Make Your Own Microcamper: Part 4 - More Sleeping Options
In the last edition of this newsletter, I talked about ways of installing a bed inside a Citroen Berlingo (or similar). But sometimes, a small double bed just isn’t enough. You might want to camp with other people or children (why tho? 😉), or - unless you’re extremely flexible and enjoying going into the ‘worm’ dance to get dressed inside your car - you might want a bit of space in which to stand up. So this edition will cover how you can create some extra room in your microcamper, whether you use it for sleeping, eating, getting changed, using the toilet or whatever.
Extra beds inside the car
Once you’ve got a boot jump or bed set up, there are not many options for adding extra beds for adults inside a Berlingo: the main bed takes up most of the space. BUT some Berlingowners have brilliant ideas for adding beds for small children who can fit horizontally across the car. This, by Kevin Cunningham (who’s kindly given me permission to include his photos), is frankly genius. He’s removed the car’s parcel shelf, and built a kid’s bunk bed out of an old bed frame, which slots into the grooves that held the parcel shelf. The closed boot door prevents a child falling out on one side, and Kevin’s attached a clip-on bed guard to the other side. He and his partner sleep on an air mattress on the car’s floor.
Here’s another beautiful variation, by Berlingowner Lou Reed - who has fit the toddler bed a little higher up, onto the window ledges.
Another option for sleeping a small child is at the front of the car. Fold the front seats down flat, and place a toddler mattress horizontally over the folded seats - although, if your children are anything like mine, their temptation to play with the steering wheel and gears might be a bit dangerous/irritating.
Other than that, the only way I can think to add beds inside the vehicle is to install a pop-top roof - but there would likely only be enough space for a child, not an adult, in a Berlingo pop top. Pop tops are expensive (around £3K), and they restrict your ability to use the roof for a rack and roof boxes (or bikes), so I don’t think one would work for me. But people who install them, perhaps not so much for beds but for the extra head-room and light, tend to be extremely positive.
Adding rooms outside your vehicle
There are 4 main categories here, made slightly confusing by the fact that ‘awning’ is used as a catch-all term for quite different bits of kit 🙄
1. Tent boxes
I’ve never used one of these, but I’ve recently seen loads on the road and at campsites . A TentBox is a brand of tent that fits onto a roof rack, and is accessed from outside your vehicle, usually by a ladder. You tend to need a proper heavy-duty roof rack for these products. There are different versions of TentBox, depending on how much you want to spend, how long you’re prepared to take setting it up, how many people you need to sleep in it, and whether you want to be able to store anything else on your car roof. The priciest (£2750) - the TentBox Cargo - mimics the shape of a pop-top roof; pops up in 30 seconds; can store a duvet and pillows inside it when not in use; can fit 2 adults; and is compatible with special roof bars via which bikes, boards etc can be transported on top of it. The next down in price - the TentBox Classic (£2250) - is like a flat pop-top roof and pops up in 60 seconds into a boxy pod for 2; but it’s not compatible with roof bars. The cheaper products - TentBox Lite (£1295-1895) - look more like standard tents, just sited on your car roof rather than on the ground. They take longer to erect (around 5 mins), and can sleep up to 4 adults; but you can’t fit roof bars to the top of them.
2. Non-Driveaway Awnings
Before I entered the world of Berlingobsession, my idea of an ‘awning’ was a sort-of stripy rolled-up blind attached to the external wall of a Parisian bar, which can be unrolled to offer les buveurs protection from la pluie or le soleil. And, indeed, some camper awnings do fit this model, although - as I’ll describe below - the word is also used for a different type of product, one which I would personally call ‘a tent’. Awnings can be divided into 2 groups: (1) those that use the car as an integral part of their structure, and therefore have to be taken down when you want to move the car, and (2) those that can be attached and detached from the car, and can remain standing when you drive away from them.
The simplest type of non-driveaway awning is a tailgate tent: a canopy of material that can be attached to your open boot door (either under it or over it), and hangs to the ground, to create a small private area. Some people rig up their own tailgate tents by hanging extra-long shower curtains around the open boot door. Or you can buy dedicated tailgate tents made by brands such as Reimo.
