Her Camper Van Has An Ingenious Murphy Bed Design - Trading Rent For Life On The Road

I think that first step of like just starting to get rid of your stuff is a huge way to propel yourself into a smaller lifestyle whatever it is I love planning I love if I'm gonna plan a vacation I buy guide books and I read blogs and I'll read the guide book cover to cover and highlight but then I stop I don't outside of booking hotels like I don't plan activities I don't go on tours I like to arm myself with research and then go with the flow van life especially I did a ton of research I really armed myself with as much knowledge as I possibly could have and then I just went for it and you kind of just figure it out as you go with whatever that little bit of background knowledge is hi my name is Lauren this is penny and this is our home the pennybaker so I've been living in DC for about seven years and really wanted to be a homeowner so I was looking into what it would cost to buy a home in DC proper and a bad house in a bad neighborhood starts at about half a million dollars so I said okay you know I'm just gonna work for a long time and keep throwing money at rent you know literally throwing money out the window and I discovered then he was new to me all of a sudden that people lived in bands and that you didn't just have to have a sedentary tiny house or sedentary house and as soon as I figured that out I knew I needed to live in a van and it was done so I bought my first home so um I did end up going with a professional builder and I just really lucked out and there was an article from curbed on a builder on the East Coast called off great adventure vans Ogier vans and their whole thing is to build affordable vans that are eco-friendly and they're a licensed up fitter with the Dodge dealership so you can actually have the build and a new van in the same car payment so that really completely changed what I was able to put in here I would never have had this would not be my van if I had to pay for it out of pocket so I traded my rent payment for a short car payment and it's it is still less than half of what I was paying for rent in DC this design is is pretty custom I figured it out with air who's the owner of the company so what they do the Murphy bed is their design and I really loved that when I went to meet with him we sat and had a conversation in one of their vans it was like oh this is great because it's sort of the best of both worlds of having this seating area but you don't have to store this giant pack of bedding and make your bed every day so I loved that so the majority of my clothing are in these two uppers and I am hyper organized I am totally OCD and I've been traveling internationally for a long time so I love these packing cubes so I have everything color-coded and labeled up here and in these packing cubes and I really think minimal wardrobe is pretty easy I mean I have I have this dress in the van I have a lot of like sort of impractical things that I like to look you know it this is going in here it works so much better like these jeans are so like hyper organized in here in their tiny little I have like six pairs of jeans in this one cube then this one is a kind of as double duty so this half of it is my bathroom and then this side is this is all Tupperware and then oil down here I did bring a curling iron in the van but I've not the one time I used it was when I was staying in a hotel with my mom so it's just there but I can use it if I want the last one here this is all of my food storage it's a little hard to open we've got two really really strong sets of magnets so this here is my bathroom and this is the biggest piece of a custom design working here there's a couple of bands that have a semi similar thing and I really wanted one for this to double as extra countertop space so I don't I don't cut on the service but it is butcher block and it's generally where I prep so I'm I can pivot here and sort of my galley kitchen but what this is because this actually clips up here on the wall and then it opens and I have a nature's head composting toilet and a lot of bathroom storage like my laundry soap is in here this little plastic Tower with all of my toiletries and it's great to have this extra this extra space and to have a bathroom in the van I was pretty pretty adamant about not needing to find a toilet and multiple times today I'm very well hydrated so it's it's really great to have your own and the nature side is definitely the way to go there they're expensive for a reason it's because they're a really really good product I'd shower mostly at Planet Fitness I think that's where most of us and get our showers I also treat myself to a state park campground about once a month and try to do all of the things use the shower refill my water if they have electricity I'll plug in to shore power and charge everything and you know like just leave the lights on and pretend like it's just a an infinite resource but after shower is really nice to have I actually love it the most for the dog if you have like muddy feet from a trail if she's really grow it's like you can hose off gear it ends up being like an external hose more than it is a shower for me to use so this is my kitchen I love cooking I cook a lot and most of this design is from the builders I did change the sink and the stove they do the genetic smaller all-in-one so this suburban um cooktop I hadn't put a ton of thought into the cooktop I knew I wanted to burners and I wanted there to be some space so you could have like a cast-iron skillet on here and then something else this is a pretty standard choice and vans people either I think kind of go with this or the Dometic I did go back and forth about having it on this direction or turning it the other way and I'm not quite sure why why it shows this direction but it works fine it seems natural to me I have a really beautiful you know sight line everything is here and then I do have extra cutting space so I end up cooking like this mostly this is the piece I used to cut on and I keep the rest of the butcher block and I really wanted to have a deep sink so this is made by roux body and they're just from you can