Building Baloo

Vehicles like Baloo do not come off the shelf. They are quite uncommon. In fact our concept of a dream vehicle seemed to be something unique until we met up with Unicat.

The plan, here, is to post a series of articles describing how we set about working with Unicat to come up with the sort of vehicle we wanted. Unicat are, in my opinion, the absolute world leaders in this sort of thing. You can find them here: https://www.unicat.net/

The vehicle is a genuine mobile home. Not a camper van. The difference is to do with compromise. When camping you accept using sleeping bags and paddling across the grass to use a shower. That is all great fun. For a while. Eventually you want to get back to your proper bed and your own shower. We wanted a mobile home that we could live in for years on end so we needed a vehicle that did not compromise how we lived.

Baloo is what we ended up with.

Industrial camping

Industrial Camping is the term used by Unicat owners to describe camping at the Unicat factory. We did several weeks of Industrial Camping as part of the process of moving into our new home. Packing was a big part of this. Packing everything into lockers, drawers and cupboards. Clothes, tools, equipment, food, supplies. Everything apparently needed packing at least four times, unpacking, rearranging and packing again. Eventually things started to fit into place but it was all remarkably time-consuming and difficult. The essential question of what to take, when examined in detail, is almost impossibly hard to answer. We spent an awful lot of time packing things, thinking carefully about it, changing our mind and then unpacking them again. Ultimately some order emerged. We were pleased with some of the packing and when boredom set in we stuffed everything else into boxes marked ‘misc’.

Many lists. And to rule them all a master list – the list of lists
Fetching essential supplies. Here are some of the other vehicles and more Industrial Camping.