For the first day of year 2021, we slept in the van for the first time. We have celebrated New Year's Eve at friends - Tiphaine and Alexandre. They live quite close to my mother's place where we currently live, but with the French curfew of 8pm, we couldn't just drive back after the party - we had to stay over! This was the call for a meaningful deadline: get the bed done before 2021.

Actually we had built and oiled the bed frame a while ago, long before we even bought the van. What was left to do was to find a way to robustly attach the bed to the 15mm OSB floor, at the right height. The core part of the bed frame consists of a 1,40m x 1,40m square, which stands on 6 legs. The legs consists of 3cm x 3cm aluminum square profiles, which slide in bed feet, themselves attached to the floor with two nuts each.

Core bed frame

Drilling feet

Nuts wood inserts

This part of the bed makes two thirds of the total bed area. There's storage space underneath it, and it can lift up on both the front and back sides to transform into a sofa. We had to correctly place the frame so that it could still lift up all the way, without colliding with the curved wall.

Frame lift-up

The other one third of the bed was built separately - during the day it turns into two facing seats and a table. This part is attached to the core bed frame with nuts, and only stands on the floor. This will allow us to easily move the seats around if we need to, by simply unscrewing a few nuts.

The facing seats

All legs

Test

The night we've spent in the van was actually rather short - from 4:30 to 10:30. The outside temperature was around 0° but we were not cold - only the cold air intake next to the bed was a little uncomfortable.