How I Put A Full BATHROOM & SHOWER Inside My Van

what is up guys sevino savage here coming at you with a very exciting project today today we are starting the full bathroom install inside of the van if you are new to the channel we have been converting this sprinter van right here into a full on tiny home we are doing the entire build diy we've installed the floor the cabinets the electrical system the plumbing system all of these lights that you see out here and we are documenting the entire process along the way there is a video on everything that you see in this van on this channel if you do like this video and this type of content slap that subscribe button below we are gonna keep making videos and we're gonna keep trying to make these videos better since this project is so big i'm gonna be splitting it up into multiple parts there will be two parts in total first one we are gonna install the enclosure for the shower we are also gonna be connecting the shower head and making the shower fully functional and in part two we are gonna be covering the toilet so enough with the ramblings let's go ahead and dive right in so to give you guys a little bit of context about what our layout looks like we got basically our entire living space in the front of the van here these two seats swivel around and make a nice little living area we have our shower which is going to go in this section right here and we have our electrical and water utility cabinets in the back underneath where the bed will be eventually so the very first step for this bathroom install we get to remove our massive pile of tools and now we have a clean open space where our bathroom is going to live you can see we've already framed out the location for it with these aluminum extrusions the entire van was actually framed with these 80 20 aluminum extrusions we did that all in one step in the beginning of the build and there is a video about it on the channel so now we're left with a 36 inch long by 24 and a little bit more inches deep space here we are currently standing in what is soon to be our bathroom considering we are in a van literally something that's supposed to carry cargo around i'm pretty satisfied with how big we were able to make this bathroom space i could kind of move around a little bit so as far as actually making the enclosure for a bathroom in a van there are a few different ways to go about it most people will just make the walls of the shower out of something like frp board which is a form of plastic making it a great material for a shower and then they'll over the edges with either a silicone or a polyurethane i was very close to doing that option myself but the truth is we are a little bit pressed on time right now i'm already not making these videos fast enough for you guys i would like to do these much more often and i still have to fund this entire build with a day job so i took a route that's a little bit less time intensive for the trade-off of it being ridiculously expensive kind of seems to be the theme in this van so what we are going to do is a pre-fabricated shower enclosure made by a company called van wife customs this is a super lightweight aluminum powder coated shower enclosure so it's completely waterproof by the way you might be able to tell that taking over my parents barn is getting more and more clustered here i don't want to give too much information away but we are making some moves in the near future and i have some very exciting news to share with you guys in a few weeks anyways let's go ahead and open this puppy up first impression is that if i was a kid and i saw this box you already know we'd be building the taj mahal of box forts so inside the box here we have our shower pan and then we have a bunch of pre-cut powder coated white aluminum panels and as far as i can tell this is 100 of the hardware and instructions that we're going to need so based on the instructions it's pretty darn simple you basically just put the walls up against each other and then you use the rivets here to attach each wall to the next one but based on the last 50 or so projects i've done it feels pretty simple right about now and starts to get more and more complex the deeper that we dive all right so we are putting the panels in place just to kind of get a feel for what they're going to look like pro tip you need to build the shower exactly where it's going to actually live in the van you're not going to be able to move this thing around inside of the van once it's built so if you build it outside and then try and bring it in here not gonna work first impressions of these components when i'm pulling them out of the box i know i was giving them a bit of a hard time on price because the shower is frankly insanely expensive but they're really nice not only are they like insanely lightweight sheets of aluminum which is awesome because i'm trying to keep weight down been eating a little bit too much during the old covid also the powder coating on these panels is flawless it looks really really good first preview of the shower door here you can see it only takes up a portion of the overall 36 inches so that you don't have to have some massive hallway for this thing to swing out build quality on this is also pretty insane and it is super lightweight for how robust it is so for the next step of the shower install what we need to do is drill holes into the bottom of the shower pan and all the way through