AMBULANCE CONVERSION VAN TOUR | VAN LIFE with no experience, a small budget + a retired ambulance

hi i'm rachel and this is nick and behind us is a retired ambulance that we spent all summer converting into our very own off-grid tiny home this retired ambulance is a 2011 chevy 3500 cargo van front end uh it is a six liter v8 gas engine um so essentially the front end is the exact same as any chevy cargo van like a 3500 cargo van um that's a gas engine 6 liter and then they're converted by a private company in british columbia to turn them into ambulances so it does not come from the factory as is and obviously we tore apart the ambulance portion of it and turned that part into our home i should also mention that it is a rear wheel drive um we picked it up from a guy living in vancouver who buys these from auction um so we picked up for six thousand dollars from him i think that's everything that i have to say for now so maybe let's go into the cab and take a look in there so being a 2011 you would think that uh the kilometers would be relatively low but because it's an ambulance and they're driven very hard and daily um they're quite high especially for being a 2011 so we bought it at 337 000 kilometers but they're very well maintained um every 5 000 kilometers they have all their fluids replaced everything's constantly checked so i wouldn't say that having high kilometers really matters that much especially being a chevy engine and that they're so well maintained um i think this thing could take us you know another 500 000 kilometers probably if we wanted it to pretty easily the only thing that i would be worried about is possibly the transmission going um if you've ever seen ambulances driving around they're pretty hard on the transmission um a lot of stop go stop go stop go i know that the brakes were replaced so i know they're in good shape but i would be a little worried about the transmission um it seems to drive fine for now so if that does become a problem then we'll cross that bridge when we come to it [Music] here we have our electric box which has everything that brings power into the ambulance it's a bit of a rat's nest not so much here um this is everything kind of in this area is what came with the ambulance it's um it's super well labeled which made it a lot easier for us to kind of understand what goes where um a lot of the stuff was snipped out so it took a lot of time to kind of like follow wires figure out what was hot what was just completely off where power was being drawn to and from so anyways it was a very intimidating task for us to go through this um everything down on this section uh is what we installed so we have our solar controller here um which obviously our solar panels are up on the roof here all the power is fed down into this and then from there it goes into our batteries and keeps those fed here we have our inverter it's a relatively small inverter it's 600 watts because the electrical box was already set up for us and the battery compartment was already set up for us and we were kind of iffy on what we were doing with the electrical we opted to just go for the same batteries that originally came with the ambulance which were two deep cycle agm batteries the batteries are run in series and together they give us 232 amp hours at 12 volts power something we love about having an ambulance versus a sprinter is that the electrical box is on the outside and it's got the door access so we don't have to worry about finding a spot for our batteries and rewiring all of our electrical we kind of just know where everything goes um yeah so i think that's probably one of the biggest perks to an ambulance over a sprinter anyways i'll lock this door up and we can head to the back [Music] so before we go up top and show you the solar we figured that we would just come to the back of the ambulance and show you our back our garage area because in our build we have no bells or whistles it's just our storage underneath our bed which you'll see later that we have a fixed bed basically all that's under there is our winter stuff we are canadian so we have jackets and sweaters and that kind of stuff in there we have extra water and then like our keepsakes so the two of us have been living overseas for the past few years we don't have a lot of stuff we got rid of our stuff a long time ago and unlike some other camper van builds where people are moving from a large house this is everything we own so that's all under the bed right there but again nothing crazy or fancy so we figured we'd just get it over with anyways let's show the solar so i know this isn't really the most conventional way to get up to the roof of your van but we opted to not have a ladder because we didn't want to give the public access to the roof um to be able to see our solar panels or to be able to see our roof vent um and that's actually the same reason that we kind of left the van looking the way that we did um we wanted it to just look like a work van we didn't want it to look uh we didn't want to give it a paint job and we didn't want it to look you know super shiny or fresh or anything like that because we don't want anybody to have the idea that anybody's living in it we just washed the van so i don't really want to wear shoes up here but like when it's winter time and cold in canada as it gets here and snowy um i i won't really have a problem with wearing shoes up there just right now i uh i don't really want to get it dirty because i washed it for this tour so that's about it for the exterior of the van now we're gonna go inside and show you what we did with it neither of us had any experience doing any sort of build like this at all um nick doesn't come from a carpentry background i knew nothing really about anything so it was definitely a learning experience but we're pretty happy with the inside so we're very excited to show you so this is the entrance to the ambulance um i'm sitting on a step right here that just steps down and then to my right we have some books and then i have my journal which i use every single morning so that was very important to find a spot for that and then to my left we have a shoe rack which we built last minute i don't know why we haven't thought of that at first but it's definitely going to be important when the winter months come to have somewhere to put our wet boots and hang our winter jackets so we put little hooks up here and then i have our laundry basket