A sturdier, larger and pricier form of non-driveaway awning is a pull-out awning, which sits permanently along the side of a vehicle (often attached to a roof rack). There are various different makes of pull-out awning: Offtrek is a popular one, but the brand name reminded me of women’s names in The Handmaid’s Tale, so I opted for an Expedition Side Awning made by a company called Direct 4X4. It fits via 2 L-shaped brackets onto my 2 Thule roof bars.
The awning can be unzipped, unrolled and erected with 4 sturdy telescopic poles that reside in the framework: it took me 2 mins 54 seconds (at an unhurried pace) to put it up this afternoon. The awning comes in various sizes, and I’ve found that the 2m width X 2m length version fits my Berlingo best, and offers the best space. (I used to have the 1.4m X 2m version, but the space it offers is a bit too small to protect 4 people cowering from the rain/sun). By adjusting the height of the 2 vertical poles, you can create shade from the sun, and you can buy various add-ons - such as individual side panels, which velcro onto the horizontal poles and need to be pegged into the ground, to act as windbreaks.
Excitingly (well, it is to me!), you can also buy a whole tent that attaches onto the side-awning. I’ve only just got one of these and it’s BLOODY BRILLIANT. Once the pull-out awning is up, I can then put up the tent in an unrushed 3 mins 39 seconds, and it offers a lot of space, privacy and headroom. If I’m camping on my own, I’ll use it to get changed in and to store my clothes and running gear; and if I’m with my kids for a short trip, then I reckon I can put 2 of them on the floor in the tent to sleep, and have 1 in the double bed inside the car with me (or maybe even put all 3 of them on the floor inside the tent, and luxuriate on the double bed on my own 🤔). There’s enough space inside it for the 4 of us to eat around a table if it’s chucking it down outside. Like I said, it’s bloody brilliant. But I do have a few gripes: it’s MASSIVE when it’s folded down, mainly because it uses seriously hardwearing fabric. It’s designed for taller cars/vans than a Berlingo, so, as you can see on the pic below, the fabric is a bit loose at the car end of the tent. I’m going to sew some straps internally, so that I can cinch it to stop the fabric from flapping. And I’m not sure how well it would fare in really high winds, as it’s quite tall and fixes to the ground with only 6 tent pegs and 2 guy ropes. And obviously it’s attached to the car, so you can’t drive away for the day and leave it (and its contents) in situ. That leads me onto the second category of awnings…
3. Driveaway Awnings
These awnings are essentially tents which have some capacity to fit onto your vehicle (either the back or the side), so that you can move between your car and the tent-awning without going outside. There are tent awnings that are specifically made to fit vehicles, and there are tents which were originally meant for other purposes, but which people adapt to fit onto their cars.
In the latter group, one of the most popular tents to be adapted by Berlingowners is the Quechua Arpenaz Base M tent made by Decathlon (£129.99). This is meant to be a general living area tent for camping: it’s not made from blackout material, but it’s got a lot of headroom, and it’s got massive windows and doors - and it’s cheap. Some enterprising soul discovered that, when the Arpenaz’s largest door is unzipped, the tent can be fitted onto the boot of a Berlingo (you start raising the boot door, and lift the tent up and over it, so that the boot door goes through the largest aperture in the Arpenaz and then fully opens inside the tent. You can fasten the exterior tent flap to the top of the car with v strong taxi magnets or bungee cords to stop it flapping around, and you can use similarly strong magnets or fishing magnets/magnet hooks inside the Arpenaz, to fasten the tent material to the side of the car and make it more watertight). The Arpenaz allows you to use the inside of the car for sleeping, and the tent for getting dressed and for some living/ sitting/ eating/ cooking space.
I used this set-up for about a year. I slept with 1 daughter on the small double bed inside the car, and I rigged up a ‘Gro Anywhere’ baby’s travel blackout blind on a bungee cord at the end of the bed, to stop sunlight from the Arpenaz getting into the car’s sleeping area. I bought an Outwell free-standing inner tent (made of blackout material) as a sleeping pod to place inside the Arpenaz for my 2 other daughters (who slept on self-inflating camping mats inside it). It was a good set-up while the kids were smallish. It’s not hard to erect the Arpenaz, even on my own, and it was cheap and it packed away relatively compactly, and it kept the footprint of the car + tent fairly small. BUT it’s not really a “drive-away awning”: ie. if you need to get about in your car while you’re on your camping trip, it’s hard (although not impossible) to extract your car from the Arpenaz, and it’s even harder to re-insert your car when you return. And, for a family of 3-5, the Arpenaz doesn’t offer much in the way of extra living space once you’ve put up a sleeping pod. If you want further sheltered space to put a table or kitchen gear, the set-up needs to be used in conjunction with something like the Expedition awning above. So, when my kids grew and no longer wanted to share the sleeping pod (or the bed inside the car) with another person, I needed a bigger solution.
