How to Build a Camper Van Step by Step

welcome to the channel today on the van cooks channel we're going to show you how we took this ugly cargo van and turned it into this luxury apartment on wheels we fill multiple van conversions in the past out of my dad's garage and this time we really wanted to step it up and take the opportunity to work with ethan no dough at n studios in Auburn California and we wanted to design and build a van that has a much more open space and is more livable I mean as you can see we're on this large couch we got plenty of counter space in here we lived in multiple vans so this one we've designed like perfectly very comfortable in some of our past builds they've just been like a bed and then you know raised beds not that much seating space so we wanted a gear hauler yeah it was more of an adventure rig we wanted to make this more of like a home so we thought being here at even shop we would be able to do this project and about a month a month and a half but that didn't really work out if you've done a van conversion you know that the timeline is gonna always be stretched out it seems like the project really never ended but it took us a lot longer because we did run into some problems with the van that we had to solve and then we had to take it to a few mechanics to get it a hundred percent and once the van was ready to go mechanically we could start on the bill but that did set us back a bit so when you're looking at vans make sure to do the due diligence because you don't want your project to be stalled at all because you're working on mechanical issues we have tons of information available on our website if you're trying to do a van conversion I highly recommend you check it out it's van Kooks calm we're gonna show you how to take your cargo van step-by-step into a home [Music] the first step in starting your van life is have a van or a vehicle that you can build out in choosing what vehicle you'll be living in there's a lot of things to take into account like what's your budget how tall are you do you need do you need to be able to stand up in your vehicle are you gonna be part-time or full-time do you need to bring bikes surfboards do you need to be diesel gas so this is the point where you research a lot and try and find the perfect vehicle for you within your budget within your restraints that you decide that you need for to make everyday life comfortable so we went with the t1 in Sprinter when we saw that it was within our price range and with very low miles for a diesel vehicle there 5-cylinder they're very good on gas they're reliable they're versatile they'll fit in one parking spot the short ones will this one was a dually so it's really a lot of the taller vehicles kind of rock side to side this one is really stable you can hug the corners besides the fact that it's a little too short for Kevin to stand up fully in he's like this it fit all of our criteria so we jumped on this t1 in Sprinter and we're gonna start building it out so once you've got your fan you've set the manifestation powers into motion and it's time to get in it and start creating obviously you're gonna want to get in there and rip all the stuff out that you don't want so there could be a shelving that could be partitions really nasty floors it's gonna vary depending on your build so remember when you're looking at the van that you're gonna have to take everything out so keep that into account next we like to paint the van to give them a nice look and also kind of just address some of the body work that needed to be done so we went with a raptor line and paint it gives the van a really nice look it doesn't look like a cargo van as much after you paint it and this process takes maybe 2 or 3 days it's really just sanding masking and then you got to paint it and then it's got to dry then you gotta take everything off so the prep work is what takes the longest you could probably get it done in two days I would say with drying and everything finished you're gonna want to paint anything inside that's scratched or dented or doesn't look nice that could show when you're done because some of these vans they get pretty beat-up inside and if you have all this nice interior finishing and then your interior van is all scratched and scuffed up it's gonna look funny so get I just use a spray paint and a clear coat and it makes it look brand-new [Music] you're going to move on to planning your layout and this takes a lot of research looking at van tours online and one of the most crucial things that I think before moving forward in starting your layout once you have everything empty is make sure you have like your components and your appliances and stuff you're gonna want to have your fridge so you can build around that you're gonna want to have your toilet if you have a toilet because you're gonna want to build around that you're gonna maybe want to know how big your bed is gonna be what we like to do is we like to duct tape a lot of like our areas off on our raw floor and just kind of tape around some of our appliances see where they'll be situated and when planning your layout if it involves bringing big items like surfboards bikes crash mats anything that you want to bring that's pretty big you need to get that in the van when you're planning your layout so that you can plan for it some other things that you're going to want to keep in mind when planning your layout is to have some weight distribution so you're gonna want to plan to have your batteries on the opposite side of your water you're gonna want to have to have your sink because just sometimes if you do the jet to the cabinet first and then trying to find a small sink that's kind of hard to do so if you have all your things to build around you have more to work with if you're gonna want to have Shore power