by Belmo » Thu Jan 02, 2020 9:14 am
I'm about halfway through my build, and I'm dormant for the winter: my garage is small, and though I can fit my TD in there, there's nowhere near enough room in there to work on it, so I've had to do my build in my driveway. It works great -- roll it out, work on it, then roll it back in the garage -- but I ain't going to be out there working power tools when it's 20 degrees outside. Since we'll not be camping until spring, I put the damn thing away for the winter, and will get back to work when the weather breaks, which will hopefully be in early March this year in my neck of the woods (Philly).
I've been thinking of things I can do during the winter, and one that popped into my head is the mattress. My TD is going to be bigger than the norm, with the inside about 8 feet long by about 6'6" wide. I made it bigger for more room for us (we have a soon-to-be-13 year old kid), and in case we want to camp with the dogs. I have a queen size foam mattress that I scored for short money from a guy who was moving to France and needed to unload it, and I'll pick up another one that's big enough to cover the rest of the floor (I think a full will do, but I have to measure). I'll have to trim both mattresses a bit, but that's OK, because I've cut foam before, and it's easy. I do want the mattress to cover the entire floor, both for insulation (the walls and roof of the TD will be insulated, but the 6-inch foam will be the floor insulation), and to allow maximum versatility for where people sleep (and which way the heads and feet are oriented; the inside will be wide enough for shorter people to sleep sideways, as it were, rather than front to back).
The whole time I've spent designing the TD, I planned to have the mattress be only two pieces: the queen and full foam mattresses, cut to fit the inside of the camper. It seemed that it would be more comfortable that way. But in looking at the pictures on this board the past few days, I've started to come around to thinking that cutting the foam into panels, like two feet wide, would be better: it would make it easier to remove the mattresses, or (and this is the big one for me) if we want to store stuff inside the camper while we're moving. When we go camping, we're planning on putting all our gear -- bags of clothes, canopies, sleeping bags, coolers, the whole bit -- inside the camper when we're driving, and I think I like the idea of putting them on the wood floor, rather than on the foam, so that the foam doesn't get all squished while we're moving. This will be a lot easier if the foam is cut into sections: I could stack them against the wall, get them out of the way, and then load stuff inside so it's not on the foam. Then take all the crap out when we get where we're going, put the foam panels back together, and we're good to go.
And if I'm going to cut the foam into sections, that's something I can do this winter: I can cut the foam, and also make the covers, inside, when it's cold out (I'm going to make covers for the foam, like a dog bed, so that we'll not be sleeping on naked foam). But before I do that, I want to ask a question here: is it better sleeping on foam if it's one piece, rather than cut up into sections like a futon? I'm thinking that it probably doesn't make much difference if the foam is tight (pieces are tight together), but that's just a guess. I don't want to hack my foam mattress to pieces, only to find out after a couple of lousy nights sleeping that I should have kept it in as few pieces as possible.
Does anyone have any feedback on this? Input will be appreciated. Thank you!