COROPLAST PRIVACY SCREEN FOR THE AIRSTREAM INTERSTATE

"What the heck is coroplast?!" you are probably wondering.  Well, much like the word Xerox, it's one of those trade names that has grown to represent the medium itself, in this case namely corrugated plastic, also known as "plastic cardboard" or by a term of greater technical accuracy which is "polypropylene fluted sheet".

If you have ever seen these USPS mail totes, then you've seen a type of coroplast in action.  It's a very light-weight, strong, versatile, and delightfully cheap construction material.  

This is also the same material that advertising and political signs are made of, the ones you see stuck in the ground outside City Hall when you go to vote.  Animal shelters love political signs because, after the election is over, people gather them up and they are used throughout the year to line the bottoms of small animal cages, all for free.   

It was by examining US Mail boxes like those shown above that I realized coroplast would have many potential applications within any small RV, not just the Airstream Interstate.  And one of the first adaptations I wished to make was for a privacy screen between the two jack-knife couch halves, for those times when I or my husband would be traveling and overnighting with a non-spousal partner, such as another family member.  For instance, we have loose plans to use the Interstate to take our daughter on a college tour.  Well, there's no way that a teenager would willingly share an immodest sleeping space with any of her family members, especially her father or step-father.  And frankly, if I myself am going to wake up with someone's morning breath in my face, it better be my husband's and nobody else's.

A coroplast screen addresses my desire for a bit of sleeping privacy by providing a degree of physical separation without requiring structural modifications and without adding unnecessary bulk, weight, or complexity.

Plus, I coordinated it style-wise with the interior of our vehicle, and I think it looks cool.  Once again, you can see the cross-referencing (design element repetition) that I talked about in my ART FOCAL WALL post:  The black color mirrors the window surrounds.  The folds mirror the pleats in the window shades.

This is the view that I get from "my" side of the Interstate.  I wouldn't know whether there's another person on the other side of that screen or not.  

There's the view from the galley.  The screen just sits on the floor and is sandwiched between the two couches.  Simple but effective.   

Most coroplast comes in the white or translucent white varieties that are used to make signs.  I realized that the best color for our vehicle would actually be black, which is a more visually-imposing color (and it would also match the decor).  So I first set out to find this product on the internet.

Ah, it was a sign!!!  I needed a black polypro sheet for my Interstate, and one of the largest national distributors is called Interstate Plastics!
:-)

0.158 inches is the 4 mm thickness, which is the one that works best for this application (IMHO).  

I quickly found out, however, that buying a piece of coroplast on the internet would be prohibitively expensive due to the shipping costs.  I ended up buying mine from a local sign manufacturing shop located less than a mile from my house.  I did not require a full 4' x 8' sheet for this project, but their policy was to only sell whole sheets if a customer was not placing a sign order.  And of course they charged a premium for a single whole sheet, but it was still much cheaper than paying for shipping.  I ended up paying $40 for a 4' x 8' sheet of black.  But if you hunt around, you might be able to find a half-sheet of white or translucent for as little as five bucks (I've seen examples on eBay).

Here are some tips and procedures on customizing coroplast for your vehicle.

As I mentioned in my recent ART FOCAL WALL post, nothing comes into our houses (wheeled and non-wheeled) without first being mocked-up using cardboard.  I knew that I needed a screen in the rough vicinity of four foot square, so I first taped together some cardboard pieces to represent that size. 

However, I quickly decided that having the screen be 4 feet tall would be too imposing.  Those are my knees for scale at photo left.  It did not need to be that high to achieve its purpose. 

See what I mean?  It's too much at this height.  Overkill.  

I cut the mock-up down to 43 inches from 48 inches, which resulted in a more pleasing, less dominating appearance.  That also had the advantage of making it short enough for storage in the Interstate's closet.

Now 43 inches high.  Much better.

This cardboard fitting procedure is a variation on the theme of "measure twice, cut once".  I didn't want to chop into a $40 polypro until I was sure of what I wanted, because that might result in waste.  I want to be able to use the rest of the sheet for other projects.  

To make straight, professional-looking cuts, use a T-square, a very sharp box cutter, and a steady hand.  

