James,
A very nice build you've got going, excellent workmanship.
I hope you don't find, like we did, that a large bed in a CT eats up all the room inside and have to remodel after your first camping trip. I suspect that won't be the case with you since you appear to come from a teardrop camping background, something I don't.
We are building a 6x10 CT and made a very nice and comfortable large double bed only to find on the first outing that the bed ate up all the usable living/sitting space inside and we were crammed in when the weather turned ugly. Our galley is inside in the front area of our CT so, with 2 less feet of space than you have, well we ended up with about 2 1/2 feet of space to move around in. Not a very pleasant outing.
Thankfully I designed our CT so that the big double bed was completely removable using E-Track hardware to anchor it to the sidewalls of the CT. The reason for that is we also wanted to be able to get our Harley inside. After that first outing it became clear that our original design wasn't going to cut it for us. Thankfully it was an easy redesign to build a pair of crosswise bunk-beds in the aft end of the CT i.e., butted up against the rear doors (the bunk-beds are also removable to get the Harley in, again thanks to the E-Track hardware system). The only thing not removable in our CT is the forward galley area, but that only takes up the space of the rounded forward area.
Christi likes to bird watch so it was quickly realized after our first outing that we really needed to have room in our CT to sit at a table and work on our laptops, she for birding research and me for photo processing. On a subsequent outing we again ran into rather foul weather and found ourselves stuck inside the CT and thankful for the bunk-bed redesign that freed up a good bit of room to set up a folding table and chairs in the CT and still have room to cook in the galley with sufficient room to move around inside out of the weather.
Again, different camping styles come into play. If the weather is foul in the evening we prefer to be inside since we spend most of the day (foul weather or not) out birding/hiking. We also prefer to cook inside in any weather except when we want to BBQ or Dutch oven cook. We tend to travel light so don't usually set up overhead tarps or free-standing overhead covers. We keep most of our stuff inside the CT (generator is the exception) so that we can pack and be back on the road on short notice should the mood strike us. We're really getting into boondocking, hence the desire to keep the CT light, self contained, and ready to move to a new spot.
Once again, you have a very nice build going and I will be following it closely in hopes of getting some ideas and watching your progress.
Please keep in mind that what is said in the above is offered simply for what it's worth... and as is often said, "Free advice is worth exactly what is paid for it."
Don
by d30gaijin » Tue Mar 08, 2011 8:22 pm 
