Budget Van Conversion Finished Tour | Ford Econoline $3000

[Music] okay so this is gonna be the final van tour of our three thousand dollar 2004 ford econo line so come on in and i'll show you all the little things that we missed in the last video i think it's been about a little over a half a year since we did our van conversion here and we've been doing a couple trips out of it and it's been great so far so i'm just going to kind of go through and show you some of the details and things we like some things that maybe we wish we would have done better and you can just see how we did it hopefully it'll help you out as you decide how to build your picana line van so one thing obviously i can't stand up i'm about six foot two and of course it would be nice to stand up but it just wasn't worth the money right now to do that for us start out here in the kitchen this little stool off amazon i think it was like 20 and it's a great little stool for camp as well but it's also a great stool you can sit here we've got our sink and here's the faucet you just open this up and we've got a foot pump and once the pump gets going then you get your water and your sink this is just a little rv sink and this is just a piece of wood kind of a project panel you can get at home depot and then we use some leftover water locks that we use for our kitchen counters inside but you could use any kind of wood finish and this is just two by three uh sanded down with some water locks on it in the back and then here we've got a little towel inside here we've got a coleman stove and then this is our fresh water supply that's just strapped onto the side of the cabinet here so we can take it out for some other camping needs and that goes into the foot pump and then that comes back up behind the sink into the copper faucet here that we just braised together and then the drain just goes into this five gallon bucket you've seen some other videos online that show you the similar setup it's a really easy setup really simple not a lot of moving parts and of course it's also very uh budget friendly some other things we've got in here a little dustpan um some cups and then what we use most often just to make coffee is just a jetboil so this is the jetboil setup and all that does is boil hot water for coffee or dehydrated food things like that and then the coleman we'd actually use that outside the van for cooking just to keep it clean we don't really cook inside the van get either we bought these uh uh i think they're rv cabinet latches you can get them on amazon they're probably i don't know eight dollars for five of them or something like that um they work great and they just keep the cabinets closed while you're on the road really easy install this is a little place for the sponge so it's kind of fun just making all these little tiny things as you go along and just adding things to make your life more convenient once you start camping and figuring it out moving up from our kitchen sink here there's the little small cabinet up here and i ended up originally i wasn't gonna put on these little uh hydraulic lifts but uh they were actually again pretty cheap on amazon so i installed uh one of those on each one and you can see back there there's the electrical cabling so it's all hidden behind the cabinets and then over here i just hit it behind a piece of driftwood that's screwed in up there [Music] this cabinet up here would be great for food storage i've used it to store a fishing pole just more storage and then over here we've got a our kind of clothes storage so this side is ashley's right now it's just toiletries in there we're not going on a trip some extra clothes up there and over here same thing on this side so those are my clothes plenty of storage for you know a few days of clothes in there or more than that depending on how many times you need to do laundry okay here's our last little cabinet unit and this is actually the first one i made um so in my last video you can kind of see how you got to contour everything in the van and it's kind of a challenge to do that it's kind of fun um but i'll open this one up and you can see what's inside here so this one is for food storage this one's for all our dishes we've all got the rv latches and down here in the bottom is the inverter so this is the inverter that converts dc to ac and if you want to see more about all the electrical stuff you can watch my electrical video it's a relatively simple electrical system altogether it probably costs about eight or nine hundred dollars most of it being the battery but it's plenty enough to charge all kinds of things including a little vacuum cleaner a little speaker all kinds of just little electronics there's some cards down there too it's more storage and then underneath here of course we've got plenty of storage dirty laundry bag this is uh how i go to the bathroom this is my pee bottle one of the best things about six foot two and it's plenty of space for me so i can actually i can lay straight like this there's almost enough space but i can get stretched out this way and if the two of us are in here it's a little bit tighter but it still works just fine so for the bed we bought a mattress topper on amazon i think it was about five or six inches thick and then it's got kind of a waterproof bag that we modified a little bit of course we had to cut the mattress a little bit in order for it to fit exactly on this bed because this bed is not a common or regular normal size so here's another thing i forgot to show in the last video is how the bed is actually attached to the floor it's basically just held in with a bunch of these brackets um tucked in here it's obviously not you know the most sturdy attachment point ever for the bed but i think it would take quite a bit for a pretty big accident to rip that out of the floor see we got our fan up here we got our lights these are just uh led lights and the lights are on this light switch right here so it's a dimmer switch see a lot of people put this dimmer switch in we love the dimmer switch it's nice to have a dimmer switch because when you're in a parking lot or somewhere you don't really want people to know you're in the van you can turn the lights down really low or you can have them really bright when you're actually camping we obviously wanted some privacy curtains for curtains we ended up using kind of a poster board inside of a reflectix on one side there's actually a little piece of wood right there kind of a batten to keep it stiff and then on this side just some leftover fabric from a different project and then ashley sewed on a uh kind of an edging here around the edges and then they just hold up here with velcro and that's a great little privacy curtain in the back so really easy to come off and super easy to put back on [Music] we used some of that same fabric just to make a really simple curtain and it's basically just a piece of string uh with some self-drilling screws holding the string in on the side there the paneling on this door was a little bit trickier to get it to contour because you actually have to get it to kind of suck in right there for it to open properly so there's some a lot of screws over here that i use to try to get it to suck in and contour to that shape um so another little thing that i didn't explain in the last video is how to do this edging so this uh door threshold has to come off obviously and then right now it's just sitting on top of the layer of poly isofoam and plywood underneath that so you basically just have to use polyiso board and another piece of plywood underneath to bring it up level so it does make the step into the van you know about an inch higher to get into the van all right so back here we've got some storage right here this is a concrete mixing bin from home depot and it's just a great place for wet gear because we've always got wet river gear neoprene stuff that we need to throw somewhere so all that wet here can just get tossed into there and then over on this side there's just more space for gear storage and more gear and then of course we've got a uh hold up camp table and a couple camp chairs for hanging out outside when it's nice all the uh the battery and all the electrical setup is over there and if you watch the other video you can see how there's a hinged door for it there over on this side is where the jack and all the tools and just some extra tools shovel things like that are and again you can access that with a folding door right there if you move the mattress up a little bit here's another little detail that when i put it in that we weren't really sure that it was going to matter but having a backup camera on a vehicle this big has been super helpful and the backup camera actually came with this uh radio from amazon for 70 bucks so we can do apple carplay and we've got a backup camera and all that for 70 dollars some water bottle holders here this is just made out of some driftwood and uh you just cut all the sides and put some shellac on it and you got a place to hold your water bottle so they're not rolling around on the ground another really nice item that we got that's worked out really well is this a water jug which we just store over on the side of the spare seat and it's great because it's a three gallons of water so plenty of drinking water and you can just pull it out really easily and it's accessible i don't really like drinking the water out of the tubes that come into the sink kind of makes the water taste a little bit funny so this has been a really nice way to have some extra drinking water so hopefully this gives you some ideas on how to do a really budget low-cost van conversion again the conversion with everything including all the stuff we did to the cab was three thousand dollars and the van itself is about three thousand dollars and we've been using it now for a little over half a year and it's worked great for us you know someday we might upgrade to a nice big tall sprinter van or something but this is great for in the meantime you

Channel: Find Out

Views: 510,162

Keywords: E350, e150, e250, ford transit, cheap, economy, economical, #vanlife, vanlife

Id: QJGxBQ5r3lY

Length: 12min 2sec (722 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 14 2021