Under Construction

Unfortunately, I am a very big guy, so in designing our bathroom/shower I wanted to avoid the undersized hard-sided bathroom/showers typically found in RVs and campervans. So I decided to create a soft-sided space of a more reasonable size. A sort of Murphy shower. This turned out to be a very useful configuration as it provides a very convenient little room in the middle of the van for changing, doing our business and showering. It also provides several handy ways of creating a partition between the front and rear of the van for naps and when one of us is sleeping in. We ran two para-cord messengers across the van about 27″ apart. On these messengers we strung two standard shower curtain liners. We strung them in such a way that they formed two “L”s. with enough of each curtain unstrung on opposite end to reach the other messenger cord. When fully deployed we wind up with a 27″x42” soft-sided room. We find that quite often deploying only one curtain in various possible configurations is quite useful in providing sufficient privacy. When not in use we push the curtains back against the wall and secure them with an elastic cord attached to the wall.

When I designed the shower pan, I started from first principles. We are very conservative with water when boon-docking. We found, through experience, that our typical “Navy showers”, where you wash yourself with a wet soapy wash cloth then only turn on the water to rinse, could easily be done with less than 750 ml of water from a bottle with a screw on spray head. Given that 1.5 liters (2 x .75 liters) of water only covers our 30″x30″ shower pan to a depth of 1/10th of an inch. Therefore, engineering a shower pan with drain plumbing is unnecessary. I designed a shower pan of sil-nylon and small dowels that folds up to the size of a folded up kite. We are able to fold it up while still full of our rinse water. It is designed so that the folded up pan forms a hammock like pouch to contain the rinse water. The folded up pan is then easily transported to either the sink or outside where a simple tilt of the bundle dumps the water. We then open the pan back up to wipe down and let dry. When deployed there are strings in each corner that are attached to either an ice-cream stick or magnetic hook. Each corner is held at a specific height either by an ice-cream stick  slid easily under specific drawers and the magnetic hook sticks to our fridge.