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You’d think with this being our second campervan conversion, we’d have all the kinks ironed out. But low and behold.. loads of mistakes made in our van floor installation! After researching for days, if not weeks, watching countless YouTube videos, and reading copious amounts of blog posts on camper van floor installation, we jumped into installing our van floor.
While most van floor installs take a couple of days, we were installing our floor while working other jobs and taking care of our granddad. So, our floor install happened over a period of a week. You can read about our step-by-step process of installing our van floor here. Within our floor installation, we made nine mistakes we wanted to warn you about!
Trust us, your van floor installation will go much more smoothly if you avoid these nine van floor installation mistakes!
9 Van Floor Mishaps to Avoid
1. Don’t fill holes that lead to things you may need to access later!
Contrary to what you may believe, sometimes holes in the van floor lead to things you actually need access to. Okay, fine, maybe that’s just us that didn’t necessarily think that capped holes had purposes.. but they do!
While not all holes in the floor of your van lead to important bits, you’ll want to check them all to see if you need to keep access to them when designing your floor plan and installing your floor.
Seat bolts holes and the like can be filled. But capped holes, like the one in the image below, need to be checked to ensure nothing like a bolt to release your spare tire is underneath! If you can see daylight through it, fill it — if there’s a bolt or something similar, be sure to mark the place you need to keep access to in all the layers of your floor install!
2. Don’t wait to do the Reflectix around the wheel well and step!
Trust us on this one.. do not wait to do the Reflectix around both the wheel well and the step. You’ll be surprised how much this minor change affects the measurements of your plywood subfloor and top flooring. It only minorly changed the fitting of the first layer of floor insulation in our van, however, dramatically affected the plywood subfloor measurements.
We had major frustration in this step, having to take the plywood floor in and out of the van multiple times to just try and get it to fit around the wheel wells. It honestly probably cost us 30-45 minutes and so much frustration and worry, worrying of damaging the floor insulation and Reflectix.
Skip the extra time, frustration, and worry by just wrapping your wheel wells and van step with Reflectix first!
3. Don’t use spray adhesive on the bottom of the insulation!
We doubled up on adhesives when we installed the floor insulation onto the floorboard of the van. We used Great Stuff Expanding Foam to fill the ribs of the van along with fully coating the floorboard and bottom of the polyiso insulation sheet with spray adhesive. This ended up being an overkill, actually working against us.
The Great Stuff Expanding Foam works as an adhesive on its own, so we didn’t need to double up using the spray adhesive. It’s a waste of money and material, and unless you lay it perfectly and there is no excess expanding foam pushing the insulation off the floor, you’ll have creaking noises each time you step on a place that isn’t fully tacked down.
READ MORE // How to Insulate Your Van Floor + Materials and Tools for the Job!
4. Measure and remeasure, fit and refit the van flooring 10,000 times before sticking anything!
We didn’t measure and remeasure the plywood, so when we went to use it as a place to put extra weight on the floor to stick the spray foam to insulation, we wasted a lot of time and frustration in measuring again, leading to the spray foam expanding too much!
Measure and remeasure each layer of your van flooring legit 10,000 times. Even if you just put the plywood van floor in and took it out then changed the smallest thing.. you need to put the plywood floor in again to make sure it still fits. You’d be surprised that the smallest changes affect the fitting of each and every van floor layer.
No matter how many times you measure and lay the floor, you’ll surely have something come out off.. having this tool is a lifesaver for being able for trimming pieces last minute when they just don’t fit.
5. Don’t try and do extra fancy on the step
I, Heather, was super keen on making the step leading into the van from the sliding door super fancy…you know.. secret shelf & shoebox.. the whole shebang. Jay, on the other hand, couldn’t be bothered. In the end, with such a small area, there was no reason to make it super fancy, adding the flooring to it, or boxing it in for extra storage.
While Reflectix again isn’t the best for insulation unless there’s an air gap, for this small of an area, Reflectix works fine. No need to piece together the polyiso insulation to just get a little bit higher R-value for such a small place. Not to mention the roundedness (is that even a word) of that area is super difficult to cut sheet insulation perfectly to fit.
Just use the Reflectix for the step and then replace the plastic step cover (if your van came with one) over the step. We ended up spray painting our plastic step cover black to match the floor better — we’ll update this with how well that holds up!
6. Don’t throw away anything you remove to do the van floor installation — you never know what you’ll end up using again.
While we knew we wanted to keep the original carpet in the van to use as a stencil for the van floor installation, we didn’t think we’d use anything else after pulling everything out. Turns out, we decided to use quite a bit of the plastic pieces (i.e. for the van step) and other bits and bobs here and there for the rest of the van conversion.
Don’t throw away anything that you pull out of the van, during both the floor conversion as well as the rest of the conversion. You’ll never know what you change your mind on, or what you could use as a stencil for making the van build out easier for you.
As a total side note, before just throwing away things that you decide not to use after your build is completely finished, check to see if you could sell them on eBay. There are lots of opportunities to make money back on even the smallest parts of vans — sun visors, seat belts, headrests, handles. You name it, you can potentially sell it!
7. Don’t stress about the cracks and crevices!
Don’t stress about imperfect fits.. It’s just not worth worrying over the quality or stress over the perfect fit of any section of floor insulation!
Great Stuff Expanding Foam Gaps and Cracks is made for the not-so-perfect cuts! All the extra gaps and cracks around your polyiso-sheet insulation can be filled with expanding foam. If you accidentally cut off a bit too much, don’t sweat it. Just add some expanding foam, shave off the excess, cover it with aluminum foil tape, and you’re good to go!
8. Don’t skimp out and not buy enough materials!
Purchase more spray adhesive and expanding foam than you think you need for your van floor installation. You can always return what you don’t use. Or, use it in other areas of the van. But you surely don’t want to come up short of something like the spray adhesive while you’re in the middle of your van floor install!
We live about 20 minutes from any store selling materials for doing a van build, so when we were running short on spray adhesive, we had no other choice but to use less than we truly needed. Some of our van floor is not as permanently stuck to the plywood subfloor as we would like.
Don’t make the same mistake — over purchase and then return!
9. When using rolled flooring, don’t cut your final flooring (top layer) perfect to size until you glue it down.
In this van flooring installation video, you’ll see a bit better what we mean by this, but I’ll try and explain here too. If you choose to not do tongue and groove van flooring but instead use a type of roll flooring for your van, don’t cut the flooring perfectly until the final stage of the install. When you unroll the van flooring and stick it down, you place it where it will permanently stay. This is the time to do any final trimmings on the edge of your flooring, not before it’s stuck, just in case it moves a bit while you lay it!
Pressing out the bubbles and air gaps when laying the van flooring roll can adjust the placement ever so slightly, making your perfect cuts not so perfect anymore!
So, why did we have so many van flooring installation mistakes?
This was our second van build. And, we did so much research before installing the van floor. However, we still ran into nine mistakes in the install. While we’d like to not have to say this, we can nearly certainly say, you’ll run into mistakes too.
It’s part of the process. It’s part of a DIY van build.
Don’t let this stress you out. Go into your build knowing that you’ll run into mistakes and mishaps. That mindset alone will help the van floor installation run more smoothly. Nothing in your van will be “perfect”, but that’s what makes it perfect for you!
More Posts to Help With Your Van Build + Vanlife
Step by Step Guide + Material List for Insulating your Campervan Floor
Helpful Van Conversion and Vanlife Blogs for any Vanlifer
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Follow Along with Our Van Build + Adventures Here
