Welcome back! After I brought Zatara home, I immediately placed orders for things I knew I would need such as the insulation, my solar set up, and mattress. With COVID, companies are experiencing shortages and delays, so I didn’t want to waste any time getting my hands on those items.

After removing the rear bench and wheel chair lift, my next task was to remove the 30yr old carpet, walls, ceiling, and old factory insulation. Have you ever removed carpet from a house? Well, I’m convinced that vacuums are mostly good at making the cool lines in carpet because there is no way they are doing their job if THAT much filth is able to settle down through the fibers and sit for years under your feet! Well, carpet in a van is no different, and mine had 30 yrs of accumulation!

To remove the carpet, we had to first take out the seatbelts for the rear bench and third captains chair (this was not in the van, but the seat belt was still there), remove the cover for the back air compressor, and make a straight cut right behind the front cab. I’ve decided to leave the carpet under the driver & passenger seats so that I don’t have to figure out installing subfloor and wood floor on an uneven, curved, surface. Once all those measures were taken, removing the carpet was really easy, and the filth cleaned right up. The foam under the carpet was a whole other task to conquer as it was glued down to the metal and was shredding in pieces as we pulled it up.

After the carpet was out, we moved on to the side walls. Zatara was a conversion van that was then made handicap accessible, so she had the wooden window sills with cup holders and ash trays, as well as more wooden detail runners above the windows that hid the blue pull down blinds. Everything had to come out! We began with the overhead pieces, and quickly found that the ceiling upholstery would twist up in the screws as we would try to reverse them out. This caused everything to get stuck, so we had to cut the material and sometimes even try to pull in the opposite direction while the other person worked the drill. While this isn’t a super big deal, it did make the task take longer, was slightly frustrating, and definitely made for sore arms, shoulders, and necks! I highly recommended wearing safety goggles as particles and clumps of stuff behind the upholstery will be falling down all over you!

The wall panels came out in large pieces that we’ve decided to either clean up and place back in over the new insulation, or use as a pattern for the new material we purchase to do the same thing. We also removed the door panels & insulation from the rear doors and the 60/40 side doors. We discovered that some wires were accidentally cut when the wheel chair lift was installed, so my dad fixed those which repaired the “lock/unlock” button at the rear doors. I’m excited about this as it will allow me to control all the vehicle locks from the back of the van.

When we finally arrived at the ceiling, we removed the back air vent box and hoses first. The ceiling was actually in three pieces which made this part fairly simple. We figured we would have the same issue with the upholstery fabric, so we went ahead and cut it around all of the screws. Once we finally made it to the center piece that housed all the wires running down the back of the van, we made sure to label everything as we disconnected it so we would remember what each one was for. This was a fantastic tip that I saw from several other van build blogs I’ve been reading leading up to this point. Most of the wires will be cut out as I won’t need them, but we are still labeling everything just to be safe.

With the walls, ceiling, and factory insulation removed, Zatara is ready to have the subfloor and insulation installed. My order from Havelock Wool arrived the day I returned from my vacation to Galveston Island, so I have everything I need to move onto that step while the rest of the solar components arrive. So far, everything is going really well and has been quite straight forward.

Stay tuned for Phase 3 blog post to come next week!