KITCHEN & CABINETRY

Our kitchen was designed around one thing: the fridge.

I love 12v fridges. Years ago I found a Norcold portable chest fridge in Las Vegas for $75. Now Vegas was about 5 hours from our house at the time, but I couldn’t pass up a deal like that. The day before Thanksgiving I headed down there, picked up the fridge, and headed home. The next day we had all sorts of leftovers and I loaded up the fridge in our kitchen to see what it could do. It had a dial that went from 1 to 5. I figured a little beyond 2 would do the trick. Well, it turns out this little fridge could bring the cold and it froze everything. I was impressed. We used it for a while, but then a good deal came up for an ARB fridge that had an LED temperature display and low voltage cutoff to save our battery. I had to have it. The ARB was fantastic and went all sorts of places with us. Along the way we also picked a small Engel fridge that is currently be used as a freezer as I type this. When we started building our first van we used the ARB for a while, but wanted something more permanent. We went with a Dometic drawer fridge. It fit perfectly in the space we had available. It just didn’t seem to hold as much as the others even though they were about the same size at around 50 liters. For our new van I knew that we needed about double the capacity and we were willing to give up cabinet space to make it happen. We wanted a fridge that was well made and had a decent sized freezer. I went back and forth for a couple months between Isotherm and Vitrifrigo. The thing that swayed is really so dumb, but it meant a lot to me, was the fact that one of the fridges had an all stainless handle instead of a plastic one. That’s really weird, but now that we have the fridge the handle makes a reassuring click when I close it and I love it. The winner was a 115 liter stainless fridge from Vitrifrigo. It has a 17 liter freezer which holds enough ice cream sandwiches. I’m amazed when we go grocery shopping and Keri is able to get everything in that fridge. I dig it the most.

DRAWERS

With the fridge pushed against the wheel well on the passenger side we have enough room for drawers on either side. We had never made drawers before, but we saw a video on youtube where a super enthusiastic man explained a sweet technique with a dado blade and a table saw. It’s called the “Quarter Quarter Quarter Drawer”. You basically make a channel in the drawer sides and in the ends into which a piece of 1/4” plywood can slide to make the bottom. It’s pretty rad and not hard to do. Keri and I felt like Bob Villa after our first drawer came together. We used that process for every drawer in the van. We used stainless steel Southco latches so everything can be locked up when we ship our rig to other countries.

COUNTERTOP

For the countertop we had grand plans. I glued two pieces of nice 3/4” plywood together and cut it to size. Next we wanted to put a sheet of laminate on top in some cool color. All that came crashing down when I decided to stop by a local scrapyard and have the van weighed for fun. Well, it wasn’t fun at all because the Sprinter was headed to being hundreds of pounds over GVWR. We had to reevaluate everything we added to the van and the big counter top was out. We went with a single layer of 1/2” ply that seemed so lame, but now it’s just right. We special ordered some Formica but the color was boring, so we special ordered some more. The second color was just right and it reminds us of the red rock of Southern Utah. We rounded over the edge with a router and sealed it with some Emmet’s Good Stuff. The whole kitchen turned out pretty good for people who had no idea what they were doing.

KITCHEN & CABINETRY GALLERY:

There are 2 pages of pictures. Make sure to click the #2 at the bottom to view the complete build.

We listed a few details of what we did at the bottom of each picture. If you have any questions about this build feel free to reach out to us.