This weekend my internal fairies copped a battering as Jamie got a bit sweary and fed up with the hours we've been spending on building this expedition vehicle. Each time he swore and got impatient, one of my happy fairies died. Lucky there's a lot of them - they're feeling better after a good night's sleep. Still, we can't wait til it's done.

The thing about a Series Land Rover is that nothing is straight. You're always chasing angles and trying to square things up, often having to unscrew and rescrew to get things level and in a line. It's really frustrating.

Our biggest headache was where to fit the Life Saver jerry can. First of all, it's not an ordinary jerry can. The 18.5 litre water purifier is designed to treat up to 20,000 liters of drinking water. It removes viruses (99.99%), bacteria (99.9999%), and cysts (99.9%) via an included activated carbon filter for chemical and heavy metal reduction and odor removal. It uses a fail safe to stop water passage once the filter service life is done. So that means basically we can get water from any water source such as rivers and fountains and not worry about stomach issues and worse, and we are going to save on buying bottled water.

It's also a very expensive bit of kit, so we didn't want to leave it on the outside. It also has a tap outlet, so I thought it'd be great on the inside for easy access for the kitchen. I wanted it by the door because it was easy to pull in and out at camp. This would reduce the length of the bed and mattress, but on the occasion we slept downstairs (rather than in the pop top roof) we would slide the water under the bed and put a section of mattress in the missing space.

I really like this solution. It means if people buy the Land Rover they can easily take it out and put something else in it's place, or put the lid back on and extend the bed how they like, keeping the storage underneath.

The other problem was the 12mm birch ply, which seemed way cheaper in quality than usual, likely because the Russian/Ukraine conflict has impacted supplies. So we ended up using extra plastic coated hex ply. We have decided to use this for the cupboard as well - to be honest, it's a better choice as it's really tough and less likely to be scratched or stained, and I don't have to varnish it like the birch ply. All this ply is NOT cheap, so we didn't want to waste what we did have, incorporating it into the design.

The carpet you see isn't a permanent fixture - it's just because I'm paranoid about scratching the floor with tools! The drawer fridge has been covered in a peel and stick removable wallpaper, but I'm not overkeen on it so it'll probably go back to the original.

To revive my fairies, comment below.