A MODERN TAKE ON THE CLASSIC VW KOMBI // Made For Full-Time Vanlife 🚐

hey guys I'm TIA this is Jordyn and our Papa's Anna we're currently traveling Australia in our 1975 book so I can calm be - we called Stella this has been a project about the last two years and we've completely built our band from the ground up you're going to see today some of the custom modifications that we made to make our band our home so welcome to our - it [Music] the first thing I'll show you is the secret drawer which slides out and becomes our kitchen we had so many ideas in mind when designing the van but we decided to go with this lair we're outdoors most of the time anyway and we're always chasing summer weather so we haven't had any issues having our kitchen outside I personally love this spot especially in the mornings when making coffee in the fresh air we love having the pull-out bench top because it really opens up the van and allows space to entertain guests so the sliding bench here runs on a 1 meter heavy-duty cabinet runner and we have a magnet on each side of it to hold it in place while we're traveling we left this bit here open intentionally so that we have easy access to things like our coffeemaker and our mugs we made these little macrame holders for all of our glassware so that they don't break when we're driving to and they've been super inside the bench here is where we keep cookware glass mugs and a few pantry staples we actually just bought this little omnia oven it's a Swedish design and allows you to cook things like bread and whatever else that you'd put in the oven so we haven't used it yet but we're super excited to have that in the van a little luxury so guys this is our land rip on the road we always wanted to park up at spots near the beach have a space like this that we could chill and relax and so we made this area with these two's bench seats where we can just kick back and enjoy the van and enjoy the outdoors we made these cupboards here a good friend of mine we made them out of MDF which is a medium density fiberboard they handle the water really well so if we got any like towels and things that are wet doesn't matter too much they're also lightweight and really heavy-duty so it's been perfect for the van build to the flooring we've got these vinyl planks so these just a household sort of vinyl planks that you can get from any hardware store they clip together really easily so it's not too much work and the underlay we've got under here is marine ply which gives us an extra bit of buffer installation over this side how do these cupboard here is bit of storage it opens just like that we have an AGM battery here 100 amp power which runs our fridge we keep supplies in here like our first day is really important extra shoes some flippers things we don't use everyday but it's great to have as much storage as possible in the van so one feature i'd like to show you guys is our little charging station which is secretly kept mix of the benches over here it's a really basic setup that we did we basically run a four meter extension cable from the back of the van where the batteries are through an RCD switch and and measure it all the way through to the front here it's really great because it allows us to charge our things while we're driving on the road or if we're actually sitting in the station behind me we can also charge our laptops etc our power situation is pretty good now we've like recently put a 200 watt solar panel on the roof this has been awesome because it generates power all during the and it feeds into two batteries which are both 100 and power we've got an inverter which is an 800 watt Victrola inverter and the best thing I ever did was to install a smart switch which actually bluetooth the information that's being produced in the solar panel through to my phone so I've got a big Tron app which I can open up and I can check the vaults of the batteries so know that the life is really good I can also see the yield how much we've actually drawn in through the solar panels and how much we've used every day so at the beginning of our travels we had a real big issue with not enough power we're constantly drawing too much and I actually killed the battery pretty early on because I didn't know how to manage our power properly so having these upgrades was really really important to us and especially like if you're doing a life where you're living no matically so you are in your laptop daily you are getting that camera out all the time you're going to need to charge things naturally and we wanted to be off the grid so it was super important to invest a bit more money get the solar panel get the gear and now we feel super confident that we could be anywhere and we could still be producing enough power so we could live every day comfortably so in this corner here we have a few and not so essential van life items so we have things like vintage vases and candle holders which we use for some of our photos I have a little shell here which was passed down from Jordans grandma which I love and yeah just a few other things that make us happy when designing the van we do spend a lot of time in here so we wanted it to be a little bit like buy B so we've thrown in some things that aren't really necessary but they make us happy so moving from the corner to our curtains here this was a little project of mine during the build I love the way these ones turned out because they block out so much light and whenever we just need a little bit more privacy we just take these off and pull them across so that's super nice so the back curtains here on the other hand are a little bit different I love linen material and I really wanted to incorporate it into the van so I decided to make the back curtains out of linen material because they're white and they're very light were always up with the Sun I recently made some window blockers so if we ever want to sleep in or want that extra bit of privacy we just stick them onto the windows behind the curtains and pull them across and then we have no issues these pouches here were another little project of mine they're also made with a linen material that I just got from a local material shop around the area what we keep in here is just things like our journals some books pens I like to draw so I have my little notepad there we always have a few doggie cheese sticks in here and what else some of our curtain holders as well these were actually something I found in Bali and I love them because they set around our house for so long and they finally come to good use in our van hold the curtains it just brings a little bit of a boho vibe and they make me happy so I love them so at the end of the benchtop here is our work station we work lost on the road so I do spend a lot of time sitting here editing photos and answering emails we also love to do art so it's great to have a space like this that we can just sit and enjoy and do our drawing or painting or whatever fully feel like doing we usually try and park up in a nice spot with an ocean view or