Empty LWB van arriving in three weeks, both of us work full time, so this is weekends and the odd evening. Every build video jumps from bare metal to a finished interior with a soundtrack, and I cannot work out what depends on what. I would like a genuine sequence and a genuine hour count from people who tracked it, even if the answer is depressing.
I logged mine because I am that sort of person. 312 hours from empty to liveable, spread over seven months of weekends, and about another 90 hours of finishing and fixing in the year after that. The breakdown surprised me: insulation and panelling was 60, electrical 55, furniture 110, and the remainder was errands, thinking, and undoing. Errands were bigger than I expected because you cannot batch what you have not discovered you need yet.
Push back on the neat sequence slightly: electrical is not one step, it is three. Rough-in while walls are open, then temporary connection so you can test as you go, then the tidy permanent version once furniture exists and you know where the fridge actually sits. Treating it as a single stage is how people end up with wires in the wrong place behind a finished wall.
Liveable comes much sooner than finished, and I would aim at liveable deliberately. Floor, bed, a power system that charges a phone and runs a fan, a box with a camping stove in it, and you can sleep in it and use it while you build the rest. We did that at about weekend six and the remaining eight months were far more pleasant because the van was already earning its keep.
This is the single best decision we made too. It also means the layout gets tested by real use before the expensive parts are committed.
Double whatever number you land on, because the hours are not the problem, the weekends being cancelled are. Rain, a delayed delivery, a weekend away, and suddenly your seven months are eleven. Nobody I know finished on their first estimate, including the ones who tracked hours accurately.
@kerf_wander · 3mo ago · 3 replies
The dependency chain that matters is: strip and clean, treat rust, cut every hole you will ever want including windows fan and any external inlets, sound deaden, insulate, floor, run all wiring and any plumbing routes while the walls are open, then wall and ceiling panels, then furniture, then the fiddly finishing that takes twice as long as you think. The only rule you cannot break is that anything passing through the shell or hiding behind a panel happens before that panel goes on.
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@psu_paula · 3mo ago
Decide now even if you fit it later. Frame around where it will go and leave the panel removable, otherwise later means never or means a very bad Saturday.
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@psu_paula · 3mo ago
Every hole up front is the part I was going to get wrong. I was planning to decide on the second window later.
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