8 Things I REGRET about my van conversion & 8 things I LOVE

shoot where am i going to put you this time good morning everybody my name is mariah this is my dog finn this is my ford transit camper conversion that i converted with my boyfriend a year ago welcome to my channel where i make videos that just so happen to be about van life right now this video in particular is about things that i love and things that i regret about my van before we get started i am going to talk about the basics of this van it's a ford transit 130 inch wheelbase it's a medium roof transit which means that after the conversion it is only like five foot eight inside which is wonderful when you have a six foot boyfriend as far as layout goes i've got the kitchen swivel seat upper cabinet i've got a two person bench seat right here that has a table that slides out the entire length of the bench seat i've got cabinets that run the entire length of my driver's side of the van and then i've got a bed that was designed with window nooks to make the bed exactly six foot and a half inch so as far as electrical goes i have two 100 watt solar panels on my roof from renegy i also have the renegade solar charge controller that trickles down into one 100 amp hour lithium battery from battleborn we only cut two holes in this van one for the upper fantastic fan and one for my motion windows window so let's get into the actual juice let's talk regrets the number one thing that i regret isn't actually about my van build it's about the van itself i regret two main things about what i did number one i bought a new van no and number two i bought the medium roof i'm not so upset about the wheelbase but the height restriction is a big deal when you're somebody like me who has a history of dating guys that are giraffes i was single when i bought the van i should have known better if i did it again i would 100 continue with a ford but i would get a used ford transit 148 inch wheelbase high roof i made a very very large booboo when i made the selfish decision to get a small van my second regret is choosing the fantastic fan over the max air fan i was sold on the fantastic fan based on a van life fur's website that i think was hastily made it was in the beginning of the van build where there was just so many decisions to make it was so overwhelming i was so overwhelmed to the point where when i found somebody's website who swore by certain products i did not even question their validity i just added it to my cart closed my eyes and pressed checkout and then when it came i installed it and now i've been living with it ever since there are a couple reasons why it's not my favorite thing in the entire world number one it kind of sounds like a windows open when you're driving which is sort of frustrating i don't really know if the max air fan would be any different if i'm being honest number two you can't use it when it's raining which again you can get a rain cover for it so i suppose there's also a solution for that one but the third thing that really frustrates me is the noise that it makes when you run out of power so i run out of power quite often i would say it's an issue it's one of the things that i'm going to talk about next so when i run out of power which typically happens around 2 am what happens first is my inverter starts to beep and i have to push my inverter power button that's there if my fan is on when my battery dies it doesn't just like shut down close itself and call it a day or call it a night right because it's the middle of the night no instead if i do not immediately within 10 seconds of my inverter beeping push my fantastic fan remote to turn it off if i forget to do this it starts to make this sound it sounds like a sonar alarm weird beeping pattern and it does not stop the only way to make it stop is by either pulling a fuse hitting the kill switch on my entire battery system or unscrewing the casing for the entire fan at 2 am and undoing the wiring and i have the fan that doesn't have like any buttons on the actual fan itself it's just a remote which is just as annoying as it sounds the only other thing that doesn't have an off switch is my fridge and it doesn't it doesn't do anything and i think that's how it should be anyways i wish that i'd gotten the max air fan i know that it's probably a little bit more expensive but i'm telling you it's worth it i've also noticed that van lifers who started van lifeing two and a half years ago every single time that they do a remodel or do a second build they always switch out the fantastic fans for the max air fans the next thing that i regret doing is um this doggie door so when we were designing the van we decided to go with a three compartment garage so my garage has one compartment for the electrical another compartment for the dog crate and then another one for my water and backpacking gear and all the other good adventure stuff uh now a couple things first of all i think that the separation was actually a really good idea because it allows us to stuff one of the compartments all the way without having it spill over into the next one what i want this to be and what i should have foreseen in the beginning was maybe just maybe we should make this a toilet so we would basically cut this wider do a new piece of wood put one of the compostable toilets or something on some sliders or wheels or something so that you could just pull it open and a toilet would come out i will say that i'm glad that we did it the way that we did it because i didn't have the money for a toilet in the beginning and i probably won't have a toilet for a while it's just nice to know that that can easily be converted into a toilet compartment so everything else that i regret about this fan are very petty things that i can easily change and add so for example this lovely two-person chair it's perfect to sit like this or like this i can even sit like this right i will say that if i'm editing a video for eight hours at a time maybe sometimes like 12 hours at a time the worst is when your butt starts to feel like it's bruising and i cannot