After I cut the piece to size, we had to make the accordion pleats, which have to run vertically so that the screen will stand up on its own.  Let me re-emphasize that - the sheet flutes have to run vertically for a free-standing screen to work.

Given that the horizontal width was still 48 inches, we did the obvious math (6 x 8 = 48) and decided that we needed each pleat to be about 8 inches wide.  However, some width is consumed during the making of each fold, so we attempted to make each pleat 7.75 inches wide.  That was just a guess, and we did not end up with 6 perfectly-sized pleats, but it's close enough (there are more rigorous ways to do that calculation and folding, methods that could result in greater precision if that's an issue for you).  

Getting a nice crisp fold is best done as a two-person job, one on each side to bend the sheet neatly over the T-square.  

Here is the final sheet accordion'd up and secured with a Velcro at each end.  I did not weigh it, but it's perhaps one or two pounds.  

And as I mentioned, at 43 inches tall, it fits perfectly in our closet, which is one option for stowage.  I could put sticky dots of Velcro on that wall and just stick it there, for instance.

We plan to add shelves in this closet, but probably only in the back part of the L-shaped space.  I need some remaining space in the vehicle for stowage of taller objects. 

If you don't have a longitudinal couch model of Interstate, you might still be able to adapt coroplast to create a screen that would work for you (for instance, you could make a screen for a lounge seating vehicle by only having the forward portion extend all the way to the floor).  Here is my general advice on fabrication:

• DO NOT run a coroplast screen up close to your heater because that could present a fire hazard.  We have a rear heater and you'll notice in the photos above that, at 48 inches wide, our screen stops 2 feet short of the Interstate's rear doors.  This is OK because it's not my shins that need privacy - it's my face.  Having a shorter screen keeps the plastic away from the heater and also allows the heat to circulate better.  See also our BIG FAT DISCLAIMER.  
• Note that black coroplast is really good at showing dust because of static cling.  This might be a concern to some folks, so you will want to pick your color accordingly.  

As always, this is a non-commercial post presenting personal opinions only.  No retailer has provided any consideration in exchange for being cited.

The Interstate is indeed a small ship, and I guess I've created a sleeper cloaking device of sorts.  

STORING PILLOWS IN AN AIRSTREAM INTERSTATE

The Air Forums thread titled "My Bed Solution" does a good job of illustrating how frustrated some owners are with what they perceive as lack of comfort with the Airstream Interstate fold-down beds.  I made a comment in that thread that a good pillow can go a long way toward compensating for a less-than-perfect bed, and I cited the TEMPUR-Symphony pillow as our choice both at home and on the road.

Tempur-Pedic makes a number of specialty pillows using "memory foam".  They do offer a selection of travel pillows, but my husband and I prefer the full-sized Symphony.

Image courtesy of this Tempur-Pedic site.

There's just one issue, though - the Symphony pillows are very large, heavy, and incompressible.  Where to store them in a tiny Interstate motorhome?

Our solution is a bit counterintuitive.

Typically in any motorhome, you would strive to put less heavy objects up high and heavier objects down low, but in this case, there was another consideration - noise from the ass end of the Interstate.  This is a view looking into an under-bed cabinet at the starboard rear wheel well, where a lot of that noise originates.   In this case, we found that noise dampening trumps weight considerations.  And there's nothing like pillows to muffle sound.  Especially when there are tubular sleeping bags stored in conjunction with them.  

Here's the next consumer miracle I discovered - the IKEA Frakta shopping bag is the exact size and shape of the Symphony pillow, and I mean exact.  At a whopping $0.59, you can't go wrong with this purchase.  

If you were storing your pillows overhead, you would not need a storage sack, but it's dirty and dusty down on the floor and the Frakta protects wonderfully.

That silvery gray fabric you see peeking out from under-couch slot above the pillows is the sleeping bag storage solution described in this post.  I have found that both of these storage solutions reduce road noise considerably.  

As usual, this is a noncommercial post presenting personal opinions only.  No retailer has provided any consideration in exchange for being referenced.

That's one of the great mysteries of humanity.  

