One putty knife we used to help tuck masking tape under seals etc during the taping process One roll of painting paper for covering things and for wadding up in holes we didn’t want to get paint in One roll of paper with masking tape pre-attached that we used for covering the windows One roll of plastic with masking tape pre-attached that we used to cover the windshield Three rolls of 9x12 foot plastic for covering various things like the tires One 10X20 foot plastic drop cloth to drive the van onto for overspray Twenty four 1 liter bottles of U-POL Raptor Tintable Bed Liner Because of the texture and matte finish, you don’t have to do as much prep work, so after looking at a ton of photos and watching numerous videos, we decided to give it a try! There are a lot of brands that make bed liner, but people felt that the U-POL Raptor Liner had a little shinier less matte finish than some of the other brands, so that’s what we decided to go with. If you’re not familiar with bed liner, it was created for coating the insides of truck beds, is very scratch/chip resistant, and sprays on with a raised texture. We settled on orange and were planning to do a regular auto gloss paint, but after thinking about how much work it would be to do the kind of prep needed to get a good finish with a gloss paint, we started looking at other options and came across entire vehicles painted with bed liner.

Then we decided that if we were going to go through all the effort of painting it ourselves, we wanted to change the color as we’ve always dreamed of having it be something bright and cheerful. Well, last month we decided the time had come to deal with the paint and knew it was going to be crazy expensive to have it done by a paint shop, so decided to do it ourselves. Being an old FedEx van the paint was not in great condition with lots of little dings and chips leading to some rust so we knew we’d paint it someday, but weren’t sure whether to try and do it ourselves or not and whether to change colors or just keep the white. Ever since we purchased our van we’ve thought about painting it.

Raptor liner with color