One of our silliest van purchases was our Belfast sink, which is a Shaws of Darwen bathroom Belfast sink (460 x 380 x 205mm). We bought the METOD cabinet legs from IKEA to mount our carcass onto, which meant we could adjust the height of the carcass to ensure it was level, and it also provided room for wires and pipes to run underneath the kitchen.
Building your own custom kitchen also means that you can make it to exactly the size you need – we were able to ensure the units would be deep enough to hide the fridge. When building the campervan kitchen units from single sheets of 12mm ply, you can either clamp the pieces of ply together using a square edged batten to ensure that the ply is butted up correctly and then screw it together this way (pictured below), or if you have a router it’s really easy to build a kitchen by just slotting it all together with a bit of wood glue. We actually did the calculations and for a kitchen of our size, we saved a whopping 35kg making the kitchen out of 12mm ply rather than buying modular IKEA kitchen cabinets!!! As well as this just being much more material, MDF is heavier than ply so you will add a considerable amount of weight if you use an IKEA kitchen in your van. This was to save weight – IKEA kitchen cabinets are made from modular 18mm MDF carcasses, which means if you end up with double thickness 18mm MDF.
We decided to build our campervan kitchen units ourselves from single thickness 12mm ply.
Most of our units are a standard 400mm or 600mm wide, apart from the furthest right hand unit which is a non standard 450mm so we could fit the fridge inside. The right hand side of the L is a standard 600mm deep to accommodate our hob and also to allow us to fit the fridge into one of the kitchen units, but the left hand side is a slimmer 450mm so the kitchen doesn’t eat into the doorway too much, and this was still big enough to fit our sink and tap. We iterated over loads of different options over months and months before we even bought our van before we decided on a final layout that we were happy with.
BEST KITCHEN DESIGN CONVERSION VAN HOW TO
If you’re not sure how to design your camper van layout, this is a great way to do it as you can make everything to the exact size it will be but scaled down, which makes it easy to see how everything will fit. We designed our campervan kitchen layout in Adobe Illustrator. We had always known we were going to close off the cab – some people don’t like the idea of this, because they want to be able to access the front of the van from the back, but we decided to close it off a) because to us it felt much more secure not being able to see there is a camper in the back when looking into the cab, b) to make it feel much cosier in the back – by not being able to see the front seats and the steering wheel, it feels less like being in a van and more like being in a cosy little home, and c) as we have a LWB we didn’t need the extra space of swivel seats anyway.Ĭlosing off the cab meant we could have an L shaped kitchen layout, which has meant we haven’t had to compromise on space – we have loads of counter space for preparing food as well as plenty of room for a big hob and sink. Our campervan kitchen takes up just less than half of our van, and we felt it was important to make sure we would have enough room to cook and prepare food inside our van, seeing as how we live in rainy England! When you decide to convert a van, you will need to decide on a layout, and one of the main areas in your van will be the kitchen.
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