Restoring & Converting a 1979 Bedford CF
We’re Lucy & Ben, and for the past 6 years we’ve been travelling around 31 countries in Europe in our (t)rusty old LDV Convoy.
Like many others, we have a dream to be able to travel full time, but first we needed to finance that dream in a way that wouldn’t involve us returning to the UK to work every summer.
So in 2018 we purchased our second van, this time a 1979 Bedford CF we found in a barn in North Cornwall. These vans, although rare to see today, were the workhorses of Britain in their heyday, functioning as camper vans, ice cream vans and horse boxes. This one was unloved and neglected, and didn’t even have a box on the back, but we instantly fell in love with its quirkiness and classic British charm. The idea was to restore the van, build a box, convert it into a liveable camper van and hire it out to generate us an income on the road.
Easy, right?
Wrong.
It didn’t dawn on us until long after we’d handed over £450 in cash just how monumental a project this was going to be.
Our ‘79 Bedford CF when we bought it- look, no box!
First, there was a lot of rust to tackle. Actually, that would be a common theme throughout the project. We started with the easy stuff; grinding and treating the surface rust on the chassis and the cab. Thankfully the van was structurally sound, but the panels needed a lot of TLC. Much later in the project we’d enlist a welder to do some serious restoration on the wings, doors and arches.
The van was 39 years old at this point, and had been sat in a barn for at least two years, but we managed to get the old 2.3L Slant Four engine running again with help from Lucy’s dad. In a previous life this van had transported horses around the county of Surrey and across the UK, but somewhere along the way its horsebox had been removed, so it was up to us to construct a new one.
We did initially look at using a donor box, but nothing we found was the right size or had the classic boxy style to match the age of the van.
So we decided to build one.
The van pre-conversion, when we were still in the planning stages.
Now, had we known this process would take the best part of 2 years on and off before we could even start converting the van we probably wouldn’t have done it. It was a huge challenge, made all the more unpleasant by the grim winter weather working on endless sheets of cold metal, but we did learn a lot from the process. Lucy’s dad showed us how to cut down aluminium sheets and box section, pop rivet them together to create walls, and weld a steel subframe for everything to sit on. Eventually we were left to our own devices, and had to figure out a way of building and attaching a roof- the final part of the puzzle, and the hardest bit of the whole project! You can see in this video just how badly we were battling the weather that day!
Halfway through the build-can you tell what it is yet?
The finished box. The cab still needed more welding though.
Finally after 2 years (with a 6 month break to travel Eastern Europe in between) we were ready to start insulating the van. Usually this would be the first part of a van build, but by this stage we were already halfway through, although it didn’t feel like it at the time. It was around this time that the pandemic hit the UK, but unlike many others who struggled we thrived over lockdown, using the time to focus on van building.
As our first van has next to no insulation we went a little overkill on the Bedford, insulating with 25mm and 50mm Celotex boards as we had a lot of extra room to play with. We cladded these with plywood for the walls and roof, as we didn’t want to go down the typical van conversion route of cladding. Initially we painted these with lime wash, but the whole experiment was a bit of a fail so we went for a simple earthy beige instead (we kept the back wall lime-washed after much deliberating, and it’s now made the nicest feature wall for the kitchen).
A blank canvas: the finished box ready to convert.
Work begins insulating the box- at last!
The plywood walls and flooring are in.
It was also around this time we realised that the van we’d built was too big and too old to hand over the keys to renters and let them drive it around the narrow country roads of Cornwall, so we decided we would site it in a field somewhere to hire out as a glamping van once the project was finished. Without weight to worry about we had greater freedom with our design choices, so we laid down real oak floorboards and tiled the shower room and kitchen in the most amazing green marble tiles.
Tiling the shower room.
The shower room was the first to be completed, with a brass rainfall shower and DIY slate shower tray, then we moved onto the seating area and the over-cab bed, before finishing with the kitchen. During those long, cold winters of 2018/19, cutting and riveting endless lengths of aluminium, we could only long for the day when we'd be obsessing over curtain fabric and what shade of green to paint the kitchen, but now here we were.
The interior ended up being a blend of various different styles; a woodland-style bed and seating area with twisty driftwood branch bed divider and a live edge burr elm table, a modern farmhouse / gypsy wagon-inspired kitchen with waney edge worktops, and cabinets painstakingly hand-stencilled by Lucy. All of this with a distinctly vintage twist, paying homage to our van’s 1970’s origins and imagining what it would’ve looked like had it been built a camper van when it was first made. Some of our favourite features are the Moroccan enamel sink, and the quirky vintage radio we picked up secondhand which crackles when you turn the dial.
The real transformation came however, when the weather got nice enough to paint outside. We gave the entire van a base coat of vintage cream (all 34m² of it!) before layering on the details in classic British racing green, with the idea of highlighting how we constructed it by accentuating the channel that joins all the panels together.
The colour scheme truly makes it look worthy of being called a classic vehicle, and being able to swap the plastic number plates for pressed black and silver ones was really the icing on the cake for this 3½ year project.
The van fully painted in vintage two tone green and cream.
We can honestly say that building this van was the biggest challenge of our lives so far, and really pushed us to our physical and mental limits. Aside from the immediate challenges of learning how to wire lights, plumb pipes and pop-rivet aluminium, there was the huge amount of mental stamina required to get back out there day after day and graft. We learned that it’s important to take breaks from a project when you’ve run out of steam, to recharge your batteries and rekindle your motivation, but also the value and huge sense of achievement that comes with overcoming a project that’s colossally bigger than yourselves. We truly feel now like if we can conquer this, we can conquer anything.
That said, we may already have a third van sitting on the driveway, but that’s another story…
P.S. The best part is we can now welcome travellers from all over the world to come and stay in our awesome creation here in Cornwall, and we’ll finally be able to realise our dream of travelling full time. If anyone wants to book, just drop us a message or tap the listing below.
You can view the entire Bedford project from start to finish on our YouTube channel here, or check out the full playlist below.
And if you want to follow our next adventures, you can join us on Instagram, Facebook or YouTube.
See you on the road!
Playlist: Van Conversion Series: Bedford CF 1979
Related posts:
The story of Bowie, and practical advice on rescuing, adopting and bringing a stray dog back to the U.K. from abroad.