the bottom of the floor of the van we need two of them in total one of them for the water drain and one of them for the exhaust vent hose from the toilet as for these holes all i did was use a regular drill bit to drill a test hole to make sure that we were in the right location and once i did that i came in with the two inch hole saw bit with the hole saw bit i drill 90 of the way up through the bottom and then i come in from the top for the last 10 to get a nice clean cut on both sides my favorite reward the whole sauce sandwich all right that joke's getting old then all i do is rust protect it by spraying it with rust-oleum black spray paint all righty so we dropped the shower pan into the shower there and marked the holes from the bottom so that we have the two exact locations that we need to drill out so i'm at jeremy's new shop now which also happens to be a classic car place not sure if you guys remember jeremy from the floor video he is the savior of the florina van we are getting the shower pan welded right over there all right first look at the stainless drains here all right so this is what jeremy uses for his shower pans he has the same van wife shower and the vans that he builds and this is kind of like a little short version of a drain you can get from home depot and then where'd you get this p-trap e-trailer i believe okay um yeah and it's just basically you can use it on a sink or on a shower uh to reduce the amount of space that a p-trap would normally take up which they can be quite big and there's not room for them so this is like the shortest combination of drain plus p-trap we could find and what you do with this one is you would just drill a big hole in the floor of the van like i don't know a three four inch hole so this whole unit could sit flush with the bottom of the shower pan and then you just tighten it from the bottom so as you guys saw before i have the two drains mounted directly to the shower pan they are waterproof welded to the top here i can basically guarantee with this that there's going to be no water seeping in between the floor of the van and the metal frame we got the pan in that was pretty simple thankfully our drain holes lined up perfectly because that would have been a problem from the top it might appear that these holes are in very awkward locations and that is because there is a ton of stuff underneath these vans like support structures that you have to avoid in order to drill holes so i know a lot of you guys are going to ask about a fan in the shower slash roast me for not having a fan in the shower i was originally going to put one of the max fan dome plus fans in here i actually bought one it's sitting in my barn right now but the challenge is on the roof i need to put solar panels i wouldn't be able to put a solar panel directly above that fan if i do put a fan in the shower i'm basically reducing the total amount of solar panels that i can have on the roof by 25 which is a little bit too much for me especially considering that this shower door has a vent built into it at the top as you guys saw which will organically allow for some airflow also it's really not that big of a deal if i decide i do need to install one of those fans at some point because i'm not using that fan slash light built into the roof i am going to be installing one of the puck lights that i'm putting on the rest of the ceiling in the center of the bathroom here so that you can see what you're doing when you're in there pretty simple i'm just going to drill a hole in the roof with a hole saw and then connect it to the same circuit as these lights right here so we got a hole it was a little bit messy the light turned out great our next step is very exciting we are going to be riveting the shower walls together so the rivets that are included in the shower are these black ones here they seem to have a black and white theme going on with the whole shower and that is not the aesthetic that i'm going for in my van build so first step was to order rivets that were not black we got white ones these should blend in with the shower much better i'll put a link to these bad boys in the description below so what we're doing right now is starting out with two scrap pieces of aluminum and we are riveting them together to kind of get the feel for what these rivets feel like let's go ahead and do a second one thing you need if you want to install rivet is a hole so we're gonna drill ourselves a hole as far as rivet tools go you can get them at your local hardware store and all we need to do is put our rivet into the hole that was one full compression two full compressions one more so you just heard that really loud sound and you can see there's no more steel shaft sticking through this rivet here if we take this piece out of the vise now you'll be able to see that the rivet is compressed on the back and these two pieces of metal are very well stuck together that's all it takes to use a rivet and a rivet gun midway through this project i'm actually switching to a different riveter here and you guys know me i'm always going a little bit overboard on things i am going to use a little bit of this 3m 4200 on the inside of the flanges of the rivets the part that touches up against the wall also in the center of the rivets i'm using a small dab that is going to prevent water from getting inside the rivets themselves all right so for the next step we are going to install the actual