This leads me to tent awnings which were designed specifically to fit onto cars/vans. These are structures that look identical to “normal” standalone tents, but have an extra bit of material on one side, called a cowl, which creates a small covered walkway between the vehicle and the tent. The cowl allows you to move between the two with privacy and keeps you sheltered from the weather while doing so. The major advantage of these awnings is that they are proper “driveaway awnings”: they’re pretty easy to attach and detach from your car, so you can use your car for day-trips and, when you return to your pitch, you can simply reattach the car to your tent. The tent can usually be closed off from the walkway/cowl with a zip door (which makes the inside of the tent warmer and more waterproof; and also makes it into a secure standalone tent when you detach the car from the awning.
There are 2 ways of attaching the cowl to your car.
(1) It can fit onto the vehicle via an awning rail, which you have to have specially fitted onto your car. Once you have a rail, you can slot a length of piping that runs along the cowl into the awning rail - or, even better, you can use an intermediary length of material called a driveway awning kit, which slots into the awning rail on the car and onto the piping on the cowl, and makes it easier to attach & detach the cowl from your car, so that you can drive away for the day and return.
(2) if you can’t be bothered with an awning rail, you can attach the cowl by running some storm straps through hooks on the cowl, slinging the straps over the car roof, pegging them into the ground and pulling them tightly (and pulling any internal cinch straps tight) so that the cowl material goes taut and doesn’t flap around. I was planning on fitting an awning rail, but actually the storm straps are so quick and easy that I think I’ll stick with them.
I’ve recently bought a pretty big driveaway awning, made by a company called Outdoor Revolution. I’ve only used it twice so far, but it’s a game-changer in terms of the amount of space and versatility it offers. I’ll use the Expedition awning tent (above) on solo trips or short family camping trips (but not in high winds), as it’s so quick to put up. But for longer family trips, I’ll use the Outdoor Revolution awning. The model I’ve bought is a Cayman F/G in the lowest cowl height (for vehicles of 180-220cm height). The cowl is 250cm wide, which is technically too wide to fit onto a Berlingo (I reckon you could get a 2m awning rail onto the side of a Berlingo, but nothing much bigger). BUT when I’ve thrown the storm straps over the roof of my car and pegged them down on the other side and pulled them tight, and tightened the internal cinch straps, it fits pretty snugly, with little material flapping around.
There’s so much space in the tent! I love it! I’ve purchased an ‘annex’, which fits onto the main body of the tent and adds a huge extra bedroom (complete with blackout lining). I've also bought an inner sleeping pod, which clips into the main body of the tent, and creates another large bedroom. AND I can ALSO cram in the Outwell sleeping pod (although I have to slightly reduce the pod’s width by using bungee cords to cinch the poles together), to create a third bedroom. So now I have private spaces for each of my three daughters, and I have the bed in the car all to myself. BOOM. When I’m taking down the tent, I leave the annex and inner sleeping pod in situ, and roll them up with the rest of the tent material. It means that the poles & pegs won’t fit into the tent bag and have to be stored separately, but it does make erecting the tent much quicker.
4. Stand-alone Tents (and Trailer Tents etc)
The final way of creating more space is to put up any normal tent or tarp beside your car. This doesn’t require my specialist Berlingo knowledge (lol), so I won’t go into the gazillions of options.
Phew! I think that’s covered most of the options for sleeping in, and extending the space of, a microcamper. In the forthcoming newsletters (next week), I’ll talk about eating and cooking (and cooking-related storage); getting the most out of your microcamper’s storage possibilities; and the essential camping kit that it’s useful to keep in your microcamper at all times (and where I store it). xxx