STORING BEDDING IN AN AIRSTREAM INTERSTATE

Few features of the Airstream Interstate have garnered as many varied complaints as the fold-down beds (e.g., see this Air Forums thread titled "My bed solution").  Those who do find relief by using add-on products such as mattresses and toppers often have difficulty storing their bedding materials in the Interstate's small space.

In this post, I detail a DIY solution for both wheeled and non-wheeled storage of our chosen winter bedding, which is the sleeping bags that we already owned from years of backcountry camping.  We are doing some boondocking this winter, running the Interstate's furnace only sporadically to conserve battery life (the heater is gas-powered but its blower fan draws electricity), and so our chosen bags are fairly bulky.  I present the customized solution first, and follow with sewing instructions.

Bear in mind that if your Interstate is of a different lay-out from ours, you can still customize a bedding storage solution for your available space.  This post will hopefully give you some ideas on what kind of container you might need to craft for your needs and available space.

ADVISORY:  Be aware that there are certain couch-related recalls pertaining to fire potential (e.g., here) for the Airstream Interstate.  If you are going to modify the use of your Interstate in any way, be aware of the potential for unintended consequences associated with the fact that electrical, heating, and plumbing systems run through the various void spaces.  See also our BIG FAT DISCLAIMER.

There is one of two -20F sleeping bags in its home-made "sausage", which is designed to contain it in a specific shape suitable for storage, and also to protect it from dirt and snags while being inserted and removed from an under-couch space that was not necessarily designed for bedding storage.  

We have one of these slots with fold-down doors immediately beneath each jack-knife couch.  One holds the large table that goes in the center holes you see in the floor here, and the other holds the hand crank for the awning (ours is not motorized).  Both represent, in my opinion, an inefficient use of space, which is why I decided to try to use them for sleeping bag storage, rather than sacrificing dedicated storage bins for this purpose.   

This is what I mean.  The starboard couch slot holds only the awning hand crank (white linear object visible here).  What a waste of space in a vehicle where waste is not affordable.  

Here are the same two sleeping bags in their "sausages" and hanging in our master bedroom closet (they actually hang from loops on the sleeping bags themselves so that the bags will not pile up at the bottoms of the sausages).  The idea here is that they can be transported efficiently from closet to Interstate with no fuss, no changing of container.  

Here is how I constructed these storage "sausages".

This stuff is two bucks per yard in a common fabric store - can't beat that price (and it is available in Interstate gray to boot).  This is a very slippery polyester lining.  We needed the bags to slip efficiently in and out of the sausages, but we also needed the sausages themselves to slip in and out of the under-couch slots.  

These were fairly expensive sleeping bags, and the deal with sleeping bags is that you can't keep them under compression for long periods - it will destroy their loft.   Because of this reason and also to minimize time, we did not want to have to re-insert each bag into its manufacturer-issued compression sack after every night's sleep in the Interstate.  That is just way too much hassle.

I measured the circumference that the sausage needed to be to contain these bags in a rough cylinder shape without overly compressing them.  It ended up being around 33 inches.  

I also double-checked the length.  My husband's bag is six inches longer than mine.  

My solution here was to sew a simple tube for each with a sleeve for a drawstring at each end (not just at one end like conventional storage bags have).

In the pic above, I actually screwed up the order of seam sewing - the side seams should have been sewn first, but that doesn't matter too much.

Here is what makes this method so efficient, especially while working in the small space of the Interstate.  You don't have to "stuff" the sleeping bag into a conventional closed-end bag.  You just reach your hand in one end of the tube...

...and pull the sleeping bag all the way through to the other end before tying off both ends.  It takes about two seconds, literally.    

One of two.  These take about an hour apiece to make with very basic sewing skills.  The main difficulty is that the lining fabric is so slippery that it's difficult to control.  

Once in the tube, the bags are easier to manage.

My husband's storage sausage has a blue drawstring cord so that we can tell them apart.  

Easier to manage and to carry.  Sorry for the poor selfie - the camera would not focus on the mirror's reflection.  

The whisper-thin polyester "sausages" weigh almost nothing and have little bulk, taking up no extra space in the Interstate.  Cost per sausage is about five dollars to construct.  

Good luck as you devise your own bedding storage solution.