shower portion of this bathroom the shower in this bathroom is going to have three different components one of them is the actual shower head it's gonna be a simple removable shower head that came with this mount i'll put a link to it in the description below second component is going to be the mixed water output that is going to be the thing that connects to this hose in order to provide us water for our shower and then the third component which is very important is our shower mixer here this is what actually does the mixing of the hot and cold water so that you can get that perfect temp first thing we got to do to install these is drill some holes in the back of our shower here and get them mounted the only thing here that i had to get a little bit creative about was this uh water outlet thingy this just has a female pipe thread on the back typically you would mount like a brass firm connection and then screw this thing onto it in my case i don't have something to mount the back of this tube so what i am doing is i have a brass female to female elbow i have a little tiny short stainless steel nipple in there you can see it with the tape around it and then i cut a piece of this black delrin plastic as a spacer and what i'm going to do is screw it into the back and basically clamp this thing to the aluminum it's going to end up looking something like this where that blue tape that you see is the wall of the shower so we have all three components mounted here two screws for the holder for the faucet we have the mixer and then we have the output into the shower head this right here is what they look like on the inside i did it like this because the mixer is kind of out of the way of the head so you can mount the head and turn the water off when you need to do your military style showers to conserve water i do know it's very strange that i have a chrome mixer and then a kind of satin shower head they don't sell this in satin leave a comment below if this is something that irked you before i started mentioning it so the next step is making this shower actually waterproof what that means is we are going to seal all of the edges anywhere there's a seam in the entire shower with but i actually recommend just using silicone caulk but i haven't had the best luck using silicone for things like this in the past especially when it's something as important as a shower so i'm going to be using the same stuff that i used to seal all of the rivets in here this 3m 5200 it is like a permanent polyurethane adhesive the little test section here basically this stuff is still soft you can poke it pretty easily with your fingernail not as soft as silicone though uh soft enough to be flexible which is the only important part and it adheres insanely insanely well like these little tidbits down here if they were silicone it'd be pretty easy to just kind of scratch them off with your fingernail but this stuff is pretty durable this stuff actually isn't available in california at the moment which means you know that it's good and not that i'm advising about doing anything illegal i would never advise you to go to the link in the description below to order this stuff if you live in california alrighty so we got all of the caulking done and it came out somewhere between mediocre and atrocious there were definitely some tough areas to caulk like in this corner up here and i spread it a little bit too wide in some of the sections couple things i learned on this is that tape does not stick to powder coat very well so i couldn't use the tape method to ensure that i had nice straight lines on the edge of the lines i ended up just keeping it really simple and putting a bead of caulk in and then spreading it with my finger the good news though is that it does serve its purpose and this is now completely watertight in here so the next step for these fixtures is actually making them work which should be pretty darn simple considering we already have our hot and cold lines ready to go so we got all of our connections here we have the cold and hot coming from the system which go into the cold and hot inputs of our mixer then the output of our mixer our nice warm water into the spigot or shower head and if you guys couldn't tell we use opener fittings there is an entire video that's like 40 minutes long that i just uploaded on the entire details of our whole water system if you're more interested in how this piping works but it is super modern and i absolutely love it so we've just gone from opener to pipe which is the back side of the mixer here and then we've gone from pipe to opener back to pipe because you actually need to be able to twist this thing when you're installing it right like it twists on both sides and it actually took me so long to figure something out in my last van that was able to twist in the middle but still be able to seal on both sides thankfully this opener pex can rotate freely and still maintain its water pressure so that made this simple as butter smooth is better so moment of truth now let's go ahead and turn the water pump on and see if any of our new plumbing leaks water pump ease of pumping oh should probably allow some water into it our pump stopped which means we have a fully pressurized system not seeing any leaks on any of our new fittings here which is pretty darn cool so now we have our shower head let's try and turn it on and see what happens there we go we got water so uh i can't say