order it on Amazon stainless steel comes with a little cutting board and this strainer basket which is nice and then the sink is really deep I can actually put something in here and do dishes I hate dishes I hated them in a house I still hate them in a van and I wanted to try to make it a slightly more pleasant experience so having the space to actually like put a pot in there it's pretty life-changing I also wanted to have sort of a pretty faucet lucky I was visiting my parents while they were remodeling their bathroom and I went with them to the bathroom fixture store and happened to find this one on sale so it's really great it pulls out which is nice I could theoretically I think wash my hair in here I haven't tried but I pretty sure I could get my head in there and use this as a shower spigot I have a five gallon gray water tank under the sink and that's actually just a jug just one of these guys and I try to empty this pretty frequently before it gets full because you do have to pull it out at an angle since the the hose is coming down from the sink and if it's really full it's a little bit of a precarious situation and for those of you know what great water smells like you don't want it on the floor dish water is gross even if you don't have any food particles in it it's really like the worst smelling thing in the van so emptying that all the time is it big it's a big fun way to go so I have a genetic fridge freezer combo it is a little messy right now but you can fit a lot of things in here I think my biggest con with this is that since the freezer the freezer basically stays cold from running the whole back panel cold so if you shove something in the fridge part back against the back wall that will freeze so basically the whole back of it runs really really cold so this is a drawer and this is also in a soft clothes and sister extra dish towels and all my utensils wine opener very important so I do have this is an extra set of switches and like I said before there's extra wire so these would be switches for other things I have a victor on energy bluetooth readout here so this is great I can access all of my systems here but I also can it's synced to my phone so I can check to see what my batteries level our battery levels are and how much energy I'm drawing at any time on my phone which is really really nice moving on to that I have two different sets of switches and they're both on dimmers so this one does this light bar under here which is really nice and then this back set of LED lights and then the front one does the front set and again the dimmers are so nice actually at night I don't really close my curtains all that often so having this all the way dimmed down makes it less bright in here so this piece is one of the things that the Builder does standard and I first I was unsure if I wanted this wall here but I actually love it I have all of a lot of things against this wall I took the outdoor a rug I have jackets on here the remote for this fan and you really don't need this sight line that's not how you drive a van you don't look behind your shoulder but in here this is all of my dishes and between these two so this is like pots and pans the omnia Sweden stovetop oven which is great highly recommend those if you live tiny and then all the dishes up here fire extinguisher for safety the middle section normally this is a microwave from the Builder I have no need for a microwave I didn't really use a microwave that much anyways the food that goes in the microwave is garbage so you shouldn't eat it I do have a mini little toaster oven which has a big surge when you turn it on so it trips the breaker so I just use it when I'm plugged in so that's really nice you like some meal prep when I stayed at campground I'll make little egg cups or things that I can freeze later and then the last part here this side storage is where the table tucks in so the table goes into the middle and the legs are in there the table I also shove a bunch of other things in here so coffee grinder and Afghans that kind of stuff I have a 27 gallon freshwater tank that is over here so this just comes out and that is filled on the other on the outside of the van with a hose I absolutely love these bench seats and they're very comfortable you can sit seat a lot of people this piece here also you can drop down by itself so you can make extra bench in the back if you want to have a lot of people sitting here and then these bench seats I thought the bench the bench storage I thought that it was gonna be really hard to get things in here and it's just you can put an obscene amount of stuff inside of them so I pull these off and these are put on with really heavy duty velcro and there's just all sorts of stuff in here yeah so this for me I have a lot of games I have tons of cookbooks I do a lot of embroidery so there's embroidery stuff in here pretty much everything in these is like fun activity things camp chairs that sort of stuff then the other side this back one is actually a pullout drawer which is really nice so this pulls out fully and then you can also access it from the top and it has a soft clothes on it it is actually mostly dog things so this is dog food extra pair of boots when it's cold dog food in the boots and it is also my liquor cabinet so tiny tiny tiny things tiny bottles but mostly the dog things I have a fan in here I send a lot of time in Florida and before I was six so definitely a Floridian so the fan when I'm in Florida and it's 80 degrees um you know it's a metal box at the end of the day regardless of how well insulated it is so if it's 90 outside you know extra fan it's nice to sleep so in this one I have some other clothing that isn't up on my uppers hiking backpacks in here I have an air compressor toe straps the tire Jack's of all the car things this is a backpacking tent just really you can get so much stuff my my dog's onesie because you have to have a onesie for your dog re at camp table so lots and lots of goodies in there as well this side is actually there's a little bit of storage and then it's where my batteries are so so there's this tray in here it's just really nice this is where most of my shoes are some