Mods are how you fine tune your van, sometimes correcting small oversights of the manufacturing, and sometimes optimizing the van for your own preferences. Here we have two of each. Of the four, one is priced at about $50, one at about $10, and the other two—more undiscovered features than true mods—are free.
#1: A ladder that doesn’t hurt your feet
Everyone seems to hate the ladder that comes with the Noovo Plus. I suspect that 1) The ladder is from the bed vendor and comes with the bed, and 2) There are lawyers lurking nearby, requiring the use of this ladder and its safety hooks.
We gave back the stock ladder and bought our own, a HBTower two step model, which I modified with the addition of two strips of CatTounge Gription tape. The metal ladder steps already have a texture to them but the tape gives me confidence that I won’t slip off the ladder when getting out of bed if I’m wearing just socks. The traction tape his easy to install, and worth the effort. We store the ladder on the bed when driving.
Pro tip: If you store the ladder on the mattress as we do, even if the bed is all the way up, it is not secured to anything, and when you stop suddenly, the ladder may shoot forward into the cab area. You will experience a sudden movement out of the corner of your eye, and at the same time will hear behind and beside you what sounds like a wall of the van collapsing. This is not desirable. To avoid this problem, shift the ladder all the way to the passenger side (so the pantry wall prevents it from rocketing forward) and place a pillow on it for good measure (which press against the ladder when you raise the bed).
Links: HBTower Step Ladder for the ladder and Cat Tongue Gription Tape for extra traction.
#2: Caps for the bottom of the sharp bed rails
In theory, you could just buy Band-Aids to cover the scratches and even cuts from the sharp edges of the bottom of the bed rails, inflicted as you slide in and out of the Noovo Plus’s lounge area. In theory, you could repair the snags in the arms of your shirts and sweaters, or just embrace the frazzled look as the true look of #vanlife. Or you can put a protective cap on the rails.
One option is offered by US Plastics, which is a square, flexible, vinyl cap that you can install by unscrewing the bottom of the bed rail enough to allow the backside of the cap to slide in behind the rail.
Another option: I found that by cutting of an eighth of an inch or so off of a 1.25×1.25-inch furniture leg plug you could push the plug into the bottom of the rail. Even without the plug covering the edges, the sharpness and the snags went away. I tested it by sliding the back of my hand every which way over the rail’s end, trying to cause a scratch, happily to no avail.
The US Plastic vinyl caps will cost you about $1 for the parts and $8 more for shipping.
The 1.25″ square plugs will cost about a dollar each. I bought mine at ACE Hardware.
#3: Reading lights that dim
The reading lights that Noovo uses are far better than you will find in most RVs. First, they aren’t blue. For some reason the RV industry feels that blue lights are the way to go at night and I’m sure it’s not because blue-white LEDs are cheap and bright. Noovo’s are a warm white and they are mounted on flexible arms so that you don’t have to blind your partner when you need to read just one more chapter of Moby Dick. They even have USB plugs, though they are of the older and larger USB-A variety (Amazon has adapters).
What would be great, what would really set these reading lights apart, is if they had dimmers.
And they do.
Click on the end to turn the light on. Long-press your finger on the end to dim and brighten. Nice.
#4: Rear window covers with, you know, magnets
Last month, at the Noovo Open House campground, we toured many other vans, looking for ideas, and meeting people we had already “met” on the Facebook group. We got to see the mods and the customizations people have made, and stuff they have purchased for their vans. We also saw an idea so obvious in hindsight and so perfect in function that we laughed out loud at our blindness.
Before the Open House, we stored the rear window covers on the mattress so they would be at the ready whenever we lowered the bed. Someone (by which I mean my wife, Lori) would crawl around on the bed and install the window covers each night, and then take them down the next day, folding them up and laying them at the edge of the mattress. If we wanted to use the covers during the day, we would lower the bed a few inches, grab the covers, raise the bed back up, and then install the covers, reversing the bed raising and lowering process when we put them back away.
But then, touring another Noovo Plus, the question that had never occurred to us presented itself: What if the rear window covers had magnets that would let you hang them in their folded configuration on the metal frame of the windows themselves, let them hang there, ready to install at a moment’s notice whenever you liked, day or night?
It really is that easy.