wait for the day where i splurge and by myself as a christian yeah simple stuff really another simple thing is the metal that's still exposed in the back i want to cover that and this with some auto carpet that's simple i also need to switch this thingy out to the same window covers as those ones back there these are nice window covers that i bought off of etsy i like them a lot i paid a lot for them but i think that it was worth it both for the installation and just for the ease of use this one is really annoying i think magnets are better and i want something that can roll up and then like velcro to itself i guess i could make this one a velcro to itself thing i just think that this is frankly really ugly and i've got a whole gray vibe going so it would just be nice to have gray hair too i missed one so the last thing that i need to talk about is electrical so like i said in the beginning i have 200 watts of solar on the roof and a 100 amp hour battery in the garage now two things are wrong with this equation number one 200 watts of solar is not enough for any human with a laptop and a fridge in the winter in the summer i had really relatively no issues but now that it's winter time i'm realizing that i am in for a long winter with limited power although i have i'm gonna call it a hundred usable amp hours of storage it's not enough so yeah in the future i'm going to start by adding an alternator charger to give myself more input i'm no longer just going to be charging my batteries with a solar panel i'm also going to be charging my batteries with my engine which is actually a much more direct charge the solar is kind of complicated because in order for the solar panels to be able to charge my battery my battery already has to be above 9 volts now my battery doesn't ever get actually below 9 volts but it does read below 9 volts when it truly dies very complicated i'm not going to get into it okay so now i want to talk about things that i love but i don't just want to talk about the things that i love about my van and just be a bragger because i can be a bragger all day i'm so proud of this thing although i'm not really bragging on my behalf i was the apprentice the builder was my boyfriend whatever now i wrote down a list of things to ask yourself like things to consider if you are in the beginning stages of a van build the first question is stationary bed versus some kind of like bed to table set up i personally obviously chose the stationary bed because i know that i'm not the type of person to be able to wake up every single morning and make my bed into something else and every single night i have to make my bed into an actual bed i would probably just end up sleeping on my couch so i chose to have a stationary bed and i'm very very glad that i chose that similarly i'm glad that i also chose to have a table set up because it was very important to me not just to have a bed in here but to also have somewhere to sit and to work obviously i also have this bad boy that you guys are sitting on right now the two-person chair and then i have this table that comes out that i get to work on i personally love this setup it's super clean it just is how it is how it is there's no overthinking it i love it now speaking of seating i wanted to be able to host people if i had to i can comfortably sit three people two in this chair and one in the swivel seat and then i can kind of comfortably sit five by adding me sitting on the bed and somebody sitting sideways in my driver's seat so um i've had up to four people in here and it hasn't been weird or uncomfortable it's actually been very awkwardly comfortable in fact when it comes to the bed not only is it important to know if you want to have a stationary bed but if you do choose to have a stationary bed first of all do you want to have it front to back or side to side we chose to have it side to side which super complicated the build but in the end i think i'm way happier with how it turned out this way and i would not have been happy with how it turned out if we did it front to back the second thing is making sure that the length of your bed is going to be enough for you i'm five foot three so my bed did not need to be any more than five five but coleman my boyfriend is six foot so obviously it was important to us to build a bed that he could sleep in comfortably our bed ended up being six foot and a half inch we are very proud of it it was a lot of work to get it actually to that point i don't think that it's necessarily easy to do that but i think it's doable i will say that it added a whole month onto our build but again it was worth it in the end the third question that you want to ask yourself when it comes to your bed is can you sit up all the way not just can i sit up all the way but can coleman sit up all the way or if you're solo how tall are the guys that you usually date i should have done this from the beginning i know what kind of guys i date i know how tall they usually are they're typically giraffes you know yourself you know what i mean and obviously there's going to be outliers but luckily i ended up actually doing the build with the person who was going to be halfway living in it so we were able to together figure out how to maximize a space to fit both of us humans the next thing that i'm super super proud of is that we prioritized ventilation instead of insulation now a lot of people will say that insulation is like everything and i will say that if you were in extreme cold weather yeah you're going to want to prioritize insulation obviously personally the way that i am we tried not to overthink it it was way too much information there was there's just like always somebody out there on google to contradict what you just learned from somewhere else on google we ended up going with foam king if i did another van that's exactly what i would do i would do the roll of foam king i actually don't know if it's called that i linked it down in my description under the amazon links it's there if anybody actually cares but it's basically just a piece of foam with adhesive on one side