More structure - building out the bathroom basics

During the same time as working on the solar panels and the electrical with my dad, I was working on structure and flooring on my own at home. After the wheelwells were in, next major structure to be located was the bathroom.

At the back is where the beds would be, going across the van, so I had the width of the bed set to the back wall of the bathroom. This ended up a bit past the end of the wheelwell, will make for some fun challenges when it comes to finish paneling.

It was going to be interesting to share the space between the wheelwell and the toilet. We wanted to keep the front of the living area open, not having the bathroom behind the driver like some Roadtrek style models. We also wanted to keep the fridge to the front/center as well, since its an important resource (not to say the toilet isn't but it doesn't need to be on display). So... we'll make it work back here.

Part of making it work was going to be reclaiming some space from the squared wheelwell box that I had built. To make the area narrower and provide more 'hallway' space, I needed to move the toilet closer to the wall. To do that, I needed to reclaim the corner. This meant doing some angle work with the 80/20 framing that usually prefers to be at right angles.

Initially I was going to use an internal anchor fastener from 80/20 to hold the angles. Its a really neat setup, but requires some machine work on the aluminum. A couple local shops quoted me several hundred dollars to do the work. Ok, I get the message, they didn't want to deal with a small job. So I came up with something else.

 This will all be over by paneling when complete, so it doesn't need to look pretty. A few small aluminum plates and the usual carriage bolts with nylock nuts. Quite secure and solid enough.

The angle let me scoot the toilet over a bit to the wall, keeping things narrow as possible but still workable while sitting inside.

A closer view of the space gained by doing the angle work.

A great part of working with the 80/20 aluminum instead of a wood structure is that things can go together and come apart as many times as needed with no loss of rigidity. Shown here is the bathroom wall structure taken out and set aside to provide more room to work (and to work on the flooring).