Having committed ourselves to a particular vehicle last weekend, I now find myself drawing and re-drawing plans for the interior. Luckily VW have a link on their website that allows you to down load CAD drawings of the body, which at least means I can do scale drawings of the layout before we lay our hands on the vehicle itself (we pick it up next Monday).
In preparation we have put together a list of items that we want to see in the van, some of which we will require almost immediately, and the rest that we need to provision for but we intend to add as and when time and money permit.
Top of the list are beds for the three of us and storage for kites and other paraphernalia that you need when attending festivals. One of my biggest bugbears when I was little and caravaned with my parents was the need to assemble the beds each evening and pack them away again in the morning, and the fact the resulting seats were never large enough (unless you were a kid) to lay on of you needed a lay down at any other time. Plus most of the storage space that was under the bed was taken up by the bed linen. Thus I am determined to have fixed beds in this van. Also I want a layout where I can get up early (or go to bed late) and leave the other two in bed, so the sleeping area needs to be separate from the rest of the interior.
My original idea was to base the interior on a La Strada Avanti Family which has a bunk bed across the rear of the van, however being based on the Citreon Relay its is 60cm shorter than the VW Crafter and thus I thought we could increase the width of the lower bunk to make it a double rather than a single. However what I neglected was the fact that whilst the Relay is shorter than the Crafter it is quite a bit wider and thus the resulting beds would really be too short to be comfortable. Whilst search the WWW for inspiration I came across the Devon Sapphire, which is not only based on the Mercedes Sprinter which is basically the same vehicle as the VW Crafter, but it has a near full size double bed at the rear. This has been achieved using a layout more typical of an A-Class or Coach built motorhome rather than a Panel Van. With a little tweaking by putting a single bunk over the double bed and an under slung gas tank rather than using bottles under the bed the Sapphire’s layout is getting a close to fulfilling our requirements as we are going to get in a vehicle based on a panel van.