because you want to sometimes charge up your batteries from a campsite or something that has power you're you're gonna want to do 120 like maybe coming out of the van or just plan for those types of things if you're gonna want your water coming from the outside of the van you're gonna have to cut holes then and that's gonna segue into step four which is once you have your layout you're going to know where you have your windows planned if you want windows or where your fans are gonna be planned this is probably the most intimidating section of the builds because it's really when you get in and you start breaking ground and you make some holes in your van and a lot of people get the sweats and everything about it but you get the right jigsaw you get the right blade and you measure 500 times we always do because it's scary you're you're gonna get through it and it's gonna be so much of an accomplishment that you can conquer anything after you put a hole in your van successfully so your next step in the process is gonna be wiring and this kind of sets it off nice because you'll have your roof fan installed and it'll have the cords hanging so this is the first set of wires I like to start with I'll run my roof fan wiring in to where my distribution panel will be and that's gonna you're gonna need to decide where your fuse box will be because you're gonna break off all around the van to different accessories from that fuse box so you need to decide and spend a lot of time on that layout where you're gonna have upper cabinet lights like how are you gonna turn the lights on where is your switch gonna be it makes it a lot easier if you wire for all the switches and everything now it's gonna be hard to go back and make it look clean and get everything back to your fuse panel so you're gonna have to put a lot of time in this step you're gonna work on your battery bank you're gonna wire all your batteries together we do power inverters it's a little bit easier than setting up a 120 outlet so where's your power inverter gonna be where's your battery bank this should all be decided in your layout and then when you come to wire it should be very straightforward you should just get your wires run them from point A to point B and if you're gonna do a switch you might as well wire for the switch I like to leave lots of room in case I messed up so I can just clip it out it's easier to clip some off and add the wire but yeah wiring the van is done easiest when the van is empty you also need to cut out a hole for your wires to come down from the solar panel down into your charge controller so while we're here on this subject it also is nice now to like get your solar panels up on the roof there's tons of ways to do this we have a really good video for under $200 solar panel rack for your van roof what we did on this van is since we don't have roof rails or any of that we just use the very strong VHB 3m tape and stuck them down and we've gone fast in this van and it hasn't flown off yet I would recommend getting your solar panel on the roof at this stage and drill those holes and run the wiring down to where your charge controller will be and then you'll have all the electrical ready to go so then when you're ready you're literally just plugging wires in it's going to be like a multi-step process you'll probably start wiring your electronics building your battery bank and then kind of adding things later but you're gonna want to do the bulk of the wiring when the Vans empty and you're gonna want to have everything planned out so take extra time on the layout make sure it's perfect so once you have all of your wiring installed you're gonna move on to insulation and this is one of the most controversial topics in van life everyone has an opinion there are plenty of different ways to get to the same conclusion of keeping your van pretty temperate in here what we decided to go with was thin slit because it is to us we've done foam board and other things but thin slit is what we keep coming back to it's easy it's cut and paste it's mold resistant it's non-toxic and we've lived in a van for over 3 years with insulate in it and we have absolutely no complaints so this is what we're going with again and what we do to achieve a thermal barrier with our solution and a vapor barrier is we use reflectix and we put this all up inside the van we made it look like a spaceship in here and basically to keep your thermal barrier you need to have an air gap for this to actually work correctly and the way that we achieve that is we had our framing go on top of the reflectix and that creates just enough of an air gap that you need to keep your thermal barrier so after you insulate your walls you get your vapor and thermal barrier with the reflectix going you're gonna want to just start framing out the van so we can get the cabinets and interior walls connected to the van this is a question we get a lot how do you put walls on the vent well we do it with the furring strips they're one inch by two inch furring strips you can get them out Home Depot Lowe's any lumber store and we just kind of work from one side to the other and we put the wood onto the existing ribs of the van another frequently asked question is how do you get your firming strips onto the van without sending a screw through the side of the van and how we do that is the van has a structural rib system throughout it and each rib has a cavity inside so it doesn't just lay flat so you can give a screw into that cavity the right size and it won't go all the way through the van out the side and looking like a coupe on the ceiling there's a bunch of ribs will frame each one of the ceilings with slats and then we go along the wall so an important thing here is when you're framing this all out you need to keep in mind how and where you want to