inside there and using thestyrofoam and the reflectix and a half inch of this styrofoam, i think that'splenty. a lot of people will use the metallic tape to tape against this andseal out all the air and everything and that's great but i don't worry too muchabout all that. you could do it but you're going to have air gaps inside yourvan. anyhow where the door seals are a lot of times i open the vent just to getsome fresh air coming through there even if i'm heating it or air conditioning it.insulating the walls, you understand, we're going to use the thin styrofoamwe're going to use to reflectix and
then a half-inch or whatever you findthat the cavity allows. you know, three quarters of an inch if you've got theroom. go ahead and insulate it up to that next all the little holes in thecavities i used just regular batted insulation and filled some of thoseholes... same thing inside the doors, i put bats of insulation in there. i did putsome reflectix against the metal and then stuffed some bats of insulation inthere and it helps tremendously the biggest thing on your van for insulationis ...your your biggest loss is just like a house and it's glass. glass is your worstenemy inside a van because there's really not a good way to insulateagainst it. i blocked off the back
windows of my van and the first thing idid was tinted the windows dark which is going to help keeping that sun out butthe next thing i did was i put some reflectix inside the window and whenthe sun is really shining against it you can see it a little bit inside ... it'sreflecting that heat and reflecting the sun's rays in there and then i coveredit with a piece of luan with some fabric over it and it makes a world ofdifference but you're going to have glass in the front - your windows up front,your windshield, maybe your fan-tastic fan and that's another reasonwhy i used this. i made this cover with snaps on it because it also keepsout the light but it insulates against
the heat coming through that and in thesummertime that gets really hot so there's a lot of ways that you caninsulate your van but once again you're never gonna get your van completelyairtight and completely sealed up and so i don't go too overboard with that. i'veeven had some people use closed foam - that spray foam - and spray thewhole interior their van before they started anything withthat closed cellulite foam - it's a spray foam that they use in houses and it fillsup all the cavities and that works great as well if you want to go to thatextreme. so next we're going to talk about a upholstering your van and beforeyou can start upholstering your van
you're gonna want to make sure you've gotall your wiring in place and i'm not going to cover the wiring in this videobut maybe later we'll cover that. but make sure you've got all your wiring whereyou want it and even run some extra wires because sometimes you're gonna add something later and wish you would've ran a wire back behind your wall and onceyou've got all that insulation in there and you've got your plywood up and you'vegot your upholstery on there it's very difficult to get back in there andstring another wire. so now i'm going to show you how to upholster it whether youusing vinyl or cloth. ok so you've got your van insulated and i'm sorry that ihave to explain this because i lost all
the pictures that i had several yearsago when i built this van was probably five or six years ago and i had acomputer crash so i have no pictures to show you i'm just trying to do the best to walk you through the process but providing you've got your van allinsulated now it's time to finish out the inside and like i said earlier ifyou want to put paneling up that's great make sure your cuts are very precisetake the time out to use cardboard and make a pattern if you're going to usehigh quality plywood with a nice finished look... same thing... give it a finished lookby making sure your cuts are more precise. now if you plan on carpeting or usingfabric or using vinyl for the inside
here's where we start. i recommend usingeither a piece of luan or a piece of quarter-inch plywood. now this does nothave to be cut precise because you're going to cover everything up and i'mgonna show you the tricks that custom professional upholsterers use. so you canuse the cardboard as a pattern once again if you like and for cutting your luan, again i wouldrecommend using a fine blade on a jigsaw to cut around your wheel wells and dothat. now you're just gonna run it up to the top. it doesn't have to completelycover everything. these sheets are in 4 by 8 sheets and one sheet is not goingto cover the whole side - the whole run
down the side of your van - so you'regonna have a butt joint and on the ceiling, a 4 x 8 sheet is not going tocover your whole ceiling so what i did is i cut it in two strips. i cut it downthe middle and i left a little gap running right down the middle now you can cover that if you like butthat gap is great for running wires down through there. putting led lights inthrough there, or using it for other things, but you can cut your luan orquarter-inch plywood into strips and attach it all the way across the ceiling.now the great thing about what i'm going to share with you is it covers all yourscrews, it covers all your cracks in your
