11 Reasons Vanlife Sucks

hi my name is Bridget and I'm Amanda and we live in this 2020 Ford Transit full-time okay we're gonna tell you 11 things that we don't like about van life [Music] the first and worst thing about living in a van is dumping a toilet we all go to the bathroom we all know how it is but having a toilet that you then have to dump afterwards can be disgusting it can be hard to find a dump station sometimes dump station costs money it can be up to 20 bucks just to dump a toilet that isn't that big definitely one of our least favorite things okay our second thing is showers um we shower at Planet Fitness which we love Planet Fitness they're super easy to find very convenient but um you never really know what you're gonna get sometimes the showers are super cold sometimes they're nice and hot and yeah just kind of roll of the dice you never know what you're gonna get um we also travel a lot so sometimes we're near the ocean we're in the desert we get dirty we have to shower a lot and um it's not quite the ease that you get with showering at home you know your shower is just right there versus when we take a shower we have to pack everything up walk into a gym and then go into our shower where we don't know if we're gonna get hot or cold water so showering that's our second one the third thing we don't like about van life is having to find water I personally drink a ton of water so only having a certain amount of water can be really difficult we currently have 25 gallons of water which sounds like a lap when you think about two people drinking water we use it for dishes we use it to cook it's really not that much so it can be annoying to have a limited amount of water and then it can be really difficult to find water okay our fourth thing that we don't like about van life is finding a place to sleep we don't get the ease of going home and knowing where we're going to sleep every night we have to find different places especially when we're on the go and we're traveling to all sorts of different places every time it's time for bed we have to do research figure out a good place to sleep or kind of drive around town and figure out what feels safe there's also just a lot of variables that come with sleeping in new places we never know if it's going to be noisy if it's going to be super cold so just a lot of things that come into play like weather noise level new locations all of that can be tricky getting the knock the worst part the potential of getting the knock yeah the worst part is you never know you may think that you've done all the research you've prepared all you can and getting a knock in the middle of night having the police wake you up and telling you you can't sleep there or waking up and seeing a ticket is one of the worst things ever for number five one thing that's difficult about living in a van is how variable the temperature is we could wake up in the morning and it's really really cold and you'd struggle to get out of bed or some mornings you can wake up and it's beaming hot the sun's been on the van all morning it's really really hot so living in a van can be really hard with all the variable temperatures the other tough part is rainy days one of the greatest things about having a van is that you can go wherever and pretty much live outside like the best part is we can open up the doors and we're at the ocean or we're hanging out with friends which is really really nice but on those rainy or windy days it's really difficult to just stay inside and feel like you can't do anything especially when you're in such a small place the other thing that really affects the temperature in the van is cooking we use a two burner stove and an oven which can get up to 500 Degrees so sometimes when we're cooking it gets really really hot in here really quick so it it sucks and you're cooking and you're sweating and you just want to sit down and enjoy your meal but all of a sudden the van is so hot you feel like you can't even enjoy the meal although we do love our cooking setup it definitely does suck when it gets really hot cooking in here number six is the van gets dirty really quickly and it also is really obvious when something is dirty in the van this bed takes up like a third of the van so when the bed's not made it just automatically feels like the van is dirty or if somebody's cooking that's another third of the van so that when the dishes are in the sink or there's stuff on the counters it just feels like such a mess in here and it can be really hard to be productive in other ways when you feel like your space is messy so that's really tricky number seven is cleaning the van before you can go anywhere although we both love having a van instead of like a trailer that you have to pull or have to set up a tent it does come with some downsides and that's cleaning before you drive anywhere when you're in the middle of something you're cooking you're like oh no I need to go get a different grocery you have to clean up everything you have to stop what you're doing make sure that nothing's on the counters nothing for the cabinets can fall down and just make sure that everything's tucked away and secure before you drive so it can be really difficult to run quick little errands because you really have to stop clean up everything go run the errand and then you can get back to what you're doing if you happen to forget something on the counters and you take a left-hand turn let me tell you everything goes flying we currently have latches on most of our stuff but it's really easy to think that something's latched and then you take one hand turn and all of a sudden the spice rack is flying open we have spices flying everywhere or the fridge could it be shut all the way and the fridge could open up and food could go out which would be horrible because as we said it gets really dirty on the ground so the last thing you want is your food to me on the ground otherwise it's Gotta Go all right number eight is this is a very small space to share with somebody um we're living in maybe like 70 square feet and so it honestly sometimes it just feels like someone is always in your way if someone's washing dishes and then you want to walk by then you gotta squeeze through also if someone's cooking in the kitchen and you want to get by that's another thing you really just you can't have two Cooks in the kitchen because it is so tiny or the bathroom is right here if someone's going to the bathroom number one you're going to the bathroom in front of the other person there's no getting around that and number two if I want to get into these drawers down here or if I want to get by and she's going to the bathroom I'm out of luck because there's no space to get around each other um also you don't really get alone time we are always in this van together so if we if either of us want alone time we have to plan for that or someone has to go on a walk while the other person gets alone time in the van so that can be tricky for number nine we have limited storage having two people live in such a small space it's hard to have all of our belongings one thing that is a little bit nice is that we can often share clothing but but her previously have an apartment and me going to college we both had a ton of stuff before moving into a van so with living in such big places before this we both had to downsize a lot we had to figure out between us what stuff was important and what stuff we want to get rid of how much clothes we could have another part that's hard about having limited storage is having food I personally love to cook but it can be really hard to keep fresh vegetables and fresh fruit in such a small space especially like we said with the temperature varying you can't really keep stuff out in the open like you get a bag of apples goes bad really really easy because they've been sitting in the sun all day or they're like really really cold and I hate cold apples on my teeth so having a small fridge and having only limited storage food can be really difficult because you're kind of limited to cooking the same things over and over again because you don't have room to have all different types of cuisines so one way that we figured out to deal with this is if you want to buy something new that's fine but that means something has to go number 10 on our list is gas this thing is a gas guzzler we get 13 miles to the gallon um and gas in California is really expensive we spend a lot of our time in California so we spend a lot of money gas because gas is so expensive we have to decide how much we want to move and travel and how much we want to stay in one space so that we're not spending so much money on gas for number 11 we have limited power I currently work on a computer from the van and that drains a ton of power I'm always having to charge my battery throughout the day and although we do have 200 watts of solar and DC DC charging we have a limited 300 amp hours of batteries we always have to be cognizant of how much power we're drawing if we wake up and make coffee in the coffee machine and then make stuff in the toaster and then I'm charging my computer for work it really drains a lot and we have to be aware of how much we're draining because it would suck if at the end of the night it's really really cold and then we don't have enough power to run the heated blanket or we wake up and the battery's dead from running the heated blink and we don't have power to make coffee nothing worse than not being able to make coffee in the morning because someone gets crabby if you've enjoyed this video like And subscribe um feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions about van Life we'll be making more videos in the future and catch you later really

Channel: Bridget & Amanda

Views: 38,168

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Id: T6gpCoFQ8r0

Length: 10min 6sec (606 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 03 2023