I am starting to have concerns about my project manager’s taste in interior design. We’d always planned to keep the colours inside the campervan quite calm and neutral – white tops, chocolate seating and splashes of coffee or beige if we were feeling adventurous. But Paul has recently expressed an interest in a fairly alarming combination of sunbeam yellow and peacock blue. Clearly the campervan’s not large enough to accommodate nicely spaced feature walls, so I fear this could be a little overbearing. Maybe a bit too cheerful. I have to say though, choosing exact colours is quite a tricky business. The ceiling and very tops of the interior sides are covered in an attractive grey carpet, which has to stay, but we still need to choose colours for the bathroom wall, cabinets, work surfaces and floors.

Last weekend, we spent a morning trawling round a few kitchen showrooms to get an idea of different materials and colours. I LOVE kitchen showrooms and before I knew it, I heard myself explaining to the sales lady (or ‘hostess’ as she was called) that we were renovating our kitchen and how much are these lovely white stone cabinets with self-closing drawers and glass mosaic tiles? That was all very nice, but it made it a bit awkward to then try and steer round to the racks of cheap laminate samples to get a more realistic idea for the campervan. Sadly our budget and weight limit in the van preclude anything with granite or stone in the name, but at least there’s a massive choice available. We finally left two hours later with a handbag full of samples and a $20,000 quote for our own kitchen (maybe next year).

Back home, we narrowed it down to these, and spent the afternoon lining them up inside the van:

So it’s a fairly neutral and calming colour palette (like we’d planned), but maybe just a little… dull. We both like the idea of including something a bit bolder and brighter, something that will make you smile when you open the door. After all, that’s the whole idea of taking off in a campervan. So Paul’s started experimenting with different colours using Google’s SketchUp (a great program where we’ve got a 3-D model of the campervan), and it does seem to suit something more exuberant. Perhaps not quite as exuberant as peacocks and sunbeams, but some glossy red or (the ubiquitous) aqua could make an appearance. So the jury’s still out on that one for the moment. We have, however, chosen the floor – update in the next post!