which hangs right here as well so if i continue walking into the ambulance you will see that i actually have plenty of headroom i can even go on my toes and not touch the ceiling but i'm only five three and nick is six feet so he can't say the same thing um which is obviously a huge downfall of having an ambulance versus you know a high top van or a sprinter this was actually the biggest van that we could find at the time when we were looking for a van to buy so um there are other perks of having an ambulance that we will talk about a little bit later we've already mentioned the electrical and there are some other things too as well but um yeah for me the height is really great so behind me here is a cubby you'll see that like down here we don't have a partition or anything to the cab we just have curtains and up here is four boxes which all have a purpose this one is my socks and undies i won't show them for too long in here we have all of our hats we like to wear hats and twos well i mean in america hats and tooths are the same thing we have no they don't say they say beanies socks and undies in here and then this is like one of those really annoying kitchen drawers that we have that basically has everything in it these are all baby wipes because we love baby wipes but you'll see that we also have um scissors and you know a barbecue lighter and a whole bunch of boring stuff this is a hack that i found online how to fold up plastic bags so that's fun that's what we use for garbage so those go in there and then obviously beside it here you're gonna see that we have our french press which we use every single morning this right here is our air conditioner and then right here is our kitchen covered although it broke like yesterday and i tried to fix it today and didn't work so this is what it looks like now um and in here we just have some just general plates forks knives are in here cups pretty standard nothing glamorous down here we have things that we use all the time for dry storage so we have oatmeal rice this is protein powder coffee nutritional yeast and panko breadcrumbs we have this little hangy thing here which just has coffee in it now but when we have fresh fruit we put that in there as [Music] well [Music] so i'm just going to crouch down here to show you our hanging storage here which is by far the hardest thing to describe our in our entire ambulance build and one of my favorite parts about our ambulance build so this is a very last minute idea and we just call it our temporary storage for a number of reasons number one being that it's obviously temporary like you find these it's just a closet organizer so we can just take it down or put it up whenever we want if we don't want it to be up no big deal and two it's temporary because everything that we put inside of it should be temporary so nothing has a permanent spot in this closet organizer so for example we just did our laundry today and we put our clean towels in here before we put them away um we have our oven mitts in here right now a couple extra face masks but this looks different every single day the idea is that when we're off grid we can use it more so if we do a big grocery shop and get like a bunch of chips or something then we can put them in there um but we do have a rule in our ambulance that we don't put anything on the floor we don't put our clothes on the floor at all um which has actually been going pretty well so far thank you to this thing because say you're too lazy to put your clothes away at night you can just put them in here for the evening and then do it in the morning or whenever you feel like it so this is a godsend we didn't think of it until the very end of our build and we're so happy that we put it in [Music] so right beside our kitchen here is our toilet which is everyone's favorite place to go to the bathroom we have a dometic porta potty it's just a very simple setup here um we have it strapped in so it's not going anywhere it's mostly for emergencies we haven't had to use it yet but i'm sure we will have to in the future and for us it was super important to have some sort of option in here we don't have all the space in the world but we managed to find a little bit of space a little corner for that so it works it works for now [Music] so i guess i will take you guys on a tour through the kitchen um this is my favorite spot in the whole van i get to stand here and make coffee in the morning and you know it's great because i can just like i'm gonna stand here and look at the at the clouds or or the stars um and this is the only place in the van that i can almost stand up completely straight so this is my favorite spot but i'll show you guys the kitchen um so uh this panel here came with the ambulance these three buttons here control the lights we have one bar uh on the driver's side the second bar is on the passenger side and then this one is actually really handy because it controls the light that is just above the kitchen here so uh they'll show you shut these off and we can just turn the one light on which is great so if one of us is still in bed and the other one wants to make breakfast or coffee we can just hit the one light here so yeah it's back on over here we have a temperature display so we can see what the temperature is inside of the ambulance right now it's obviously 26 degrees outside it's a little cooler like i'm a weather weatherman meteorologist um here we have volume control just for in the back so we do have a speaker in the roof um that we can control through this knob uh just plays the radio from the cab 12 volt plug-in here which is super handy and over here we have our solar panel controller not a controller our solar panel display so it just lets us know what percentage our batteries are at how much power is going from our solar panels into the batteries etc so super handy just before we get to the actual kitchen counter and all that um i'll just show you guys back here so i wanted to leave a space to be able to access the electrical if i needed to so i did leave a little panel here so that will allow me to get to all of the electrical because that's where i ran most of it to so that's pretty handy to have that there um yeah and this just pops in and out [Music] so the reason that this bumps out here is because this is the actual electrical box uh we've seen with other ambulance builds people tear it right out you know we do lose like almost a foot of space um coming in and then i think this is i don't know how many feet across but still i stand by what i said i do like the fact that we have our electrical box on the outside so up here we just have a small little bar sink that we installed uh and then just a copper faucet which i actually want to give a massive shout out to matt and danielle uh of exploring alternatives youtube channel i pretty much completely ripped off their plumbing system so thank you guys so much for that we didn't want to go with an electric plumbing system so we went with completely um manual manual i guess uh yeah so we have the copper faucet here which i soldered um and then down here uh we have a little foot pump so all that you do is you press on the foot pump here and it will take water from this line i don't have it hooked up at the moment but this hose just falls into this little can and it will suck the water down into the foot pump push it up through my pex lines and then out the faucet and it comes down into a into a five gallon bucket that i've installed in the back uh super simple system the only thing is it's kind of a pain to um empty when we have to because i have to pull the lid up the abs piping pull the gray water out without spilling it and then take it outside and empty it in a grey water tank which to me isn't a massive price to pay we have to empty it every few days but it's not that big of a price to pay because um because i didn't want to have to go underneath the van and spend a lot of time installing a water tank installing a grey water tank and then you know a water pump and all that kind of stuff so i'm happy with the system that we have for now that may change who knows but uh thank you to matt and danielle of exploring alternatives for the super great idea of this plumbing system [Music] anyways thank you guys so much for that system um from me as well because as soon as we saw your youtube video we were super stoked on that system i liked it actually the most from the beginning we actually originally got a faucet that didn't really work with the system it just kept spraying water everywhere and i really liked the look of the copper faucet so nick just soldered one for ourselves and yes thank you so much we love that system and we're really happy that you brought it to us so anyways back to the kitchen we have our induction cooktop here which draws a lot of power way too much power way more power than we thought it was going to draw so this was actually a really big mistake that we didn't really think about before incorporating into our van build um and when we realize that it draws as much power as it does uh it was a little bit too late so this was all already built based on this one cooktop and that was a huge bummer to find out but luckily we can still use it when we're plugged into shoreline power um so that's all set up for it to be able to work as soon as we ever plug in so that is still there but in addition to that cooktop we also have many other ways to cook thank god so we have another portable gas stove which works on propane and then in addition to this stove we also have a coleman propane folding glow fold and go grill so that's at the back of our ambulance for when we're camping or we want to cook outside this is for the interior of the ambulance when we want to cook inside but we are off grid and then this is in the interior of the ambulance if we want to cook inside and we are plugged into shoreline power so it's a lot of options that came out of making one simple mistake but in the end it actually kind of works because when we're on grid we just kind of cook a lot of food in advance put it in the fridge and then just heat things up when we're off-grid so that's basically how that works okay so that kind of just tucks behind here it's not the most ideal situation but again we didn't plan for it and hey that's what we got so here we have our 12-volt compressor fridge it is a chest style fridge so let's just open it up i actually love that it has a light like a real fridge in it so we basically just keep our fruits veggies sauces that kind of stuff we really like making our own sauces sometimes we'll have like leftover rice or whatever make it once a week and use it for the rest of the week but other than that we don't have a lot of stuff in there right now sometimes it gets really full and sometimes it just looks like that so that's what we're working with right now again that's pulled that's plugged into 12 volt power right now right beside us here is a mirror which you will see it comes off the wall and goes back onto the wall which again isn't rocket science but it's actually something that i really like because this is the spot where i do my makeup but if the lighting isn't very good then i can take the mirror off and move to somewhere else in the ambulance so that i can get the natural light coming in depending on the time of the day and then right below it is a little nook if we take these pillows off and we take this outlet out we can get to our pantry it's really nothing exciting so these are just tupperwares of dry food spices spatulas that kind of stuff so after i put the pillows back on here you can see that we have these lights um and these are clip lights so they don't actually always live in that spot they can live wherever they want in the ambulance really we move them around all the time and then we can just basically adjust them if we don't want to use power it's night time we don't want to wake the other person up and then right beside this little nook as well is more power so this is actually plugged into our inverter so if we uh turn our inverter on all of these outlets work and we can plug in here and then this is my favorite spot to sit in the ambulance because it's like my little nook and in the mornings i do my makeup turn off i do my makeup back here um and when we're hanging out i hang out here all the time i just think it's perfect i love that there's a little countertop here and i don't know i just find it to be a really comfy rachel size seat [Music] inside of this bench is our closet this is literally well not all of our clothes at all most of our clothes are done our summer clothes most of our summer clothes so yeah most of our summer clothes so these are my shirts here um and then my pants and then we have nyx shirts and pants and then we have our our sweaters and i steal nyx sweaters a lot so that means his sweaters are my sweaters whether he likes it how do you feel about that honey that's fine i'm used to it [Music] this grid is very important to us it's very sentimental for us with the pictures that are on it and if you've watched our videos before in the past you would know that this grid was in the background of a lot of our videos but i was actually not going to use it for aesthetics this time i was going to put hooks on it and hang stuff off of it but then i realized i have no idea what to hang so this is purely aesthetic once again one of the important things that we wanted to incorporate in this build was that we could both sit up on the bed um so as you can tell i can sit up perfectly so we built it two feet from the ground which gave us tons of storage space underneath and it gave me just enough room to stretch out and i can stretch my back out and sit up straight another thing that we really love about having an ambulance in particular is that it's so wide that we can fit a regular sized bed in it this is a double bed um it could technically fit a queen like honestly if you want to fit a king probably could but yeah we just have our double bed here and we actually have room at the end so there's actually a fair bit of room at the end here and then of course we have cabinets at the foot of the bed that you can see right here so in here we have belly baskets filled with things that i mean we pretty much need we have our chargers in one deodorant we have a vanity one and then we have little makeup bags like this that organize a lot of our stuff so this isn't a new system for us because when we were living overseas living in cambodia australia wherever we were living traveling through we've been keeping our stuff in these travel these little makeup bags for a while now so as soon as i see the zebra one i already know what's inside and same goes for the other ones as well so this is actually not um much of a new system for us this is actually a way more organized system than what we've been kind of used to and then i think that this is again one of those circumstances where you know we didn't come from having a house we came from um living out of our backpacks so a lot of the stuff in the ambulance has been an actual upgrade for us so there are a few things that we haven't mentioned yet one of them is actually at the foot of our bed right now you may have noticed earlier that we actually don't have tables for our living room area back here actually we have two side tables which i can just pull out this way it is awkward we're not going to pretend that it's not awkward to kind of pull these guys out and then we can just set it up in here you can also set this up standing up but i'm just sitting on the bed right now so why not so that's one of the tables we do have two but we have realized that it actually works just one because obviously the person that's sitting in this side can just put their dinner plate or wine glass or whatever there and then the person sitting over on this side which is obviously always going to be me because i love this spot um i can sit here have my laptop here have my wine glass here or whatever and then eat dinner here or however it works but yeah technically these actually do fit horizontal as well so if we do want to have both tables out we can but as you can see it would be a little bit tight if i had this one and that one as well i think that's about it for our van tour i think so there were a few things that we did miss we do have heat which was one thing that i forgot to mention uh we have a heater underneath rachel's bench uh that runs off of shoreline power and just underneath our bed we have a heater that runs off of the coolant from the engine so that goes in like where the carpet is so it goes out into the van yeah because when you stay under the bed under the bed like it goes into the van it doesn't just blow hot air into our garage um so yeah so that's one thing that we forgot to mention the next thing that we forgot to mention um was our curtains for the back here so it's been three months of me shopping and i am yet to find curtains that i really like for the back so we haven't bought any yet right now we have um insulation what do you call that like reflective insulation reflectix so we have reflectix that'll go around that i've cut for all of the windows so we'll have we'll be able to black out all the windows no one will be able to see in and it'll keep us cool or warm depending on the weather so that's that's our temporary solution for now we actually probably will keep those on our windows even when we do get curtains but that is why the back doors are exposed of the ambulance and if you are wondering like hey i feel like anyone can see into this build that's why and of course we don't have them on the windows right now because that would be very ugly for this tour so yes i think that that's it for now i mean i feel like we missed so many things and we're going to look back and be like oh i wish i said that and wish us that but that's what more future videos are for this was such a crazy summer project thank you to anyone who followed along with us the whole time we posted the whole van build and all of our vlogs on this youtube channel as we always do we love sharing our journey with you guys we love being able to look back on the footage it's really awesome for us to be able to do that which is the whole point of this youtube channel in the first place so yeah thank you so much for following along we are so grateful and we hope that you like our van we know it's not perfect but hey it's ours and we i think that you did an amazing job i think that you did an amazing job and we hope that you think we did an amazing job too it's just a simple budget build um but it's our home and we're really proud of it and really happy with it okay we'll see you in the next video

Channel: Nick & Raychel

Views: 58,197

Keywords: van tour, ambulance tour, ambulance conversion, ambulance to camper van conversion, camper van conversion, rv build, off grid tiny home on wheels, van life, budget van build, budget ambulance build, budget van conversion, van life couple, van life tour, couple lives out of van, living out of a van, living out of an ambulance, alternative living, living the van life, van life with no experience, van life with no money, low budget van build, low budget van conversion

Id: uzq5qSuTaA8

Length: 28min 20sec (1700 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 03 2020