joints and your gaps and everything likethat so here it is... trick number one! once you've got all your inside eithercovered with luan or covered with quarter-inch plywood, what you're goingto do next is you're gonna put a piece of foam... this comes in rolls and you have togo to an upholstery shop, or maybe jo-ann's sells it, but it's just a half inchpiece of foam and what you're gonna do is, if this is the interior of your van,you're gonna spray some of this 3m 80 adhesive on the wood and you're going tospray some on the foam. follow the manufacturer'srecommendations, let it set up a little bit and then you're gonna attach thisfoam all over the interior of your van
and you can start in the front and bringit back and put it on the sides and cover the whole thing in foam. this foamis going to cover all your joints. it's going to cover all your screw holes. it'sgoing to cover everything. now be careful when you have to butt this foam up to oneanother, you want to make sure that it's a nice joint because otherwise it's goingto show so ...and it's helpful if you've got a helper to help you do this so that youcan just gently put it on it don't compress your foam too much you don'twant it absorbing all the glue. you just want it to make contact and stick on thereand one of the reasons we spend a little
extra money on on 3m 80 is becauseit can withstand high heat temperatures and the problem, i'm sure you've seen itwith a lot of headliners in cars and stuff like that, if you don't use aquality glue they're going to come loose over time and and i've done it... i ran outof this and used a cheaper one that i got at a different hardware store orsomething and it would not hold up so i recommend using the quality glue and getplenty of it. ok so you're going to have your luan oryour plywood and then you're gonna have your van covered in this. don't worryabout where the side meets the ceiling or where you're meeting up against anotherjoint ...don't worry about that just yet.
i'm gonna show you how to cover that. thekey is to cover your ceiling and cover your walls and the next thing you'regonna do depending on what you're gonna put on the inside if you're just usingcarpet you probably don't need the foam. i would just go ahead and do the carpet straight to the luan or straight to the plywood but if you're going touse fabric you're gonna do the same process. you've got the whole thing glued.you're gonna have seams in your material so make sure that you run itagainst the edge where the side wall meets with the ceiling or where you'regoing to have a cabinet or a joint or something like that unless you want it toshow. i've seen people take a roll of
material and put fancy stitching in itand it looks really nice. i have seen people do the same thing to vinyl as well butyou really want to do that before you start gluing it on there so then howyou're going to finish this is let's say we're gonna use vinyl on this you'regoing to spray the glue - same thing that you used before - you're going to spray theglue on top of the foam. make sure you get a good full coverage and you'regoing to spray the glue onto your vinyl. let it set up just a little bit and thenslowly put your vinyl on making sure you iron out any wrinkles and stretch thatvinyl out. now you want to have a little bit left over on the
ends so make sure you give yourselfplenty of room to have a little bit left over here in this corner where it meetson the sides maybe a little bit down on the bottom if you're doing your ceilinggive yourself a little bit of an overlay. you can trim that off later but it'simportant that you have enough and now i want to show you on the side doors ileft about five inches because i carried it right on down to the door and that'sone of the things that gives it a finished look. i can't tell you how manyvans i've seen where the people didn't know what to do right there where thedoors are. they built little shelves and cabinets or ran a piece of wood acrossthere, something like that. this is going
to take it up a notch. when you glue this foam to that metal and then you wrap it with vinyl or cloth it gives it afinished professional look. so that's trick number one. this right here this iswhere i ran the foam all the way down and all the way to the edge. i pulledthis rubber molding off and put the foam all the way to this edge righthere and then when i glued this on i had a little extra so that i could trim itand cut it exactly along the door jam there and that gives it a much moreprofessional look. comes all the way over its smooth all the way to the end. now ihaven't done the front of the van yet i have some ideas for redoing the frontbut i just ran this write-up underneath
the headliner and stopped it right therefor now but anyhow i just wanted you to see this and you can see the paddingthat it's got that half inch foam underneath there and helps a lot. nowthis doesn't have the half inch foam underneath it this is just the the vinyl over the luanright there but it it really gives it a nice finished look. ok so where yourvinyl comes up here and meets, and your vinyl comes over here and meets, i callthis like a crown molding and what i did for this... remember you left a little bitoverlap here a little bit overlap there... but right here is a metal chase andwhat's great about this is you can run
your wiring and stuff through there butwhat i did there is i cut a piece a luan to fit from there to there and theni wrapped it in vinyl and i didn't putthat quarter inch pad on it or half inch pad on it. i just sprayed glue on it and iwrapped it in this. here's trick and tip number two! these little things here arecalled snap-caps. they are great for when you're upholstering somethingbecause now instead of just putting screws through here and attaching it tothe metal, you can cover it with a snap-cap and those snap-caps come in alldifferent colors and different sizes you can see down here along the side they're alittle bit bigger. now i
