The first difficulty with my hatchback camping dream is that the trunk bed actually lies a few inches beneath the lip of the hatch. Unlike, for example, my girlfriend's Outback, where the trunk bed is on the same level as the hatch lip, this makes sitting in the trunk space of my car rather uncomfortable.

Secondly, where she has a solid, rubber-liner covered surface in her trunk, my car has a bunch of flimsy felt-covered panels that cover up the spare tires and some cubby holes. In fact, I've already bent the main felt panel out of shape by attempting to sit on it. So, I decided that replacing this panel, with something more comfortable and reasonable to sit on, would be my first addition to the trunk space.

The design I settled on is nothing fancy, and may in fact be rather boring to read about. But, I can use it as the base to build some bells and whistles in future projects (perhaps even in the second part of this article?).

I decided to build a cheap but sturdy frame from 2x4s, with a hinged plywood surface on top of it, so I could still access the space underneath. As the dimensions worked out, this pretty much exactly put the top surface level with the raised hatchback lip, guaranteeing a comfortable sitting experience.

Next, the plywood hatch was relatively straightforward. After a double-check test fit of the frame in the trunk, I used the frame to trace the shape of the lid onto my plywood and cut it out.

Originally, I tried setting up a fence to ensure I was making straight cuts with the jigsaw, but that ultimately proved to be unnecessary -- I could make pretty straight cuts freehand, so I ditched the fiddly fence setup.

Time for the finishing touches! I put carpeting on the top of the hatch, wrapping it around the edges to hide the plywood edges. The two pieces came together with a piano hinge, before taking them apart again to spray paint the frame black to look more natural in the trunk of my car.

Finally, I drilled a hole in the lid for a "handle", just a rope with a hook that I could clip in to keep the lid raised when it was installed.

After that, I could finally put the frame in its new, permanent home in my trunk. On the whole, I'm very happy with how this one turned out, and I'm very excited to keep building off of it to deck out my setup.

I guess this is a good time to talk about my typical process with these projects. I start off with design inspiration -- looking up reference photos, blogs, pinterest tidbits, etc. I'll usually build a reference board, with a program called PureRef, if I find enough good material. This provides me a single place to go and look at a bunch of different ideas that may or may not help me design my own thing.

Next, I'll start ideating -- sketching ideas, looking up hardware that I might want to use, and identifying critical and/or challenging aspect of the design. There are all sorts of considerations here: materials, fabrication methods and capabilities at my disposal, existing similar contraptions.

But it's important to not get bogged down. The important considerations for this design were:

1. How does the table attach to the car? This would have to be tight (not wobbly), but easy to assemble.

2. How do I support the tabletop? I want this to be compact and easily stowable, which probably means something collapsible. Again, tightness and ease of assembly are important considerations.

3. How does the tabletop attach to the support?

Early on, I loosely settled on having my table off to one side, rather than directly in the middle of the trunk, for a couple reasons. First, this simplified attaching the table to the car: I could attach it to the outside of my new frame, without having to alter or cut through the lid in a non-desirable way.

Secondly, the usability might be improved: sitting two people in the trunk with a table in between started to feel very cramped, whereas putting it off to one side would make sitting down and getting up a lot easier for both users.

So, it was time to settle on the other critical design choices. For now, I'm using wood, although I may replace the supports with aluminum tubes for the next version. I decided on a hinge in my support, to allow it to collapse.

In order to attach the tabletop, I wanted to use brackets, thumbscrews, and threaded inserts set into the underside of the tabletop.

Finally, I settled on a simple slot-style attachment for the base of the table, allowing it to be held quickly but quite securely.

But now, it's building time at last! At a certain point, I can't continue to ideate without playing around with some ideas physically. Sometimes, I make mistakes that I could have avoided with more careful planning. Other times, though, I learn things or get ideas as I build, that would probably never occur to me without diving into the project. So, I guess it's a difficult line to tread.

Anyhow, my first step was to get my main support piece together. I used a half-lap joint to connect two 1x4s at an angle, using dowels to really beef up the joint. That probably isn't necessary, as the tabletop will be small and light, but it was quick and easy to do.

Next, I built up the "sheath" for holding the base of the table, which I would attach directly to the frame I built earlier. I used some cutoffs from the same 1x3 material, making sure to round out the top interior corners to help with inserting the table base.

With the sheath assembled, I took it and the table base out to my car for a fit. Using a level on the "tabletop" to get the correct angle, I then clamped the sheath to the frame and attached it with screws.

With the support in place, I sized up the dimensions for my tabletop, and where I wanted a supporting member on the 1x3 structure. With that laid out, I added the supporting member with a hinge, as well as brackets for 3 attachment points to the bottom side of the tabletop.

Once these were in place, I could lay out the exact locations for my threaded inserts (actually, the best I could find at Home Depot were basic square nuts, so that's what I used). I drilled them out, making sure to not punch through the top of the table, and then chiseled out an inset for each square nut.

Here, I made a mistake: after gluing in each nut, I realized that each pilot hole I drilled originally was too small. My screws would thread into each nut easily, but were almost impossible to turn when they hit the wood, as the were a bit long.

For something supposed to be "easily assemble-able" with hand-tight thumbscrews, this just wouldn't do. I could have looked for shorter screws, that wouldn't thread past the ends of each nut. What I ended up doing, though, was to work around a tiny drill bit, through each nut, to hog out some material beneath them.

This ended up working out okay, but it's an important to slow down sometimes and consider everything before making any irreversible steps like gluing things together.

I need to take it out camping, for a real test drive, before making any final decisions. However, I can make some immediate evaluations. As is to be expected, there are some problems that I would address with the next version.

First, the "sheath" attachment point for the table is not quite as rigid as I hoped, a problem which can only get worse as the table is used and abused. I'd like to have some clamping functionality here that would really hold the table steady, but I have to think up a good design for this before trying it out.

Secondly, the hinge on the support structure has the same issue: there is a little play in the angle of the hinge, which translates to looseness of the tabletop. The solution may be as simple as using a better, tighter hinge, which is what I'm hoping for.

Finally, although I'm happy with the thumbscrew attachment of the tabletop, it is a bit fiddly to set up. This isn't the worst thing in the world, but I think a better, quicker-to-assemble attachment solution is out there.