Jet van der Graaf (4/5)

Jet van der Graaf (in her daily life she’s a designer at a magazine) has a dream: traveling the world in an old camper with her boyfriend and her two sons. The nineties camper van has been purchased and work continues day and night to pimp the in- and the outside. Jet shares her tips, doubts, decisions and moments of bliss with us.

Party on wheels

The inside of the camper is really almost finished. We only need to fix the floor and we’ll just leave it ‘open’ so the inside can ‘grow’ and become more personal by all the things we will come across on our travels. But then there’s the outside… The original factory exterior doesn’t go with the interior at all. Time to go for some rigorous plans! And we didn’t go about that lightly. The basic color, are we going for bright or pastels? Fact is that our little camper van doesn’t have any retro shapes, so pastel colors make no sense. We need the color to make up for the not-so-sexy-shape.  Orange maybe? Hmm, too ‘soccer-y’. The remainder of the black board paint?… Too ‘doomy’, so let’s not. And then we decided that all our vans – both now and in the future – will be red. We started out with a red and white VW old timer van after all. And we always loved the color, so this one will be red as well. And as it probably won’t be our last camper van, we’re already promising to make the future ones red as well. Great, this color-choice-stress-moment has been dealt with. But…. shall we go for a hippie painting or just let the kids have a go with paint? And are we using foil or paint? Luckily we can photoshop together some previews. In the end, the Orla Kiely pattern doesn’t make the cut. We really like the Orla Kiely wallpaper inside the bus, but it mustn’t get too much, too ‘slick’. Let’s keep it a bit ‘loose’, a bit more flower power. So shall we add flowers… Or is that too jolly… Bunting maybe? In the end we got ourselves a real ‘party on wheels’, painted in a good quality acrylic high gloss paint. The result? You’ll just have to wait until next week to see in the final No-Mad Family blog.

A summery salute, Jet