attach your cat your upper cabinets so we have our attached here so we ran the furring strips the whole length underneath and all the way across the top so when we put our cabinets in there's multiple anchor points another thing to keep in mind is when you're putting on these four by eight sheets you need this when you're framing you need to lay down framing in between the areas that are gonna be the walls otherwise you're not going to be able to put your wall on properly you need some more anchor points same goes with the count the cabinets so you know we ran our framing straight down exactly how the cabinet is and the cross and then when we built the cabinet frames we accounted for where the wall framing is and we just attached it directly to the wall this is important so when you're framing you may have to draw a diagram we recommend drawing almost everything at every step so once you framed out each side of the van you're gonna do your ceiling so we got tongue and groove pine we stained individually each one and then when you're putting all this in just take account for your puck lighting if you do use puck lighting where it's gonna go you're then ready to attach your interior walls so it's a pretty straightforward process we use liquid nail and a pin nailer and we just push it up against it nail it at each support once the ceilings in and you have your walls in you're gonna start feeling good and now it's time to start building out these cabinets now that you got your van all prepped and everything's framed out and ready for you to start building what you're gonna want to do is you're gonna want to start with your biggest item and that's usually your bed so we started with our bed first and we knew that we wanted to have a bed that looked out the window turned into a couch and also stored things underneath it after experiencing a rock and roll bed when we were living in the VW van that we built out we wanted to have that again because it was so easy to turn it into a couch and being in couch mode and entertaining mode it's really important to build your largest item first whether it's building around your bike so we did that in our last van you need to have your bikes and then build on top of that know how big those are we needed to know how big our bed was going to be in day mode and in bed mode so we built this first and it took some time figuring out how to make it rock back and forth correctly a couple Reed welds just basically fabricating it's working through the kinks and trying to make something that didn't really exist before you started so once you got your largest piece of furniture in the van and it's working to your liking next we're gonna move on to more designing and fabricating it's going to be your cabinets some people doing what we did here was we kind of used masking tape and taped out our layout and like we had our fridge on the ground so we knew how big each individual item needed to be and one important thing I would note on the van is you're gonna always want to measure from the bottom of the van to the base of the countertop or a cabinet or whatever you're building and the top because these vans they curve and it's gonna be different from bottom to top we have some issues on just some of these countertops where we didn't take an account to the slant even at the lower part of the man and then it fit properly we had to tweak them to get them to work perfect so that's something to take in account also you're gonna just want to draw out everything you're doing it's gonna help you so much one more thing to take in account is each piece is going to be multi-use piece of furniture it's not just an ordinary cabinet so like for instance this countertop it does so much more than a normal countertop it actually has a refrigerator in it so when you're designing all this you need to kind of know where and how all your accessories are gonna either slide out or whatever they do you're gonna have to plan for it so this takes a lot of time this is probably one of the longer steps but take that extra time get it perfect and you'll be really happy with your outcome so once you got all your lower cabinets framed out around all of your appliances and making sure that you're accounting for each one of their sizes and making sure that they'll fit in there but then you're gonna want to move on to your upper cabinets and with your upper cabinets what we wanted to do was we wanted to make it a really simple design where it was just like an L with anchor points on the top and on the bottom and we had to be very mindful of where our anchor points were going to be in crossing a furring strip so that we could attach it on both ends the bottom and the top so that's just something to keep in mind when you are framing out for your upper cabinets is to always have a amazing anchor point because this thing is gonna be bumping around and you're gonna want to make sure it's really secure in that once we got everything framed out it basically looked like a jungle gym in here we painted everything made it black so that there wasn't any rust that could possibly happen so the next step that we needed to do is we need to hide that framing with some wood paneling if you really dig in and put in the work here you're gonna get really seamless edges and you're gonna really be proud of yourself so what you're gonna need to do is you're gonna need to start with some RAM board which is just kind of like cardboard for construction and basically you're gonna want to put that Ram board up on your frame and start scribing and making a template so you're gonna want to scrub because it's a van and it rounds you're gonna want to scribe those rounded edges with your RAM board and sometimes your RAM board is going to be a little bit too long for your framing and that's perfect you just want