A Garage on Wheels, Part One

Our Camp Inn camper has two main functions: sleeping and eating.  The other 15 or so hours per day are spent outdoors, enjoying the various places that we visit.  Various gear is required (camp chairs, a shade structure, a small screen room for when bugs are annoying, sporting equipment, etc) to optimize our daily experiences.  And the question that every teardrop owner wrestles with is how to carry and organize that gear; the answers are as varied as their owner's interests and the many ways that their campers are utilized.  We'll be living in ours full time for much of the year and we won't be near a home base, so having a place for everything and having everything in its place is essential to allowing us to optimize our time spent enjoying the many places that we will visit on our journey.  

After considerable research of the available options, we feel that the Ford Transit Connect Cargo Van will be ideal for our needs.  It is essentially intended to work as our garage on wheels while we are traveling around the country: it will be our place to store everything that won't fit in our Camp Inn trailer, including our two bicycles.  The color we've chosen is Frozen White, and we've opted for a windowless cargo area.  Both choices reflect the reality that our tow vehicle will always be out in the elements, so we are attempting to minimize heat gain and the associated discomfort that can often accompany hot weather.  We also opted for aftermarket heated seats to help warm things up on cold mornings, as modern vehicle engines are so efficient that it can take a while for a space as large as a cargo van to heat up.

The cargo box of our Ford Transit Connect is relatively huge at 130+ cubic feet.  In contrast, with the rear seats folded down, most compact SUVs of about the same length (Mazda CX-5, Toyota RAV 4, Honda CR-V, etc) only have about half that amount of cargo space.  And while an SUV has the flexibility of extra rear seating, they can't easily carry big bulky items like bicycles or whitewater kayaks, and access to the gear that they can store is more difficult due to the narrow standard passenger side doors and a higher load floor. 

Since we plan on spending a LOT of time living on the road, we need places to store things like the many maps that we'll take with us and the many chargers and adapters for our electronics, as well as the more mundane things like laundry soap and the accessories for our emergency toilet, the Luggable Loo.  Fortunately for us, we owned an IKEA IVAR modular 9-drawer pedestal (i.e., no legs or top, just the cabinet and drawers), which we've adapted for use in our van, adding shelves above to store our Solaire Everywhere! infrared grill (we love infrared - so much easier to clean that other grills), a central charging station for all of our electronics, plus our camp chairs and a small folding table.  These items all fit perfectly in front of what our salesman terms the van's rear "barn doors."  The cargo floor of the van sits about two feet above ground level, making even the lower drawers easily accessible and thus providing one convenient point of access for the items that we will use most frequently.  The picture below shows the pedestal in its current state of construction and gives an idea of how it will help us to organize the gear we'll use nearly every day, though without a few critical van measurements, it's not yet possible to complete the upper part of our planned construction.  At one point we had thought about painting the pedestal, but decided to keep with the cargo van theme by keeping it unfinished and utilitarian-looking.  Our plan is to decorate the drawer fronts with pins, walking stick badges or other mementos that we'll acquire at the various places that we'll visit.  We're off to an early start on that with some personal mementos that we've already attached to a few of the drawers.

Our modified IKEA IVAR 9-drawer pedestal (with only two drawers shown).

Since we need our new van to finalize certain aspects of this storage pedestal, the above picture is only to give a sense of how this area will work.  Our REI Alcove shade structure will be stowed strapped to the left side of the cabinet, our dog's shade structure/outdoor kennel stows behind that (both are shown strapped down in the above picture).  On top of the pedestal is our infra-red grill and the power strip that will serve as a central charging station for our electronics (it will be mounted on a small shelf to the right of where it is shown above).  We'll install an AC power inlet on the outside rear curbside portion of the van, which we can run off of either shore power or our 2000 watt Yamaha generator (the van also has a built-in 12v outlet on the interior curbside wall - parallel to where the power strip will be located - so some items can be charged while we are driving from point to point).  On the right side of the pedestal will be a narrow space sufficient to store up to eight Duraflame logs (our standard fuel given the ubiquitous prohibitions on importing campfire wood).  Atop all that will be a deck a bit less than four feet wide that will give us a place to strap down our folding table and two camp chairs.  An existing office organizer will be bolted along the right edge as a place to stack multiple devices for simultaneous charging.

Rear Cross Section showing placement of the drawer pedestal.

The section view above shows our current concept for the area as viewed from the rear barn doors.  The drawers of the IVAR pedestal are ideal for organizing things that we won't necessarily use every day, and the design makes maximum use of the cabinet's compact space.  The friction of the drawer slides should be sufficient to keep the drawers from opening while we are driving, but if they do open it will only be by a few inches before they are stopped by the inside of the barn doors (if they do tend to work their way loose in transit, I may need to devise a means of keeping them from doing so).  Angle iron attached to the sides of the pedestal will be bolted to the load floor to keep everything secure while in transit.  The design makes it easy to remove the entire pedestal for when we aren't traveling and need access to the entire cargo space.  

Our six shallow drawers and three deep drawers can be arranged in a myriad of configurations, and we plan to keep the center of gravity low by arranging them with the heaviest drawers on the bottom and lightest drawers on top.  Thus far, the contents of the nine drawers can be roughly described as:

• Stationery supplies.
• Bicycle route maps.
• Electronic devices.
• Bicycle supplies.
• Miscellaneous repair supplies ("MacGyver" supplies).
• Laundry supplies.
• Emergency toilet supplies.
• Personal files.
• Tools.

This design allows us to preserve the remaining two thirds of the cargo box for the rest of our gear, and still have lots of extra floor space left over for extra temporary storage (though much of that extra floor space would require that we move one of our bikes in order to access the area).  But I'll postpone that discussion for part two of this post...