and foil on the other i just think that it's totally fine i've never really had a problem with the van being too hot or too cold because odds are we have the window open and our fan open if not all of our windows and our fans which was very important for us because of the dogs so sometimes we do leave the dogs in here if it's hot outside and we have the fan on and all the windows open it's never hotter in the van than it is outside the only time that it is hotter in the van than it is outside is when it's cold outside and we close all the windows up and we stay inside anyway my point is that if you have dogs or even if you are yourself and you want to be able to work in your van and or be cooler in your van than it is outside you're going to want to prioritize ventilation we did that by having obviously the fantastic fan and then by adding a window that opens now the window that i chose was from motion windows i probably wouldn't go with them again only because it frustrates me that the window isn't super symmetrical to the van i'm not to i won't ex i'm not going to go into that but i think that having a window that opens is great and if you can have two windows that open even better and if you can have two windows and two fans inside you are set baby anyway something else to consider how easy is it gonna be to make your bed is your bag gonna be easy to make or is it not gonna be easy to make my bed is the easiest thing in the entire world to make it's easier than a house bed to make i'm very grateful for it the next question that i have written down is where are you gonna pee at 2 a.m i know a lot of people are just gonna say well go squat or pop a squat but like are you always going to be somewhere where you can pop a squat are you going to be comfortable walking into walmart at 2 am to go pee are you going to be comfortable walking in at 2 am to a truck stop to go potty these are all the questions that you got to ask yourself you got to figure out what you're going to be comfortable with because it's a lot easier saying that you're going to go pee at 2 am in a truck stop versus at 2 am actually having to get out of your van it just doesn't feel right it doesn't feel right that's that's my take on it i know a lot of people who would be okay with it personally that's not me i guess the whole point of this is you gotta know yourself like you gotta be able to self-reflect enough to understand what you're gonna be okay with and if you are just gonna make decisions based on what somebody else says is okay the universe is gonna put you on your ass you know like the things that i chose because of other people just they just never worked out well so oh this is a good one this is one that i did not think about actually how easy is it gonna be to charge your phone when you're on your phone and it's dying at nine o'clock at night and you wanna sit there and stare at your screen and get all dopamine rush from this little square device why am i getting so weird anyway my outlet is just on that wall and my head goes on that side so i actually have to turn myself around to plug my phone and on this side and if i had thought about that i would have just added another outlet on this set as well as far as the kitchen goes i chose a lot of big appliances like my fridge is huge for the space my sink is a literal shower basin it's not actually literally a shower basin i'm just being exaggerative i prefer that i know that i want a big sink and i love it because i can shower in my sink now maybe you don't want to prioritize a big sink maybe you want to prioritize cooking space personally i actually would like more counter space second to last question what happens if there's a water leak how much is going to be ruined this is one of the questions that is going to inspire an entire redoing of certain things in this van i want to put a water tray in the back where my jugs are i want to do something here to make sure that if the worst possible scenario happens that i'm not completely screwed because i think it's a big deal and i think that ignoring that is i mean ballsy the last question that i have here is if there's an electrical issue how easy will it be to work on it for me personally like i said my garage is split up into three parts and my electrical is in the first one but it's all the way in the first one four feet inside of a big hole and yeah it's a big hole i can fit into it very easily but will an electrician get into it i still haven't found out but i thankfully have not needed to figure it out because it seems like my electrical is doing a-okay yeah that is things that i regret things that i love there are plenty of other things that i love about this fan but i think i'm going to save that for a tour which i have not done my own tour i know i need to do a tour i know that it'd be smart i know that it's about time but if i'm being honest i just feel like i'm not in my element enough to film a tour that i would be dead proud of so i'm gonna wait until i feel a little bit more confident in myself i feel like my style changes every single video i'm still trying to figure myself out anyways i'm hot as hell i have all the windows closed because i've been filming and it's too loud outside thank you guys for watching if you've made it this far maybe consider hitting that like button um i hate that i will see you guys in the next one finn is being way too cute to move him so i'm just gonna say bye

Channel: Mariah Alice

Views: 350,189

Rating: 4.8835893 out of 5

Keywords: van life, regrets, solo female travel, mariah alice, mariah van life, ford transit, camper, ford transit van life, window nooks van conversion, van conversion, things i regret about my van conversion, things i hate about my van, things i love about my van, campervan, things i would change about my van, van build mistakes, van build changes, van build regrets, camper van ideas, van tour, van life renovation, van life realities, van build-out, transit build, off grid camper

Id: dRDHs6vU1Zk

Length: 16min 59sec (1019 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 15 2020