Camper Van Barn Door Cabinets

With a tiny camper van like the Ford Transit Connect, it’s all about creative storage solutions that maximise the available space in the van. One of the appeals for me to having barn doors (versus a hatchback) is the storage potential. I have long thought that the recesses of the rear barn doors would make a great space for a cabinet with shelving, but couldn’t find examples of people who’d done this before (correct me if I’m wrong!). So with Mark’s help, we set about doing it ourselves.

We found the easiest and strongest solution was to drill cabinet side walls directly into the recess of the barn door then make shelves to fit. Read on for more details and pictures, and check out my full post about my Ford Transit Connect Camper Conversion.

Starting point

Start with carpeted rear doors – an essential step for preventing condensation and keeping things cozy. Four-way stretch carpet is readily available in a multitude of colours and is pretty easy to install. You might also need to remove any existing fixings. You can see below (right hand side of the pic) that we already had some makeshift shelves installed in some plywood. You can also see that we desperately needed more storage for all of our cooking shenanigans!

Plan your Cabinet

Decide how deep you want your cabinet to be so that they fit whatever you want to store and don’t interfere with any other internal furniture. We built one cabinet to be about as deep as a Jetboil stove, and another cabinet deep enough to fit kitchen spices and other cooking delights. Once you decide the width of your shelves, you can get started on the cabinet walls.

Make the shelf walls

Make templates for your the vertical shelf walls using cardboard (here’s a video demo of how to do that). Use this template to trace the shelves on plywood, then cut with a jigsaw. Test the shelves in situ and make any corrections so that it fits nice and snugly in the vertical barn door recess.

Drill the shelf walls into the barn door

Drill the side walls directly into the wall of the barn door recesses. Self drilling or self tapping screws make this much easier. The bonus with screwing into the door like this is there’s very little risk you might drill a hole all the way through the van! From here it’s pretty easy to finish off the rest.

Add shelves and shelf guards

With the cabinet walls in place, it’s pretty easy to cut shelves to fit. We attached the shelves by drilling into the side of the plywood, and also added “guards” to avoid things falling out. As you can see below, it’s nothing fancy but it does the job!

Add Cabinet doors

Strictly speaking, you don’t need to add doors, but it does make it look a whole lot neater and is also quieter when driving. To make the doors, we cut out a piece of plywood to fit the front of the cabinet unit. Then we cut the ply roughly in half and attached to the cabinet walls with hinges. We fixed a simple slide bolt latch to keep the closed cabinet doors secure. (Note in the picture we also have some magnet catches installed at the top of the cabinet, but these proved pretty useless!).

As you can see above, we also have a little fold up table installed in the van door. It’s so handy! A table like this is pretty cheap and easy to install with some folding shelf brackets and a couple pieces of plywood. Here’s a DIY video to demonstrate:

Other rear door storage solutions

Storage nets are a cheap, easy, and popular storage solution for camper vans which can be used throughout the van, not just on rear doors.

A company called Fuel Lagoon makes rear door organisers for some popular van models (not the Ford Transit Connect).

For a really quick fix, you can use cladding to tidy up the look and feel of the rear doors and create storage slots in the recessed areas of the barn doors. This is what the first iteration of my Transit Connect barn doors looked like:

Gallery – tiny van rear door cabinets