a park to make our work atmosphere a good one all right let's take a look what's in our cupboards so we use these lockable latches here on all the cupboards and drawers which are super handy because they're very secure when we're driving a few times we forgot to lock them and as we started driving they've come flying open and it's so scary every time that happens but when we do remember to lock them they're perfect so we love having that and this cupboard here is my closet so I use these travel pouches for all my clothes and I've just labeled them on here so it's super easy to see whatever I'm looking for in the drawer we also do travel with a suitcase because we have very minimal space here in our combi and I like to have enough clothes on the road so that we don't have to go to the laundromat every few days cover it actually goes all the way to the driver seat so sometimes it can feel like cave diving to get anything out of there but it is super handy to have that little bit of extra storage where we keep things like our extra linen we keep as ennas doggie gear there and a few arts and crafts things like macrame strings paints and all that other fun stuff all our cutlery cooking utensils and spices live in this drawer here we have some fun things like little spoons that we like to use also we've got our milk frother for our morning coffee and some beeswax reps which we use to wrap our food the final cupboard here is just our pantry so that's where we keep all of our dry goods you know you got some aziz living in the van when basically all that's in the pantry at the moment is Vegemite all right so from here we're heading up to the pop top so this pop top is one of the reasons we brought you come be in the first place is probably my favorite features in the whole van it stands quite tall so it's I'm 510 so it stands over me about 10 inches so it heaps of space up here lets in a lot of ventilation which is important for especially when we're sleeping so these just fall down and I can put them up again the pop top is only like something that takes 2 or 3 minutes to set up or if we need to take off we can just pull it down straight away and it cooks on with these little clips here tear put this cute little basket in the corner which we keep some of our free and things like that and to the back side here we have storage so when we're sleeping we use this space up here to carry things like my guitar and some of our luggage and things like that super handy for when we're on the road and yeah which wanting to set up quick and get things ready for bed this rock and roll bench seat here pulls out and becomes a queen-size bed so most Combes actually only have like three-quarters of the bed size they have a bench top that goes all the way to the back but we had this custom build because we just wanted a little bit of extra space on those hot nights when you just don't really want to be touching each other it's a lot nicer [Music] now that we've taken a look at the back of the van let's take a look at the front where we spend a lot of our time driving we use our seats to their full advantage so when we pull this forward I always have a set of clean clothes back here and pajamas just so I can change whenever I feel like it so something we customized ourselves was storage between the seats we've got our cup holders here which is really important sorry Xena underneath here you'll see that we've got some extra bench space for things that we want to have quickly on hand so things like our camera gear electronics summiteers cosmetics as well we keep in here and it's really handy to have just between our seats because we do spend so much time up the front so to the back of the combi is the engine bay the 1975 vidcom B's a 2 liter as your twin carb and it's a stick shift so I have a lot of fun driving it I know pretty much nothing about mechanics but I think one of these cars means to get pretty familiar with it very quickly so we had ours fully rebuilt two years ago before we took off on the road and it's been really reliable since then which is great probably done over 20,000 k's and it's an honest debate really so I'm originally from Canada and Jordan is from Australia and we met when I was here on a working holiday visa straight away we started doing road trips to places around Perth and we just loved it so man life has come really natural to us because we've kind of always done it together so originally we didn't have in mind a particular type of van to take on the road tear was a little bit obsessed with comedies and I thought the vibe was pretty cool we knew nothing about them and we thought that we'd go see Stella and maybe just have a look but the time we rocked up she was just too perfect not to take home the a - shell was freshly painted bright yellow and thought it was just so cool right she had no rust as well which is super rare for a vehicle of this age and so being said we decided to take her home spend the money and here we are today one major advantage to having Stella was the fact that she was completely empty inside we had the canvas and the pop top attached but everything in here we were able to customize ourselves which was super fun to do but we loved a lot of the details that go into making this van ours we hope you guys enjoyed our van tour we are about to travel up the east coast of Australia so if you'd like to follow along please check us out on YouTube or Instagram at 75 vibes underscore we'll see you guys soon [Music] I hope you enjoy that content if you hadn't noticed we do have an e-book that we sell and the link is just in the description it contains 160 pages crammed full of practical advice walk through information electronic schematics and part lists which will make your job a lot easier for doing a fan conversion and it will save you time and money also we've created special videos for the e-book which enable you to see walkthroughs for how to do loads of things in the van conversion you said that's for water systems through electrics for how to do the simple woodwork torrents that anyone can do and I really believe that anyone regardless of experience can make a half-decent fan conversion thanks for watching we really appreciate you watching our content and we put a lot of effort to make it interesting informative and find those cool projects to feature on our Channel consider subscribing leave a comment and we'll see you next week

Channel: Nate Murphy

Views: 240,838

Keywords: van conversion, #vanlife, vanlifediaries, van conversion electronics, van conversion solar, off grid soar, off grid camper, van conversion electrics, van conversion heater, van conversion how to, how to van conversion, vanlife, van life, how to van life, digital nomad, extreme camper van, selfbuild van, selfbuild camper, camper van aircon unit, vw crafter, vw crafter conversion, self build, campervan, vanlife australia, vw kombi, kombi, kombi campervan, customized kombi

Id: 4YFiFeFyJ4k

Length: 15min 34sec (934 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 25 2020