that it's amazing pressure in fact it's a little bit dissatisfying that's for two reasons this is a california illegal showerhead yes believe it or not california regulates those as well so it only allows 1.5 gallons a minute to flow let's see what it looks like from here it does reach the other side pretty easily super excited though i mean we literally have a shower inside of our van right now something is so surreal to me about putting a shower in a vehicle so instead of all the water draining directly onto the ground what we want to do is connect our stainless steel pipe that's welded onto the shower pan all the way back to our gray water tank that's actually a spare tire gray water tank over there so that we can capture the water and then drain it when it is appropriate all right so we finished the gray drain for the shower we did something a little bit strange it comes at the bottom there it goes straight into a bend which gets routed kind of towards the center of the van here the sink drain comes up and over the top and drains into the top of the gray water tank and i don't think that would have been enough uh flow for the water to actually drain from the shower so i have the shower one coming down it's this bottom one here and it comes into the bottom of the grade tank now if you want more details on this gray tank and how i hooked up the whole gray water system you can find that in the water video also i got about a hundred comments on my gray drain that do not have pea traps in a van you have natural dips and rises in your gray system that act as a p-trap it's also not that big of a deal to add a p-trap later so i'm gonna use this system how it is and if it does start to smell i'll let you guys know and i'll add a p-trap but for now similar to how it was in my last van vangelina jolie i had no issues and i'd rather have that additional pressure of not having the p-trap so that things drain faster all right so we got the drain hooked up let's go ahead and see if it actually works all right what we're checking for here is just making sure that after we get enough water in there that it doesn't fill and it keeps draining all right so we just pumped a bunch of water in there definitely enough to make sure that it works the drain does indeed drain faster than it fills you can see here that if you do have a flat shower pan in your van and you take a shower it's gonna collect water and look exactly like this there's about an eighth inch of water or a quarter inch of water you can put a kind of traction pad or something in the shower so that you are not standing directly on it and you're standing a little bit above it it's probably what i'll do but you do want to make sure that all this water gets dried up eventually because it will just sit there and mold over time all right so the very last step that we have to do for this shower enclosure is mount it to our 80 20 frames so that it is super sturdy and in place and will not move a single millimeter when we start off riding this thing got our first hall drilled here no problem at all we finished all four mounting points we have two in the top bang bang and then two in the bottom corners all the way down there you can see right now that i have the massive fender washers on here the hardware store ran out of the regular size one so i got to order some of those for now we're stuck with the ugly big ones reason i did these ones right here a couple inches from the top towards the center i'm going to be able to hang a clothing rod across there and actually bolt it to the walls if i ever want to kind of repurpose the shower to hang clothes or maybe dry out snowboarding clothes or something like that as for how we actually mounted these things we just attached little chunks of 80 20 secured them to our strong 80 20 frame and then put a t-nut on the opposite side of this little bar and the bolt goes directly into it nice part about that is i don't have to be able to access both sides of this in order to remove those bolts did the same thing on the bottom section here just cut off a little piece of 80 20 and bolted it to the frame and now we have four secure mounting points this shower is not going anywhere and believe it or not guys that is actually the final step for completing our shower here the entire enclosure is good to go it is 100 sealed functional sturdy and the shower actually works we are going to install the toilet in the next video so if you're interested in seeing that slap the subscribe button below overall i am super happy with how this shower turned out i really like how they designed the shower as far as aesthetics by the way i am 6'5 and this is what it looks like while i'm standing in the shower here i obviously can't stand up fully in here but it's pretty darn close so thank you for watching the entire video if you made it this far i hope you enjoyed it if you did slap that like button below it helps push this video out to more people in the youtube algorithm thank you all so much for watching and i will see you guys next time [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Seven O Savage

Views: 113,162

Rating: 4.9239364 out of 5

Keywords: sprinter, sprinter van, sprinter van conversion, diy van conversion, vanlife, vandwelling, seven o savage van, 70savage van, van shower, van bathroom, van toilet, van water

Id: UC_raCFw98s

Length: 21min 10sec (1270 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 13 2021