WIP - Sunny Boy's interior!

It's finally happening my friends! After 18 months, endless hours of labour, and endless dollars we are THIS close to getting our Kombi road worthy and registered! I first posted about Sunny here - you can see the horrendous 'before' and totally awesome 'after' pics of his exterior body work in that post. We took a week off in November so my love could crack on with building the interior cabinets, and I could crack on with his curtains and the seat upholstery, and these last few weeks my love has been spending every spare minute he could on getting it done. Because we've set a date! We've locked ourselves in to a beach camping weekend away in late January with friends, for the Australia Day long weekend. That gives us about 4 weeks to get Sunny running right to be roadworthy, and sleep-worthy on the inside! He's got to be nice on the inside, because I'm not up for scuzzy camping - with Sunny taking care of us we will be Glamping!

I'm so proud of my love's exceptionally hard work, and I'm very well pleased with my first serious attempt at upholstery and piping. Feel free to tune out if Kombis aren't your bag, but I've a swag of photos showing the progression of our work.....

These pics might give you a bit of an idea of how completely foul poor Sunny's innards were..... After sanding, more sanding, sealing and painting we were able to lay a ply floor, and some snazzy chequerboard vinyl tiles over the top! So awesome!

 Matt's been making all the cabinets and cupboards out of plywood - I love these funky little pigeon hole shelves in the back - a common feature in caravan and camper interiors in the 70's....

He's building the cabinetry first, installing it all to make sure it fits, and then we have to pull it apart again, sand and paint it. We're going to paint it white, in a sort of white-wash stain, to keep the grain of the timber visible and give it a bit of a Scandi look. The interior colour scheme will be black, white and red. 

After hours of interior research we found a Kombi with fab new Formica bench tops, using a newly issued reproduction Formica - unfortunately very pricey to install new, so over the last year or so we've slowly been acquiring old red Formica tables off Ebay, to use as our bench tops in the kitchenette section. Matt saved the chrome edging, and after careful separation, gluing, clamping and polishing he's made bench tops that lift off to reveal the sink and a storage box. They. Look. Freaking. Awesome. 

After much deliberation he decided to make a cutlery drawer, and cupboards to hide the gas bottle holder:

Above the bench tops is a long narrow overhead cupboard which we'll probably use as a pantry:

We've used a heap of used and recycled bits and pieces in Sunny, including the kitchen sink, the rock-and-roll bed frame, and the fridge. How cute is the fridge?

I haven't any pics of the curtains yet - they're almost finished, but can't be hung until the cabinetry is painted and reinstalled, so sadly that will be one of the last (but most exciting!) jobs. The old seat cushions that we sourced were beyond repulsive - brown hessian and vinyl full of holes, mouse crap and dead insects. Vomit. I've recovered all of the upholstery in the back, using a sturdy grey tweedy polyester fabric from Spotlight, and made contrast piping in a heavy red cotton. I found using my zipper foot absolutely indispensable for the piping, and also found it a lot easier to baste the piping to one piece of fabric first, before sandwiching it between the cushion fabric. It's not all 100% awesome, but its pretty good.... 

This little seat has storage under the seat cushion and Matt has grand plans to hide a small TV behind the back cushion! 

This is the passenger/rock-and-roll seat - it's so clever, it folds back and lifts up level with the back of the camper to form part of the bed (the last thing I need to cover is a small piece of mattress which fits in behind to form the rest of the bed). It's cozy thats for sure! 

Such a spunk-rat - who wouldn't want to cozy up in a Kombi with him?

 So whats the verdict? Any glamping tips? It's so damn exciting - I can't wait to be pulled up somewhere quiet, chilling out with a drink, a book or my knitting! Hopefully a follow up post with my curtains won't be far away! Whoohoo!