Now that the first couple of fixed furniture like the bed structure, partition and cabinet are finished, the next elements for installation are coming. For this blogpost, these are the bench seat with the height-adjustable dining table.

The bench

In order to achieve a comfortable sitting height, the construction of the stools must take into account not only the total height to the edge of the wood. For the final seat height, the thickness of the seat cushion must also be taken into account. We conclude that for our van the seat height including the cushion is 46cm. So, we dimensioned the stools with a height of about 42cm so that everything fits together.
The construction is kept simple. Basically, our seat stools consist of a square construction of wooden slats, which transfer the forces to the vehicle floor. For the side walls and the lid of the box we use the same birch plywood as for all furniture and screw them from the inside. In this way we achieve a clean appearance from the outside with a high internal stability of the bench.
The lid of the wooden box aka bench can be easily lifted up, so we have a storage space of around 55 x 45 x 45cm twice.

The dining table

For the dining table, we are guided by the idea that we would like to be able to make a sofa out of the tabletop together with the two benches. Accordingly, we order a table leg that can be screwed to the floor, is height-adjustable, and can be rotated and moved sideways. This gives us all the adjustment options we need to sink the table into the gap between the seats. With stop woods, which we screw to the sides of the wooden stools, we stabilize the tabletop additionally against the strong lateral forces, if we should not sit centrally on the tabletop. This gives us a comfortable dining area as well as a sofa in case we don’t need a table.

That’s the plan, in reality we are only building the benches at this stage of expansion, the table will be added later as the table leg still needs to be delivered and the tabletop needs to be adapted to the built-in benches and not get in the way during further expansion.
However, since we are writing this post after the finishing of the project, we can already provide you with pictures of the finished table.
Another important part of our interior is done. And soon we will continue with the kitchen installation!