Thursday, September 4, 2014

More storage space

The Versatile has 4 seats, which we don't need. The first time we traveled, we took out the seat cushions of the passenger side rear seat and put a cooler in the seat frame. That wasn't a real efficient use of space, so I went ahead and removed the seat and seat belts altogether:


The top of the seat belt came out with a big wrench, but the bottom bolt defied my most strenuous efforts, so I just cut it off. The seat is never going back in anyway.

Having the table in the middle of the aisle is very constricting as far as movement within the van goes. There are only two of us, so we don't need table seating for 4, or even 3. I built a box to go in the place where the seat was, and modified the table top slightly to fit it:




This gets us more storage space, the table is permanently set up, always useful and out of the way of the aisle and we don't have to haul around the table support tube.

The box is about 2' tall, 2' long, and about 20" wide. It is fastened to the floor using the holes where the seat frame was attached and is also attached to the bathroom wall.

The table top originally had 4 of the fold-up extensions, but now there are only 2. The table top fits fairly tight against the door and the armrest on the door just slides right under the top. I also removed the extension on the side against the bathroom wall, but left the hinges so the top lifts up for access to a good sized storage space.

We have talked about putting some partitions inside the box or maybe a door on the aisle side, but really, it's quite useful as is. We put all that odd sized stuff in it that doesn't fit anywhere else.

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