Since I’m still waiting on my sewing machine so I can start the canvas, Jason and I tackled the last major project on the camper: the galley.  The galley is one place where you can always use more storage… and this one has a lot to fit into it.  We want an integrated place for our stove, room for food, sink and faucet, the heater unit, a propane locker… I had a place in mind for the stove already so we started there.

But first, we had a little bit of prep work to do.  Last night I glued in a few of the countertop support pieces, so this morning I finished that up first thing.  After that set up (and breakfast was had!) I glued in Jason’s mounting panels for the electronics in the seat back of the dinette and also the main galley divider bulkhead.

After all of that dried and the bulkhead was set where it needed to go, I measured for the platform that the stove was going to sit on.

We had to trim the countertop a little bit because it didn’t quite fit right.  It also turns out that the color I thought it was going to be with the stain isn’t the color that it turned out to be. I really don’t like it at all.  It’s like… chocolate mousse or saddle leather… it looks “soft”. Not what I wanted. So it doesn’t matter if I have to sand on it a little bit.

We’ve had our little camp stove for a while now and it’s pretty well used, but we’ve spent enough money so I didn’t want to spring for a new cooktop.  I modified this one a little bit by removing the cover and side flaps.  The handle may need to go also. We will see. It fits pretty nicely under there though!  Once everything is in place we’re going to cut the countertop and have this part hinged so it flips up and you can access the stove underneath!

I tried really hard to keep my epoxy out of the sun in the garage and now that we have a roof and a shade cover it stays pretty nice inside the camper, but apparently it just takes too much time with all of these little pieces and I had another one of my roller brushes start to cook off before I was done.  That’s starting to get really annoying.  I managed to finish it with my little throwaway chip brush though.  Mom’s started saving plastic food containers for me to use once and then throw away. It’s like recycling, right?

While we were waiting for all of the above fiberglass to cure, we made the floor for the water tank area under the dinette seats and Jason made the backing plates for the camper tie downs. We have an unreal amount of 1/4″ steel in the scrap pile and neither of us could figure out what we bought it for originally.

Also, we started this project with a super clean shed… that didn’t last long.  It looks like Lowe’s and a junkyard exploded in there now.

I even put up a blue tarp to stop the neighbor’s water sprinklers from spraying the camper… but it looks terrible.

We made a lot of progress today, but not quite as much as I had hoped for.  We did finish a few smaller things that I didn’t get photos of.  The stove is fully installed and I ended up screwing little support pieces to the upright bulkheads for the stove platform to sit on.  Jason also found some little brackets to bolt to the battery platform so that we can tie it down with a strap and secure it.  At over 100 pounds, the battery isn’t something we want to move! I think we have a pretty good plan of what we want to accomplish tomorrow, so lets hope for another productive day!