Phew! I can’t believe we are finally at the stage of tackling the ceiling. At this point, I was more than salivating at the idea of finally getting to see those beautiful wood beams with grey grain installed in the van. There were just a few things to tackle before installation, though.

Before the ceiling could be completed, we needed to place the solar panels and drop the cables down into the van, insulate the ceiling, and cut holes in the boards for the 12V puck lights that would run off the solar. When I was at Derek’s having the hole cut in the van, we played around with the panels on the roof to determine the best placement to make this step go faster once dad and I had clear weather to tackle that phase in the build process.

Once the panels were installed, I dove right in to putting up the insulation, and this was no easy task!

As previously mentioned, I chose havelock Wool to insulate Zatara. You can read about my reasons for choosing this product over others on the market, here. In that post, I talked about how working with Havlock’s wool panels became difficult when we got to the walls, but trying to install them in the ceiling was a whole new beast! At first, I tried using duct tape to hold the panels up, but that south Texas humidity said no dice, try a different approach. Next, I used string. This was better as far as holding the insulation in place until we were ready to cover it with the boards, but weaving long wool panels through the string pattern was gruesome on the arms shoulders and neck.

Once the ceiling was completely covered with the wool, I measured where each puck light should be on the boards and cut the hole for them to fit.

We placed the very center board first, working our way out to the edges.

Once the boards hosting the lights were secured in the ceiling, we pigtailed each puck light, and the dimmer switch, into the long wire line we prewired after gutting the van interior down to the metal.

The final two boards for each outside edge required very unique measurements as the side of the van isn’t straight, but both pieces fit like a glove! I am in love with the way the ceiling turned out. Seriously, it looks even better than I had imagined.

This process has been long and hard. Many tears and much frustration has been along for the ride on this build, but the end is so close I can almost taste it!