could have gotten a brown to match this but i went with more of the tannish color to match that right there but these panelsare removable so if i needed to get in there i could take those screws out andremove those panels. see across the top and back here it gives it a much moreprofessional look when you can cut and mold your luan around that and then wrapit and what i do when i wrap it... let's look down here... this is the vinyl that i used for theceiling this is a tooled vinyl and it costs alittle bit more but it gives it a much more unique look. i didn't do this... ibought it this way and this vinyl
was on a clearance rack and it actuallycame with a little bit of foam glued to the back of it so what you do foryour moldings and your corner end pieces is you wrap this around the luan and first, you spray it with glue... spray this with glue... let it set up... you putthat on there and then you pull that tight and i put real short staples tohold it ...you're just holding it until the glue sets up and until the glue dries sothen i put staples along here to hold that and let that dry and then you'vegot a piece of wood wrapped with your vinyl and then once again those snap-caps... when you attach this and it's best if you can space the screws out evenlyand make it look to neat ... you can always
do that but sometimesaesthetically you can put one in there that maybe is not attached to anything butaesthetically it just looks congruent so you put your screws in here... they go intothe metal and then you put your cap over it to cover it and that gives it afinished look and as you can see i ran a piece right down the middle and you canhide your led lights up in there and you can run wires down there. climb on in and take a closer look i have a seam right here and i could'vestitched that together and made it a little bit better but my piece wasn'tlong enough to go all the way down. it
was just a little bit short so i had topiece it right there but i put the snap-caps all along here and snap-caps allalong here and one that meets that and that means that it just covers it andgives it a professional look ok so to get that final look i spent alittle extra on getting these cushions covered. i was this close to covering these cushions myself. i purchased the material that i liked ...it went wellwith this ...it's a personal choice... some people would hate it other people would like it so take yourtime, take your materials and pick your vinyl, pick your material, pick yourcolors, whatever to reflect what
you're trying to do. but anyhow i tookthese to a neighbor that was doing some upholstery work and put a zipper allthe way down the back. these are removable covers so i can remove them and clean them but it just gives it that little extra finish. now the foam you canuse different kinds of foam. this is not the exact foam that i used. this comesin different densities and it comes in different thicknesses. now if you wantedto use a smaller foam, you could use a higher density and a smaller foam thatgives you more space and do that but i went with i believe this is a four inchfoam i like it that way for sleeping on it,for sitting on it, you don't bottom out,
you don't feel the bottom so it iscomfortable but there are all kinds of different foams so you have to experimentwith that. the density that you use - it's just like a couch cushion oranything like that .. it comes in great big sheets. i cut it all out and had itexactly how i wanted and then i took it to somebody and for a small amount of moneyi don't remember what it was - a hundred bucks or something like that - they sewedit and put it all together. i purchased the material and he stitched it all upfor me and did that so that's what gives it a finished look on the inside of yourvan so you can go from plywood to vinyl on the side
relatively easy it's a little bit oftime a little bit of money but then it's done and you can enjoy it for years andyears to come so i highly recommend that you take thetime out use these tips and tricks that i gaveyou today and finish off your van. if you're driving around in the van rightnow that's all unfinished on the inside take a weekend. you'll be amazed at whatyou can do... what you can come up with. i hope this video helps maybe an answersome of your questions on how to take your van to the next step. if you'redriving around with insulation on the inside of your van. go ahead take theplunge. buy some sheets of plywood and
cover it up, paint it, stain it, wood burn it,use some creative juices and come up with your own interior. if you don'twant the wood look and you want to go with some vinyl or some cloth get thathalf inch foam and glue that into the inside of your van and go ahead andfinish it out take that next step. it's really not as hard as it seems to be andonce your van is done like this you'll be able to enjoy it for years and yearsto come if you do decide to insulate your van andupholster it, send us some pictures... we'd love to see them. we'd love to share them. if you have some comments on this video please leave him down below... if you'vegot some hints or tips or tricks please
share with us ...help everybody else. anyhow we appreciate you watching, we appreciate all our subscribers. if youlike this video and you want to see more videos, give us a thumbs up subscribe to our channel because we,vegot a lot more coming your way. anyhow this is mike with backroads vanner sayingwe'll see on down the road and make it a back road!