Ceiling Pt. 4, Day 25

2 min readJan 24, 2021

January 23, 2021

This entry is short and sweet. It’s not that the work done today was quick or particularly easy. In fact, it was quite the opposite — putting up the rest of the ceiling planks was time consuming and tested our patience the most out of all the other tasks we had accomplished. After covering the rest of the ceiling with black felt, each ceiling plank was painstakingly screwed into place by fastening them onto the stock metal crossmembers and PVC ones that we installed. The task sounded simple enough but here’s where our build plan differed from the majority of other van conversion projects, leading to our frustration:

We chose to screw our ceiling planks directly to the crossmembers rather than first putting up a wooden grid to which they could be attached

Having that attachment grid would have probably cut our install time in half and saved a handful of curse words. Originally, we thought we were being slick because attaching the planks right to the ceiling would save us about an inch of headroom. At 5'9" myself, and only opting for a medium height Ford Transit, our plan had good rationale behind it. However, that ONE inch came at such IRRITATING costs:

Four broken drill bits
Having to change from smaller to larger drill bits in order to bore a hole big enough to accommodate our metal screws
Screwing into different medium: metal vs. PVC
Marring our beautiful cedar planks as we “fished” for solid screw points — the stock crossmembers had some gaping holes
Having to navigate uneven surfaces, resulting in creating and installing spacers/shims under the planks

All could have been much more streamlined and headache-free had we put up a stinkin’ wooden grid. I gotta admit, we made the best of our decision and came up with some pretty good solutions to the aforementioned obstacles. How does the saying go? “You made your bed..”

This is how we left the ceiling in the last blog installment: