The last time I wrote about fitting insulation was back in May, and it feels like the job has been dragging on since then. When you look at the YouTube videos, you see time-lapses of people fitting insulation over the course of a weekend. Maybe we could have achieved that if we’d known exactly what we were doing before we started, but we didn’t, so … tough luck, I guess.

To be fair, we haven’t spent all the intervening time fitting insulation, but every weekend, pretty much, we’ve been doing part of the job, just enough to progress some other part of the job: fitting the bench bed, or the shelf above the cab.

But the main source of frustration has been the endless trips to Screwfix to buy more materials – and in particular, expanding foam. This van eats the stuff.  A quick check of my van expenditure spreadsheet reveals we have bought this many cans of expanding foam:

That’s 14 cans.

They’re 750ml each, and the packaging states the contents will expand to 35 times the original capacity. So – ignoring wastage, of which there has been a fair amount – I calculate we’ve sprayed over 26 litres of foam into the cracks and crevices of this van.

Anyway, we’re almost done.

Insulation is one of the most controversial topics on the van conversion forums, with many a certainty bandied around. Our original plan was to use rigid board for the bulk of the insulation, with expanding foam to fill the gaps. I still think that was a pretty solid plan, but I wish I’d known at the time we’d by spraying this much of the stuff.