10 THINGS I REGRET ABOUT MY FIRST VAN BUILD (2 YEARS LATER)

hello and welcome back my name is colton from ankeny van builds and today i'm going to be going over all of the things that i wish i could have done differently and all of the things that i do not like about my personal van so if you haven't already make sure you like this video subscribe down below and let's jump right in to the top things i would change about my very first fan [Music] so before we start with the list of all the things that i wish i could have done differently originally i was planning on doing maybe a top five things i would change about my van but then i started asking my girlfriend what she would have done differently so i actually brought her in to talk about all the different things because she came up with much more than five different things so let's go ahead and start with number one so when colton first asked me to name off things about the van that i didn't like the first thing that came to mind was the height of the bed because i'm pretty tall i'm 5'10 and this is still a pretty high bed so it's pretty hard for even me to get up and i have to ask for colton to help me up every single time i go to bed at night it's a pain it's super hard to get up in and i love it but it's tough so not only is the height of the bed an issue but if if you saw my van build on the newer van i built these little bump out systems to make the bed as long as it physically could be you could tell that i didn't do that in this van so me being six foot two amanda being five foot ten uh it is very difficult to sleep side to side so i end up sleeping kind of in a diagonal where she only gets the rest of that corner there and uh there's just simply not enough room for the both of us to sleep side by side without that build out in so the second item on our list of things we would do differently is instead of doing the quarter inch thick ceiling panels we would have gone with the actual three quarter inch style walls and the reason for that is this stuff is really thin and it's also really weak so you could tell just by pushing on it it has a little bit of give to it and you can tell here it was really hard to marry up all of the gaps and seams when it's so thin so next time i definitely would have gone with a thicker material so the third item that we would change about this van is the overall layout when we first built it out we prioritized countertop space and cabinet space over seating area later on we found out that just the two swivel seats up front wasn't quite enough seating area it would be nice to have a lounge area in the back and with this bed being so tall i can't really sit in it comfortably without kind of hunching over so having more seating area in the back would have been a much better layout also with our layout because we use it more as like a vacation van so we don't live in it full time so we thought we would need more storage space but since we only use it for our short vacations that we honestly didn't need as much storage as we thought we would which is why we prioritized the counter space and the amount of cabinets we could have under it but we really didn't need it with the new van colton particularly we want to prioritize putting a table because originally with this layout we didn't think we would need it and so we just did the swivel seats and we thought that we could just eat on our laps and it wouldn't be that big of a deal but it makes a difference and i'm very jealous of the table that we put in the new van because it would make our life so much easier even on road trips just for me to be able to have a space that we could put stuff while we go along so i wish we would have put a table in here so speaking of the different types of seating area i thought that having this mini fridge with a cushion on it would have been good enough for a place to sit well i put this in before i put this overhead shelf in which leads us to the fourth thing i would change about this van this shelf right here is way too low so if i go to sit in this seating area i smack my head right onto the back of this shelf and if i wanted to sit in it comfortably i have to like hunch over watch my head for this puck light and then lean back and it's just kind of claustrophobic a little bit cramped and not very comfortable so also talking about this shelf as i mentioned in my last video i had zero prior experience when it came to woodworking so i learned a lot of things as i went but if you look at this shelf another thing i'll change is i would actually make it level with the ground you could tell it's completely curved so i made a total rookie mistake i made the shelf perfectly square perfectly straight and then i attached it to a wall that was completely curved and it makes the entire shelf look totally off centered the fifth reason that i came up with on what we would change with this van is the oven which i take full responsibility for i we were building this and colton told me like we don't need an oven we should just get a stovetop i was like no we're gonna use the oven we're gonna make cinnamon rolls like this is gonna be very important we have never used it the entire time we've had this van for over a year we've never used the oven we tried to use it once and it was a complete fail and with elevation it doesn't work very well so it's completely useless at least to us and i wish we would have just done the stovetop so another thing with this camp chef oven i looked at a ton of reviews online and if you guys didn't know people on youtube are not always the most truthful a few people with this oven said oh it doesn't rattle at all when you drive well it is quite the opposite listen to this anything you touch on this entire oven no matter what it doesn't matter how smooth the road is you are going to hear this thing rattle so most of the time we actually keep rags and stuff underneath here to keep it tight so it doesn't rattle we'll take out this or this oven shelf and even then it still rattles a ton so other than that we thought it would work out for us we thought we would use it a ton we've really only used the two burner stove on top so on our next fan if we ever built out a new one we would probably just go with a classic two burner stove minus the oven so the sixth thing that i could come up with on what bothers me most about this van is the fridge it's not bad we were obviously on a budget when we did the van the only reason that i don't enjoy the fridge is