Campervan garage dimensions: fitting bikes, boards and boxes under the bed
· 6 min read
The “garage” is the space under a fixed bed — usually a transverse platform across the back of the van, loaded through the rear doors. It's the single best storage idea in van conversion, and it runs on one brutal equation: the garage is exactly as tall as the tallest thing that must slide into it, and every centimetre of garage height is a centimetre taken off the headroom above your mattress. Get the number wrong by 5 cm and you either can't load the bike or can't sit up in bed for the life of the van.
So the design order is fixed: measure the gear first, set the bed height second, and only then check what's left above the mattress. Here are the numbers that decision runs on.
What the gear actually needs
Clearances below are the clear internal height the garage must offer — measure from the van floor (or your finished floor) to the underside of the bed frame, not to the mattress. A typical slat-and-frame build eats 4–6 cm below the platform, so a bed at 105 cm gives you roughly 100 cm of clear garage.
| Gear | Clearance needed | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Road bike, upright, front wheel on | ~95–100 cm to bar tops | Measure your bike; drop bars vary a lot |
| Road bike, front wheel off, fork on a mount | ~10 cm less, and ~50 cm shorter | Fork mounts also stop it falling over |
| MTB, upright | ~100–110 cm | Riser bars and big wheels; dropping the saddle helps little — bars govern |
| E-bike | ~110 cm, plus floor anchoring | 20–30 kg each — rails and lashing are structural, not optional |
| Surfboard / SUP | Length is the problem, not height | Anything over the garage width goes diagonal — or on the roof |
| Ski / snowboard bag | ~20 cm flat, up to ~190 cm long | Slides diagonally between the wheel arches on most vans |
| Euro stacking boxes (60 × 40 cm) | Common heights 22 / 32 / 42 cm | Pick a bed height that stacks them with no dead air on top |
| Portable toilet on a slide-out | ~35–40 cm incl. runners | Fits under even a low bed — see below |
Two bikes side by side: budget ~40 cm of width per bike with the pedals staggered fore-and-aft so they interleave rather than clash — so ~80 cm for a pair, which fits between the wheel arches of every large panel van with room to spare for a wall-mounted service run. Line them up pedal-to-pedal instead and you need noticeably more, and they grind on every bump.
Boards: a 7 ft board is ~215 cm. No garage is that wide, so it lives diagonally — which works only if the diagonal is actually free of arches, tanks and bike mounts. This is precisely the collision a floor-plan sketch won't catch and a 3D mock-up will.
The headroom trade
Now the other side of the equation. Take a van with ~1.90 m of interior height (an H2 Ducato, roughly), subtract a finished floor and ceiling (~5 cm combined), and put a ~20 cm mattress on each candidate platform height:
| Bed platform height | Space above mattress | Life above | What fits below |
|---|---|---|---|
| 105 cm | ~60–65 cm | Crawl in, prop on an elbow; no sitting up | Upright bikes, e-bikes are marginal, full Euro-box stacks |
| 90 cm | ~75–80 cm | Most adults sit up with a bowed head | Bikes with front wheels off on fork mounts, 2 × 42 cm box stacks |
| 70 cm | ~95–100 cm | Sit fully upright, read, drink coffee | Boxes, drawers, water tank, toilet slide-out — no upright bikes |
There is no correct row — only the row that matches how you travel. Full-time couples who work from bed tend to regret 105 cm; weekend mountain bikers tend to regret 70. What people regret most is picking a round number before measuring the bike.
The weight is in the worst possible place
A loaded garage sits over — and usually behind — the rear axle, in the rear overhang. That has two consequences. First, it's the heaviest concentrated load in most builds: two e-bikes, tools, water and a full box wall can pass 100 kg without trying. Second, weight behind the rear axle acts as a lever that takes load off the front axle — which matters for traction and steering on a front-wheel-drive Ducato. Put the heaviest items (e-bike batteries, toolboxes) as far forward in the garage as loading allows, and run your numbers through the payload and axle-load guide before you commit to carrying two e-bikes and a full water tank at the same end of the van.
Details that make or break the garage
- Wheel-arch intrusion. The arches steal ~20–25 cm from each side of the lower ~30 cm of the garage. Full width exists only above them — which is why box dimensions and bike positions have to be planned around the arch geometry, not the nominal van width.
- Lashing points. Everything in the garage becomes a projectile at 50 km/h. Bolt rails or eyes through the floor into structure before the furniture goes in — retrofitting them under a finished bed is miserable.
- Rear vs side loading. Rear doors give the full-width slide-in that bikes need; a hatch from the sliding-door side is far handier for daily items like chairs and the toilet. The good garages have both.
- Leave a service corridor. Reserve ~15 cm along one wall for water lines, cabling and the fresh tank. Packing gear wall-to-wall means dismantling the bed to chase a leak later.
Mock it before you build it
The garage is a 3D problem pretending to be a height number: arches, diagonals, staggered pedals and the headroom above all interact. So don't build the bed at a height you read in a forum — mock your bed over your gear first. VanPlot has the real wheel-arch geometry for each Ducato variant and a measure tool: set the bed to 105 cm, drop in bike-sized boxes, and check the sitting height above the mattress in minutes, free in your browser. Moving a virtual bed 10 cm takes one drag in VanPlot; moving a built one takes a weekend and new panelling.