With the walls cut, I was ready to upholster them. Like so many other pieces of this project, I’d never upholstered anything before. But a few YouTube videos later, I decided I was qualified enough. I bought two different types of fabric for the two walls- a green vinyl for the kitchen side and a sandy colored coarse weave fabric for the bed side. Each panel will have a layer of 1/8″ closed-cell foam between the wood and fabric, which will provide some thermal insulation, heat insulation, and make hitting my head on stuff in my small van a little less uncomfortable.
Step one was to attach foam to wood. With a can of spray adhesive, that was easy enough. I then trimmed down the foam to match the edges in most places and left an overlap along the edges I wanted to be a little thicker. This went pretty smoothly, but then again, none of that was going to be visible, so the bar was a little lower. Next up was the fabric. I did the vinyl first. I once again used some spray adhesive to stick the fabric to the panel, but in hindsight I’m not sure that was actually helpful. I then trimmed the fabric, folded, and stapled my way around the edge. Given that this was my first time, the result was pretty good! There were some wrinkles, probably caused by not smoothing the fabric out before gluing it and not pulling hard enough before stapling.
I took those lessons into account for the other wall, where I didn’t use glue and pulled real hard before stapling. That panel turned out great. The only problem was that the coarse weave fabric frays pretty easily, so I was worried about fraying making its way to the front side of the panel. I decided to tape down the flaps on the back with duct tape in the hopes that this holds it all together. I’ll report back.
The last step was to transfer the mounting holes in the panel, through the foam and fabric. In the vinyl, this was easy enough; I took a center punch and poked it through the fabric no problem. In the coarse weave, where I was worried about fraying, it was more of a challenge. Ultimately, I used a knitting needle to widen a gap in the weave and was able to push a screw through the space afterwards. I tried my best not to break any of the threads to minimize the threat of fraying.
