Door mat for the van

We camp in forests and park at muddy bike races. The van floor can quickly get covered in dirt. Two types of door mats help with quick clean-up.

This may sound like a minor concern, but when you are camping for two weeks in dusty pine forests with a dog, the levels of dirt soon build up. Our coin flooring can take the abuse, but when it’s difficult to differentiate between the floor and the ground outside because of the amount of dirt in the van, it’s time to take action.

We have been carrying a plastic astroturf style door mat around in the van for ages. The intention was to unroll it whenever we parked up, and leave it outside as a shoe wiping mat. It never happened.

The simple answer was to make the mat automatically “unroll” for us. We cut a section of it out and zip-tied it to the electric step. Now we have a shoe wiper whenever we step in and out of the van.

Shoe wiping mat attached to electric step It’s working so well that we’ll probably find a way to attach it more permanently, but so that we can still take it off to shake or wash it out.

Inside the van, we use Trek N’ Clean Super Absorbent Floor Mats. They aren’t a perfect fit for the floor space, but they are small enough to pick up individually and shake outside. We just lay three out to cover our main floor area. If we know it’s going to be really wet or muddy, we layer another over the top in the doorway.

Absorbent floor mats catch mud, pine needles, water

The pile on the mats pulls dirt off your shoes/paws, and then holds it inside the mat. They also absorb quite a lot of moisture from wet shoes. They don’t dry out super-fast, but they keep working even when they are wet.

We still carry a small sweeping brush to get dust out from the corners, but the combination of inside and outside mats has really helped to keep the dirt under control.

Leave a Reply