It’s been a busy couple of weeks – but we managed to squeeze in a few jobs along the way.

With our first fully van-based week long holiday looming, we wanted to get a few small jobs done in the campervan.

Chris cut out some spare pieces of plywood to create a top for the sink and draw bottoms. The sink top would allow us extra cooking space when the sink wasn’t in use, while the draw bottoms would stop smaller items dropping through.

He also fed the gas pipe through the worktop and created a holder for the camping stove, so it could be easily packed away when not in use.

For my part I lined a small cubby hole above the driving seats with carpet, so we could use it to store our clothes.

With these small adjustments we headed up to the Cairngorms for a week in the campervan.

On our return Chris finally put our bathroom blinds back up. He’d taken them down as a slight twist in the wood they were attached to meant they looked a little crumpled. After putting it off for a few months he finally made some blocks to straighten up the attachment so the blinds hung a little straighter.

Having previously made a door for our study, Chris cut it to size and added some biscuits to secure a small crack in one of the planks.

It just needs hanging now before being painted.

I used my time to start on the spare bedroom windowsills. We don’t have enough elm left for all the windowsills but we’re trying to make it stretch as far as possible.

I made new cardboard templates, before deciding how best to cut up the wood. One plank wouldn’t be wide enough so I would need to join two planks with biscuits.

For the larger sill I cut the biggest piece of wood to size and then straightened both edges, before measuring up a second piece to join on. For now both are clamped together in an attempt to straighten them, I can then plane the joining edge before using the biscuits to join them.

The smaller Windowsill was a little more complicated. I cut out the back piece but wanted to avoid cutting the joining front edge from one of the larger, more useful pieces of wood. We had one scrappy, small piece of wood, but it had a bad crack through it. Chris suggested using biscuits to stabilise the crack before cutting it to size.

I glued and clamped the wood to close the crack, before cutting a series of biscuit holes along it. I then glued the biscuits in place. Once the glue dries I can cut off the protruding half of the biscuits and cut the piece to size.

We probably only have enough elm left for one more small windowsill. We’ve decided to make the final two windowsills from the larch cladding we have left from the shed, a little rougher wood but should still be a nice feature.