I Smashed the Back of My Motorhome. Then I Fixed It.

There’s a specific kind of sick feeling you get when you hear a crunch you caused yourself. Not a random noise, not something mysterious. A crunch you walked right into, despite your own instincts telling you not to.

I know that feeling very well now.

The Night in Enniskillen

Kathy was meant to be spending the weekend in a hotel with her sister Michelle. Plans fell through, but I’d already found a spot at Trory Pier, just outside Enniskillen. I’d never been before. It looked brilliant. Right on the water, quiet, exactly the kind of place you feel smug about finding.

We arrived late. The car park wasn’t level, and anything that was level sat under trees, which is no good for Starlink. So I went for the wall. Reversing the van back, ramps down, arse to the wall. I hopped out, checked the gap, thought “eeesh, bit close, but should be okay, so long as I don’t come off the ramps.”

I’ve never come off the ramps.

Until that night, I hadn’t.

I came off the ramps. Wrong side. Right into the wall. The crunch was, in the most literal sense, sickening.

The Damage

Kathy sat in silence. Full empathy mode, with what I can only describe as a small but entirely justified cloud of “bout time” hanging over her. She said nothing. She didn’t need to. She knows me well enough to know that nobody was going to make me feel worse than I was already making myself feel.

I’ve spent years taking the piss out of her for clipping every motorhome we’ve ever owned. Years. And here I was, having ignored my own instincts over ego, standing in a car park in Enniskillen in the dark, staring at the carnage.

The rear trim on the driver’s side had exploded into about eight pieces on the tarmac. The light cluster was off the van, broken into three bits, with the fog light hanging out like something from a cartoon. The number plate was on the floor. One of the LED reversing lights I’d fitted the year before was obliterated. The only thing still intact was a single rear reflector, now rattling around in a bag with the rest of the rubble.

The following morning, after a night’s snowfall, I got on my hands and knees and screwed what I could back into place. Enough to be road legal. Enough to get home. The number plate rested against the rear window, held in place by shame and wishful thinking.

This was not an accident. It was stupidity. Preventable, wilful, ego-driven stupidity.

Three Months Later

A thousand quid. That’s what a proper repair would have cost. New panels, respray, the lot. And a thousand quid isn’t something you just find down the back of a motorhome seat cushion.

So I waited for a dry week in the forecast, ordered some bits, and had a go myself.

What the Repair Involved

Here’s the full parts list:

Plastic filler – lashings of it.

A plastic welder – the kind with the little wiggly pins you melt into the plastic like stitches, used from the back of the bumper where nobody can see them. This was a birthday gift from Gemma, who thought it an odd request when I asked for it. I told her it would come in handy someday. She was very polite about it. Turns out it was less premonition, more inevitability.

Plastic primer, to give the filler something to hold onto before paint.

Three rattle cans of Holts HYGREY35 – colour matched perfectly to the van. This is the bit that held the whole thing together, literally and spiritually.

A Ryobi sander with 80 and 260 grit paper to work through the layers.

New 3mm rubber seals for all the light fittings. While I had everything stripped back, I noticed the old seals were past it. In for a penny.

New M5 screws and washers to give everything a more solid hold going back together.

Two full nights, a whole Friday, most of a Saturday waiting on Amazon to deliver the fiddly bits, and one fortunate gap in the Northern Irish weather. That was the job.

The Result

From a distance, it looks great.

From up close, you can see it. The repairs are there if you look for them. It’s my first attempt at this kind of bodywork, and I’ve since learned that fiberglass matting and ISOPON P.38 resin would have given a smoother finish. I found that out after I’d finished, obviously, because that’s how these things work.

But from a reasonable distance, like, say, the end of the road, you’d never know.

From Mars, it’s invisible.

What It Gave Me

There’s something about doing a repair yourself, even an imperfect one, that makes you feel more ownership over a thing. This van is our home. Every scratch and bodged repair is part of that.

I can now take it through a car wash without feeling like I need to explain the state of the rear end to anyone, which I haven’t been able to do for three months. I’ll do that when we get back from Thailand, where I’m currently sitting in Dublin Airport writing this, waiting to board.

The roof also needs doing. Green moss situation. Twice a year job, invisible to anyone who doesn’t know it’s there, completely thankless. That one’s next.

But the bumper’s done. Nobody will notice my efforts where they would have previously clocked the damage and thought “wonder what happened to the back of that van.”

That’ll do.