When I’ve been parked up in the past, either on a campsite or when ‘stealth camping’ on a housing estate somewhere I’m unfamiliar with, the things that are most important are privacy, security and secrecy, particularly at night. A quick, easy solution to meet these requirements would be to add a curtain behind the front two seats. Using velcro, rivets, curtain blackout material and an existing wooden headlining batten, I crafted the below.

Here’s the wooden batten that ran across the width of the ceiling initially. The screw hole, drilled by the previous owner had pierced the roof itself, so my first step was to remove this screw and re-position the screw hole on the batten to a more sensible location.

Batten removed:

New hole drilled to the left of the original:

Full length shot of the batten:

My weapons of choice. Rivet gun, rivets, bradawl, washers, velcro hooks and loops, hole punch, scissors, blackout material (white):

Added velcro hooks to the wooden batten:

    

Located the correct roof screw holes and re-positioned them:

Added smaller screws with washers, so the velcro would hold fast and the screws wouldn’t pierce the roof:

      

Re-seated the new batten and fixed it to the roof again, ready for the curtain material:

On to the curtain itself. My first attempt at using the rivet gun to fix the velcro onto my parent’s best tea towel worked a treat!

  

So I got to work on the real deal:

  

I must admit, I felt well chuffed with this, as I managed to make a useable curtain without laying a hand on a sewing machine!!