incense and then this tray actually lifts up and the batteries are underneath it and then this is access to a lot of my electrical and the nice thing about having a build around it so I have all these extra wires that I can add stuff onto later so all the wiring is run through and there's more wires in the wall then I actually have things attached to I have 100 amp hours of lithium-ion batteries from battleborn I really wanted a pretty robust system I work full-time so I need to have the ability to charge all my things and I just didn't want to be in a scenario where I needed to go to a campsite and find a way to have short power or to move around more than I needed to so I have 300 watts of solar and the 400 amp hours in the battery bank and I can honestly I can be off-grid for a really really really long time usually around 9:00 a.m. I'm not a hundred percent charge so I have to max their fans one in the front and one in the back and then there are windows diagonally on each side so when you have this pulling up and the windows open it sucks all the air up and around and really keeps it pretty cool pretty cold so I absolutely love them our feet bed this bed is fully made there are sheets quilts to blankets to pillows and a dog bed in here currently so this is when you now you are actually holding the weight of the bed so you have to take a second but pretty easy it just all comes down one piece shove the mattress over and then straighten pillows back out yeah and the bed is fully made and ready to sleep this is a 6 inch memory foam really really comfortable I had a really nice mattress at home but I still think this is this is up there it's not quite as good but it's really nice so because I work I try to put it up every day I do end up working I usually have this back here and a pillow here and that's my my work nook I lean up against there and put my coffee here but I really try to put on real clothing and make the bed I think that that's just really important to stay in that like productive headspace I have what I call bed days like if the weather is really rainy the bed stays down all day and everything is on the bed and you know that's when you're like streaming a lot of Netflix or doing non-productive things but I don't do them very often especially when it's nice outside I have two separate part-time remote positions and so one my family publishes on tourism magazines in South Florida called musty visitor guides so magazine in Sarasota Naples and Fort Myers so I've been the assisted editor of their company for 11 years and I also run their social media and I run an exchange program for the State Department so I'm actually when I leave here we'll be driving up to Minnesota to leave the van and my dog penny to fly it and then I'm flying out to Ethiopia for three and a half weeks to run the exchange program that I manage so I love this awning and this is the Fiamma I think it's 3,500 or 350 something like that and it's a manual hand crank so I can show you it's actually attached right now so this piece clips in across the two bent sheets inside but it's just a little hole hook so you hook the end and you turn this to turn into a handle and then you just crank it either way so really really easy it is a little bit of work with one person the legs store up in the top part so basically what you do is you pull it out half way and then you pop a leg out and put it on the ground and adjust it and then you have to move it so if you had a second person you can move it together it takes like five extra seconds to have to do it but this awning is amazing you can leave it up in in light rain obviously want to let it dry out before you roll it back up provide so much shade it's obviously great for gatherings I have this whole activity space with another van right now so we were able to pull this out this isn't even all the way out it goes out a little bit longer these things are huge and they're really tall obviously right now this is up above another Vans sliding door but you can also angle it down to be shorter it's very adjustable the shower it's nice this actually can sit up here right here so you can stand here and shower of hot and cold water and then you can also pull this off and you adjust the how much water is coming out here it's not the fanciest of showerheads but it absolutely it absolutely works pretty well and the hoses base pretty long so it's easy to do the dog being really realistic with yourself about wants and needs and what those lines are and if they're if you are a person who needs to shower every day just because a lot of van lifers and tiny houses have showers in them does it look you should put a shower in your van that's one of those things that's gonna keep you on the road because you're gonna be comfortable it's it's the things that break people are always these little things that they they misjudge you know they thought oh I can kind of I can do this like dirtbag lifestyle thing I don't care about having a toilet and then they realize you know in the middle of the night when it's freezing and it's pitch by and you can hear coyotes that they don't want to go outside and pee in the wilderness like you have to be realistic with yourself figuring that out it makes it easier to take that leap thank you so much for watching you can follow our journey and our travels at on instagram at flit float fly away and we also have a blog shouldn't say we she does not blog but she's heavily featured and all of all of my online things the website is flit float flyaway calm thank you

Channel: Tiny Home Tours

Views: 822,444

Rating: 4.8886337 out of 5

Keywords: tiny house, tiny house on wheels, living big in a tiny house, tiny house england, tiny house uk, tiny house movement, tiny home, small house, small spaces, small house design, alternative living, architecture, affordable home, off the grid, small space living, tiny house life, tiny home uk, diy tiny house, diy home, van life, small house plans, architecture 101, diy home decor, affordable homes, alternative living ideas, tiny home tour, van conversion, stealth van

Id: LvDBlCndLc8

Length: 18min 40sec (1120 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 03 2020