Hey y’all! We’re still playing catch up here on the old blog and today we’re covering what might be the cheapest, fastest project we’ve had yet – our makeover of the inside of the camper door. This is one of my favorites because it was cheap and quick, but also because we were able to feature one of the few original elements we have left at this point.

If you missed our other door post – that includes where we found our awesome keyless digital doorknob – you can find it here.

Our camper door interior makeover shopping list:

• Paint thinner

• Lint-free rag

• Adhesive vinyl plank flooring – Since we knew we were painting our planks, we looked for cheap vinyl plank flooring that had great texture and a full-adhesive back. These planks fit all three criteria! We measured our door and figured out our square footage. We bought 10 of these planks and have one left over.

• A few nickels – for spacing planks

• Primer

• Paint – we used our house wall + ceiling paint that we had on hand. (We love Behr’s Swiss Coffee in the flat finish, colored matched by Sherwin Williams! It’s the same color we used for our cabinet uppers, just in a different finish.)

• Paintable latex caulk

• Thin wooden dowel – We used a .25” square dowel

• Wood glue

• Plexiglass – the small cheap samples work great for this!

• Clear Gorilla glue – it doesn’t take much of this at all.

• Painter’s tape

Tools needed to complete the job:

• Miter saw

• Measuring tape

• Speed square

• Pencil

• Sharpie

• Nail gun + nails (maybe)

Our 1-day, $10 door makeover

planning the pattern

For the design, we knew we wanted to continue the angled geometric lines we’ve got going on the exterior and in our interior 3D wall.

Note: Like flooring, a diagonal design requires a little more material than a horizontal/vertical one since you have a little more waste when you cut off the corners at 45-degree angles.

We played around with some designs in Adobe Illustrator before choosing this symmetrical one:

We went with this design to give some movement, but added the alternating direction in the upper right and left to keep it from looking like just one huge arrow.

Polishing the trim

Since we polished our exterior trim with steel wool only way at the beginning, we learned our 3-step aluminum polishing method, so right before we planked the door, we polished up the surrounding aluminum door trim with a combination of steel wool and our polishing cream to really help make the inside of the door shine.

Prepping the surface

If your door was in bad shape like ours, you might need to first scrape off globs of caulk, sand down anything on the door that might be sticking out etc. like we did toward the beginning of the renovation before we painted our exterior. We also had some screw holes that we filled with JB Waterweld back when we filled all of the holes in our exterior wall skins and we sanded those down to be flat with the door.

After our surface was caulk-, lump- and hole-free, we wiped down the surface with paint thinner to remove dust and any oils. This step is super important – the adhesive won’t stick well if the surface it’s sticking to is dirty at all.

Installing the planks

With the door clean and dry, we marked out the horizontal center of our door with a level and a Sharpie and began dry fitting and cutting our planks one at a time. We started with the longest plank that touched our center line to help set our pattern on two sides of the window.

With the protective backing still on, we cut our plank at a 45-degree angle, cutting one side first with our miter saw and dry fitting it in place before cutting the other end to length.

For each of our planks, instead of measuring, we pushed the plank under the perimeter trim on one side and then marked out the length on the other side so that it could underlap the trim on that end as well (so the door trim pinches the plank in place).

With the plank cut to the right length and each plank end under the trim, we carefully peeled off the protective backing and stuck the plank to the door. (We did it this way to make sure we had it back in the perfect spot before sticking it down, and also peeling the backing on the door like this helps to make sure we don’t have flying debris stick to it since we’re outside.)

Cutting tips for a clean look:

For a clean finish, cut with the finish side up.

For pieces that needed to be notched for window corners, cut at a circle for the doorknob or cut around the serial number tag, I marked it out using a pencil and used scissors to cut the special pieces by hand.

You can see in the photos above why it was so important we tucked the planks under the trim pieces. We were missing some original trim around the window that helped keep the peach-colored metal door skin firmly in place, and underlapping our planks keeps everything tight and locked down, as well as made for a clean finish on the edges.

(Side note: anyone else think the sanding mark in the first photo above looks like a peacock or a silly bird wearing a powdered wig? I can’t unsee it!)

Spacing the planks

As we worked our way around the door, we used nickels to maintain a consistent parallel space between each diagonal plank to create the pattern. The bigger the gap, the more dramatic the design will look.

When we got to the centered horizontal mark, we did not add any space so we don’t have a hard horizontal line dividing the door in half. We wanted this seam to blend in.

We continued sticking up the planks like this:

Until we were all done!

Finishing the edges

Once we were done with our pattern, we used a tiny amount of paintable latex caulk to carefully fill our small gaps around the edges where the planks met the trim, making sure to keep our clean nickel-space gap in between the planks.

Keeping the patterned spaces clean:

We used a flathead screwdriver wrapped with a lint-free rag to clean up any caulk that got in our intentional decorative pattern gaps.

Priming + Painting

With everything carefully caulked, we primed and painted 3 layers with an angled paintbrush, making sure we painted with the “wood” grain.

Some of these photos (taken late in the day) really don’t do the pattern justice. We’ve opted to go with a flat paint for now, but the glossier you go with the paint finish the more any pattern and detail will pop! (And also, the more imperfections will show up.)

You can see in these photos just how defined the pattern is and how nice the texture of these vinyl planks really is:

Framing the original serial number

One of my favorite parts of this makeover is featuring the original tag at the top of the door. It’s the main reason why we didn’t want to replace our door or do anything more major to it, even though it was in pretty rough shape originally. Though the sticker itself has a corner that’s been torn off somehow and poorly realigned, it’s metal and has been punched with the identifying details of our vintage cutie and I didn’t want to risk damaging it trying to “fix” the weird corner.

For our solution to not only feature, but preserve the label for anyone (maybe us years from now, who knows) who might want to remove the frame/door planks later, we opted to protect it with plexiglass.

First, with the protective plastic layers still on, we used our miter saw to carefully cut the small piece of plexiglass to fit in the space we left inside the planks. The plexiglass we got is roughly the same thickness as our vinyl planks, so we were able to make it so the front of the plexiglass is flush with the front of the planks.

Then we got our measurements of the serial sticker and cut our small dowel into four pieces, each at 45-degree-angles on each end (so that they make little trapezoids).

We used smalls dabs of wood glue to glue the dowel pieces to each other, and after removing the protective film on both sides of the plexiglass piece, used a small amount of clear Gorilla glue to glue the miniature frame onto the vinyl planks, sandwiching the piece of plexiglass in place over the serial number sticker without letting any glue actually touch it.

We used a few of pieces of painter’s tape to hold it in place while the glue dried.

Once dry, we carefully painted the frame with a tiny brush. (You could also pre-paint the dowels before securing the frame to the door, but I couldn’t wait to get it up!)

Before + After

Loving how quick, easy and cheap this makeover was, but most of all I love that we could give it some style while preserving its history.

Do you have any original pieces like this in your camper that you’ve been able to save and prominently feature?