Our Simple Awning

After all that time, sweat and energy spent on building out your van, here’s a project that is super easy to do and gives a big return on a very little investment.

Coming from our hometown in the pacific northwest, we didn’t realize how important an awning would be, but once we reached the desert southwest, it became readily apparent. As much as we love the sun, we soon realized we needed some shade to go with it.

Luckily, we already had an 8′ x 10′ tarp with us and some paracord and roof rail hardware. (If we were buying a tarp, we’d probably get a larger one to go the full length of our van roof.)

A quick trip to the hardware store for some construction stakes, and some light stands ordered online were all we really needed to make this happen.

Here’s how it works:

We attach the tarp to the roof rail on the passenger side of the van. We like to run the 10′ dimension along the length of the van, but you can also run 8′ there and then extend it out 10′ feet. (see how versatile this is?). You can use 3 or 4 slide in or drop in T-nuts or T-slot studs. The slide in kind that we used could be dropped in anywhere along the length of the rail but they just won’t come out easily unless we remove the solar panel crossbars. Not a problem for us – we just leave them up there. But you may want to go for the drop in style.

Once your tarp is hanging off the side of the van, extend your 2 light stands to hold up the corners.

Put a looped end of paracord around the top of each light stand and pull it snug to hold the tarp out where you want it.

Anchor the paracord with stakes to hold it in place.

Check out our video to see it in action:

Here’s a list of what we used for this project:

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