because it's tough to get things out of because you have to open it if someone we've had people sitting in here with us before and it's constantly when i'm cooking it's a small space already but if someone's sitting on this i'm like hey can you get up i have to get in there i have to get this for dinner that i forgot to grab before and everything in there is buried you put stuff down on the bottom and then you have to layer things and so you try to get under people to grab things and you're trying to dig and your take physically taking everything out of the fridge to get to something that's at the bottom it's a really big pain to have to dig for things that i need even if it's just like one item that i forgot to grab out before dinner so the seventh thing that we would change about this fan is actually these cabinets themselves so i didn't know how to build cabinets when i first started building this fan out and it was kind of overwhelming to think about at first so i thought a better solution would be to buy the pre-built out cabinets from home depot well turns out the dimensions of those are way too wide because for a standard house they're a lot wider than what you need for a van so when it came to making them fit i ended up having to take about five to six inches off the back rebuilding all the different drawer slides to get the soft clothes and it was a ton of work and it was almost more difficult and the materials that are used to build these are not meant for a van that constantly vibrates constantly shakes so throughout the year and a half to two years that we've been traveling in this i've had to do quite a few modifications just to make it continue to work and to prevent things from coming loose so you could tell these drawer faces are kind of slouching they're not flush anymore and that's because of the cheaper material that the pre-built cabinets come with as opposed to just doing it yourself so with colton laying corner to corner on the bed naturally i'm the closest to the heater so that was my eighth biggest gripe is that the heater control is so far away from the bed i'm the one that has to get out and turn it on every time it gets cold if we wake up at two in the morning and it's freezing you have to physically get out of bed or at least get up and like crawl to the end of the bed and across this countertop to be able to hit it to get heat on so just the fact that it's so far away from the bed when we need it the most at night when it gets coldest is probably the most inconvenient spot for it so that was my eighth biggest gripe okay so coming in at number nine when i first built out this van the entire goal was to make things as simple as possible that required the least amount of i guess effort when it came to building it out well when it came to the sink i thought the foot pump was the simplest and easiest method and when it came to installing it it was but now a year and a half later especially after installing a 12-volt pump in this new van i realized how almost barbaric this foot pump is and just as a quick demonstration i'm going to show you just how long it would take to fill up something with a foot pump so you gotta stand here and it's like every step you gotta put a whole body weight effort into it it's almost like a workout and it just takes way too long and it's kind of inconvenient so having a 12-volt pump would be much better than a foot pump so that's why reason number nine of things that we would do differently is one of those so coming in at number 10 of things that we would do differently is going to be talking about this energy apex so initially i had the choice between doing a goal zero or the energy apex the energy came in a little bit cheaper and because i was on a budget i went with this one and after using the goal zero in this newer van i realized that i probably should have just gone with the gold zero not saying that this isn't a good product it has done everything that we have needed it to but there are times that it has been a bit inconvenient so sometimes if the battery levels get a little bit too low say below fifty percent it doesn't have the same amount of output that it would at a hundred percent so things like the heater if the battery level gets below 50 percent and we want to run the heater well that output needs the full 12 volts where when it's below 50 percent the apex can't provide that much output and the heater won't work and we've run into two scenarios where it's been cold as hell in this van and we've wanted to run the heater and we couldn't because battery levels were too low and that just had us both cussing the apex the entire night as we froze our butts off so if i had a choice between this and the goal zero i would go goal zero every time and lastly just as a bonus thing that we would do differently is i would choose a different insulation so i again on a budget i went with the cheaper option which was this denim insulation with a reflectix backing to it it's a lot thinner than i expected so when i put that up i realized that the insulation doesn't work quite as well compared to the 3m thinsulate which is what i used for the newer van and it is a night and day difference on how well it traps heat in or on hotter days like this it keeps the heat out so if i were to do something differently i would change up the insulation and not go with the denim option so this is where i'm going to include this week's video and if you guys think that we hate our van from this video we don't we just learned a lot from it on what we like and what we don't like so next week we're doing things that we absolutely love about this van so if you guys want to see that video make sure you hit the subscribe button with the notification bell so you don't miss out and we'll see you guys next week see ya so if you haven't already like ah see i'm gonna feel like all day is gonna be like but there are times uh just wait for all these cars to go by cause it's gonna be loud oh fifty percent apex doesn't quite oh my god that i can use that i brought her into this video here so that she could come in and come on i killed it that was such a good intro you hesitated that was your cue [Music]

Channel: Ankeney Van Builds

Views: 24,282

Keywords: VAN BUILD, OVEN, INSULATION, FOOTPUMP, FRIDGE, SHELF, VAN LIFE, REGRETS, WHAT I WOULD DO DIFFERENT, EVERYTHING WRONG WITH MY VAN, 2 YEAR REVIEW, VAN MISTAKES

Id: NA2TqUFRyXw

Length: 13min 45sec (825 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021