to scribe in there push it up and then get your lot your straight line from the front with your framing and then you're going to want to take that template and you're going to want to put it on to once you got it perfect you're going to want to put it onto your ply you're gonna take your traced template and you're going to want to cut out that section on the table saw and then usually you'll have to take it to the bandsaw take it over there get it as close to the line as possible and once but don't take the line off leave the line and then what we did is we took that and we sanded it down perfect to the line on a belt sander so that we could get this edge just seamless there there's a side to every cabinet that you need to be scribing so get your scribe and pants on that's a thing and so after you've scribed all of your sides what you're going to want to do to really finish this off and we find it to be a crucial step to make your van look really finished is having a face frame we didn't do this inner last van and after seeing this we totally regret it so what the face frame does is finish it off and what you're going to want to do for the face frame is like measure all of your frames again draw it out so that you know how much material you're going to need to buy for your face frames we made it out of hardwood so take your measurements get your hardwood start making your cuts start making your jigs and put your face frames together based on your drawings once you have your face frames in this is a perfect time to get your countertops installed but you're gonna want to do is make a template for your countertop so you know how you need to cut it so it will fit perfectly in that space so this is a good time to install your countertop while you have no drawer fronts because it's gonna make your life so much easier so that you can get up and underneath there and attach that countertop securely to your frame and also at this time if you're not gonna do any tile work or if you are gonna do tile work do it here and then what you'll want to do is install your sink basin and your faucet sometimes with the faucet we like to put all the components together so that we don't have to do it in that tiny space now it's time to work on drawers and since we're here at end studios and he has all the tools you could ever need we're definitely gonna do the drawers right this time we've made our drawers out of prefinished Baltic birch and the results look amazing if you want an in-depth video on how to make drawers we have one of those on our playlist [Music] okay so we're gonna move on to plumbing this is gonna be pretty quick basically you're just gonna decide what kind of tanks you want how you want your tanks to be so we have a 6 gallon gray water tank it just pulls out from under there so we can dump it out that makes it very easy we have a 25 gallon freshwater tank under the couch and it's all pretty straightforward from the couch under the couch it runs through a sheer flow pump and it just pumps it up to the sink you need to power your sink pump so you got a wire for that and then there you go [Music] so the next thing you're gonna want to do after your face frames is move on to your cabinet doors and honestly a lot of people do it this way what we did is we wanted it to have a really nice finished look so we sent it to some professionals over at Kaldor we measured out 3/4 inches between every door so that I was consistent everywhere and we sent out our orders had about 20 doors and they sent them back within a couple weeks then all we had to do was wait stain and install and it really works wonders once we got those doors in here it made the van just look like it was almost done getting to the last step when your van has all its cabinet fronts on and it's looking about 100% but it's really 80 what we like to do is do our wallpaper at this time you so most of your stuff for your couch or whatever you need you put your door knobs on you put your catchments on you make sure that all this is secure so that when you're driving you don't have to worry about stuff flying while you're taking the turn around the corner so these finishing touches can take a lot of time so be patient with it you've done all this work up to this point don't try and make any shortcuts at this point because you'll see them it's it's your finishing touches what your I will gravitate to so just make sure you take your time don't get frustrated you're almost there and you'll be so happy that you took the time to really put the silver lining on all of your work that you've culminated up to this point thanks for watching we hope this was helpful to everyone after our last time lapse video the whole process people ask for a narrated step-by-step easier to follow video we hope that this whole process becomes easier thanks for watching and like and subscribe and if you guys like content like this we do have a whole playlist that breaks down every single step that if you want to build your own van we hope uh scoops give you coops the courage to get out there and if you know someone that this video would benefit go ahead and share it with them and we'll see you next time you cooks see ya [Music]

Channel: Van Kookz

Views: 141,408

Keywords: diy sprinter van, diy sprinter van camper conversion, step by step van conversion, van conversion guide, complete guide van conversion, how to convert a sprinter step by step, van conversion process, converting a sprinter into a camper by step, How to Build a Camper Van Step by Step, diy van conversion step by step, How to build a Camper Van / Studio - DIY conversion (Step by step), How to Build a Home Made Camper Van - Start to Finish DIY, step by step van conversion guide

Id: ohFemFRZjKg

Length: 24min 24sec (1464 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 24 2020