The entire thing started with a problem. When my wife and I go to a triathlon or running event, or just out of town in general, we get stuck in a room that thousands of people have been in before and get charged a ton of money for it. All that and usually we just look forward to getting back to our own bed. So we started thinking about campers and tow-behinds. The issue with most campers is that they are so big that driving them around town is pain. The issue with tow-behinds is you need a vehicle capable of towing it, and in many cases you may still have some difficulty maneuvering around town with such a large vehicle (you’re atleast not going to fit in a regular parking spot). Then the solution to all the problems was found… #vanlife.
Starting scouring youtube and seeing so many beautiful examples of what could be done with the blank canvas that is, “the cargo van”. You don’t have to look for very long to find builds that will have you thinking things like, “that is nicer than my house”. Let that sink in for a bit, have some success in renovating your house plus a recent purchase of lots of power tools and you too would be searching for a van to outfit yourself. All the youtubers made outfiting a van look so easy. You could watch their entire series in a couple days, so obviously it’s not that hard right??? Yeah, it is.
At the time of this writing our van doesn’t even have the walls in place and getting this far has been a real challenge. The amount of planning that you have to do before you even get to cut up any lumber is staggering. You’ve got to plan for everything from the floors, to how you’re going to insulate, what is your floor plan going to look like where are the walls for the shower going to go, how high will the bed be off the floor, every light and switch and outlet you want to have you’ll need to run those wires before you even think about putting up walls. Thankfully my wife is a superb planner and taskmaster and has helped keep us on the right track as I’m pretty sure she’s seen every van build video on youtube and the general internet by now. (seriously if you haven’t gone to see some of these stop reading this and go look for a bit.. they’re amazing).
So after much research, constant rechecking of local used vehicles, car lots, craigslist, we finally found her at price that was reasonable to us.
Finally, the hard part, all of the waiting, was over. We had acquired the van and could start building. Oh, boy was there sooooo much work to be done. Keep on following these posts if you want to see the process we went through to get this van from Cargo to Adventuremobile.
Feb 12 2020 Our van still doesn’t look like much but it’s starting to look more and more than a simple cargo van. The attention . . .
So we finally had the original floor out and now it’s time to prepare the surface for the application of floor. During all of our . . .