Replace and Rebuild

Now that we've effectively junked most of what was our "kitchen", it's time to reconstruct it to a new design.

With the wish-list in hand, we got the sketch book out again with a selection of crayons....Where should we begin?

Water storage. Since we now have the new tank and have removed all trace of the old, we decided to start with that. It's big and needs proper support, so it seemed a good idea to get it installed at an early stage. Building up some cardboard mock-ups around it gave us the arrangement we thought we wanted, and we played "camping" for a few hours, to see what would work well and what wouldn't. Needless to say there was a lot of fine-tuning and remodelling of space, which is easy to do with cardboard. Eventually we agreed a compromise plan and I was left to the saw table and tape measure to make it happen.

The black strips on the fridge door are the magnets that hold fridge door seals closed...very useful for all sorts of things, but not in a Defender. Not enough steel.

This is the water tank in place, with the second aux battery alongside it.

Here's the new battery installed and strapped down. No wiring yet.

I tried to find a battery tray of the right dimensions for it but had no luck until I stumbled across this blowing across the garden in one our many gales:

Suitably sliced up it worked perfectly. In fact, with the bit I cut off the top fixed around the other half on the bottom, it was more solid and lighter than the plastic box I looked at in the caravan shop.



The battery is an AGM and having done a lot of reading on the subject, can be used in parallel with the sealed lead-acid we already have without any major problems. Being AGM, we can also install it on its side, which saves valuable space - we don't have to have the connections on the top so the seat which is going on top can be a little lower and match the height of the Wolf box "bed base".

I recycled the old worktop to provide a solid support for the overhanging half of the water tank  - the half that isn't supported by the wheel arch.

The water tank still lacks the outlets

This provides a long tunnel for storage of the stuff that used to go under the cooker unit...

This is quite heavy but slides in and out really easily and allows quick access to the two warning triangles, wheel brace, lever and breaker bar, two tyre levers, the wheel nut key and a "Landrover Multi-tool".

The prototype "library area" - the fridge has been moved sideways a little to give more elbow room for reading the paper!

A fold-down seat back converts the battery cover to a comfortable chair, using what will be the solo mattress as a cushion. A wolf box at the foot makes it into a lounger and the top of the water tank is the ideal height for a corner table. We can't build much there anyway because it'd block the blind spot window, but there'll be room over the window for a bookshelf...or something equally "homely", probably.

This is one of the mock-ups, but the arrangement didn't survive the first trial run.

With the airline boxes in place, I built up around them, trying to make sure that it would all come apart easily for finishing later.

The airline boxes slide in, but it's all a tight fit.

This isn't as easy as I'd thought -  a bit like a Chinese puzzle - and I've had at least one re-think over the order in which everything has to go together. I also wanted it to be fairly easy to remove, so at the moment it's all held in place by one bolt, a ratchet strap (around the water tank - don't want that moving about and disrupting any plumbing) and just one corner of the original bodywork. With everything fitted, it seems pretty secure but might need a bit more restraint, we'll see.

Reversing the orientation of the boxes worked better this way, but the forward one needs to be set upside down or the door opens in the wrong direction....

Anyway, with the boxes in place, the hob went in easily enough although I had to raise it by 50mm to give enough room for the sliding table to clear the hoses underneath. These have been carefully routed to keep the exhaust hose - which is insulated - as far as possible away from anything combustible. There will be extra heat shielding in the vulnerable places as well, but it's all a bit "juste", as they say in France. I've tried to keep everything as accessible as possible for the inevitable maintenance and other "tweaks" that'll be needed over time. The two hoses - inlet and exhaust - pass through the wheel arch ahead of the rear wheel ..

The now-redundant hose inlet has been cut short to clear the new tank and a blanking plate Sikaflex'd over the old tank filler.

which is just outboard of the rear corner of the plastic water tank, so some heat insulation will be needed here in addition to the wrapping already on the exhaust hose.The exit point puts them in the way of any form of commercially-available storage  box I might want to put there to replace the old tank. This really can't be helped as the hoses can only be a maximum of 2 metres long and the outlet must be at least 300mm ahead of the tyre. Needless to say, everything has to be put in place, adjusted, removed, replaced and messed about with a dozen times before it all works properly without something getting in something else's way, particularly with the rather natty set of drawers and sliding table...

These were masterpieces of innovation (cue applause) and I'll be patenting the whole thing, of course. Make me a fortune, it will. Well, maybe not, since we pinched the idea from John's conversion so he deserves the credit, but I'm very pleased with the result anyway, and Sue is very happy too. Particularly as I'm making rapid inroads into "all that junk" that's been knocking about the garage for years. The drawers have been in the attic since the day I converted the cabinet they came from into a hi-fi stack...about 10 years, I think. Long before the advent of I-Pods and Spotify, anyway.

There's a space behind the drawers - they can't be too deep or Sue won't be able to pull them out completely - which is just the right size to take a tool or, more likely, a spares box. I'll have to figure out a way to strap this down or I can imagine it opening the drawers from the back if we roll around too much.

The plumbing and water pump will be under the sink in whatever form that eventually takes, with enough room to take a waste pipe through the wheel arch to a tank under the floor.

The tank has had a drain port and outlet added and some heat shield put around that vulnerable corner. 

I had a thought as I woke up this morning...it suddenly popped into my head that I'd put one of the holes in the water tank in the wrong place because I'd marked it up without having everything around it in place. I hadn't got it wrong, as it turned out, but it just goes to show how a moment's inattention could really mess up the plan.

With everything fitted in, it's now time to take it all apart and paint it, add the trimming and then put it all back together,



 hopefully in the right order and without this problem: