Man lives 5 years in DIY Van! | Unique Ford transit Vanlife tour.

hi i'm sam and welcome to my van i've been living in it full-time for almost five years now and i've got some really cool features in here and some really unique designs part of my reason for doing van life is to inspire people to live more minimally and sustainably and more integrated with nature so i'm going to give you guys a little tour in the house here as you can see my kitchen is big and right here in the way um but um i built it this way to optimize it for space and storage and i really like the feng shui of being here and looking out and cooking it's really nice and like some of the smoke and stuff can go out if you're cooking with the door open and it creates the cool like dj vibe dance booth action in here i've got this two burner cooktop here which is pretty slick with the oven it's a marine grade oven pretty dirty in there that's how i do don't worry about it and i've got this red oak countertop that you can see i had to cut all this detailing in to make the inset chopping board and the sink cover hammered copper sink with this bronze faucet works well do what you got to do and then this thing i really like it's a propane fireplace um creates a really nice vibe nice cozy heat i've actually got three different fireplaces in here this one which runs on propane i've got what's called the wabasto which a lot of people have you can see it it's down here and then that's plumbed into the gas tank and it uses less than a gallon of gas for every day that you run it the downsides are it's a little finicky and not that reliable and it just creates a ton of heat so in the shoulder seasons when it's just a little bit chilly that thing is just pumping out heat and it gets like too hot you have to like open a vent or anything i did heated floors too electrically heated floors it's a 18 inch by 5 foot long element that just runs in the kitchen aisle way here and it's nice gives a nice cozy foot feel i got the eight kitchen drawers that i put in here i optimized it all the drawers are a different size of course to make it extra hard to build and they're also different lengths because i've got components behind them but eight kitchen drawers is a ton of storage pots and pans cleaning stuff the little spice drawer stuff more stuff even more stuff the knick-knack drawer and the cutlery so they're all use these marine grade latches and they're on soft close drawer slides oh that's nice yeah yeah on this side of the van you can see i got this couch here um the couch vibe is pretty good for a lot of reasons you get the nice ambiance where you can sit on the couch facing the door which is great for relaxing i'm like looking at the golden gate bridge right here it's like really awesome and then i designed the couch to hold some of the components so i've got my nature's head toilet right here which is great um love this thing been using it for years it vents to the outside so all the odors don't stink up the van and it separates the liquids and the solids and i change the toilet out about every month or two depending on how much i use it and then over here i've got my fridge um it's a norcold fridge and you can see it's just a fridge it works great keeps the beers cold keeps the food ready so i've got the swivel seat up front um which is great really opens up the living room and the hedge unit up here i have actually wired to my auxiliary battery system so i can hang out at camp and play music all day and i don't have to worry about killing my starter battery and then working back in the van um you can see i've got this unique bed set up um never seen any other bed like this bed ever i'm too tall to sleep crossways in the van a lot of people do their bed this way but i'm just too tall my instagram actually is tall man in a van and this the ford transit is the tallest of all the vans at 6 7 interior height i'm 6'4 so even with the installation on the floor and the ceiling i can stand up in here which is great um so i came up with this really weird bed design um i'll give you the demo of it so it's long enough for me up here which is nice and then this side i had to actually change the length of the bed here so only short people fit on this side but it's long enough and it works out when i initially started building my van i only built this half of the bed and i worked with this for over a year year and a half maybe until i finally built this other half of the bed i did it this way because it folds up really easy and it works great to open up the living room and access all the storage underneath so in the morning when i wake up it's pretty easy you just throw all the bedding on this side and then there you go no more bed and then you get the whole length of the van which is great and then i have all this storage back here which is easy to access if you want to get dressed grab my clothes here's my pants with the storage that i did back here they're all milk crates which have little steel strips that i put at the back here and then if you look in here you can see i put magnets in the back down there so i've got 17 mil crates which is a lot of storage and it's all accessible at any time easily which is pretty killer underneath the milk crates 20 gallon water tank and i don't know if it really comes out during the day but i have a back light behind the water tank so i can see how much water is in there and it creates a really nice ambiance and vibe and creates light under the bed so you can actually find stuff you're looking for and i have the same leds down here that i have up here and the trim behind the uh behind this crown molding which like brings the eyes up and creates a nice vibe and then this half of the bed actually folds up as well um it's a bit of a thing but not too bad i normally just throw these pillows over here and then you got the whole dance floor open you've got the full size of the van available to loading stuff up hanging out in cleaning doing whatever you got to do and then you've got really easy access to all the storage and i really love it it works great i didn't really know what i wanted to use my van for when i designed it so i just made it able to do anything really and that's worked out pretty well for me primo job with a mirror trim here pieces of tape holding it up it's funny i put a lot so much work into so many parts of this van and then some parts i just completely just like dialed in so here i have my propane tank i made it extra complicated by putting the propane on this side and all the things that use the propane are on this side so i had to run the propane line around i did that so i could preserve the storage under the kitchen it's not very useful having your kitchen be a giant propane tank it's way better to have a bunch of drawers here so you can use what you need when you're cooking and to make it even more complicated the propane tank is here and i buried my inverter behind this panel back here so if i ever need to service the inverter this whole box actually is modular and can come out and i've got my control panel for my electronics here i can see i'm making 135 watts for my solar right now my batteries are full um this is the switch for my heated floor this is the control from my wabasto and as an extra safety feature for my propane i put it on this timer and that actuates an electric solenoid which allows the propane to flow and so i did this so that if i forget and i drive away my propane doesn't stay on forever so it creates a little extra safety safety layer for me this is probably one of the most awesome features i've put into the van my friend recommended that i do it and i was like nah that's crazy and then i was like actually that's a really cool idea so it's this two foot square boat hatch um which lets a lot of natural light into the van and it's really great to lay in bed and look up at the sky some of my favorite things to do is park under a tree and lay in bed and then the tree is like right here and you're like part of the tree and then also when you're looking at stars you can go park out in nature where there's no light pollution you can lay in bed with the fireplace on and stargaze and it was like so dope and when i built this one of the things i was like really excited for was to finally get out in nature and see a shooting star through my skylight and my first trip i took in my van i was up in canada and i was like in city to city and i wasn't able to be somewhere with good no light pollution and finally i made it out to this hot spring and i was like okay tonight tonight i'm gonna lay in bed and i'm gonna see the shooting star so i lay there and i'm like however long it takes i'm gonna lay here until like oh there's one and it just happened like right away it was it was hilarious it's not for everybody but i'm a giant athletic rock climbing guy so the way you get up onto the roof deck is you just climb up through the skylight there you go so this thing is great i love being up here um i'm when i'm with my partner and we're hanging out up here having lunch or whatever people get such a kick out of it they'll drive along and they'll be honking their horns and like waving at us and we just create like such a vibe when we're up here so this is one of my favorite things i did in my van is this skylight it wasn't easy i had to create the curvature of the roof turn that into a flat surface to mount this boat hatch to it's the altus vetus is the boat hatch it's a two foot square hatch so that was pretty complicated and then all this trim work i did with this aluminum was also very complicated somehow it came out looking pretty good light switch nothing fancy touch lights here i also have touch lights back in here which are great for reading and so on creates a nice little vibe um and then i got the speakers mounted in the rear doors so i took the rear doors they have glass in them and it was annoying laying back against this weird surface back here so i again overly complicated hard to build but worked out great i created a bunch of different blocks back here that took the weird surface of the door and created a nice flat planar surface so you can lay in bed and not have like a weird hunched neck and a lot of vans will do like flares pop-outs on the side of the van to extend the bed but that also makes it really annoying to sit up in bed so having flat walls all the way around the bed works out great because you can sit in a lot of different ways you can be hanging out this way a lot of times when i'm eating dinner i'll be here my partner will be there and we'll have all the food between us sometimes it's hard to operate in the van with two people so one person can be up here out of the way the other person can be cooking and doing all the stuff they want to do so you can see from the back here i keep my window covers here they're from this company's straw foot handmade which is i think in santa cruz they make a really good product i really like having those things they go insert up into the cockpit the three glass windows and the slider door to make a privacy up there this is my shower setup works great hot water take a shower wash your bike off whatever you got to do and just jam that in here you can see down here i put this bungee down here it holds my drinks my little pantry area down there and then you can see the water tank there so i'd use this bamboo floor um click lock bamboo nicely trimmed out with black tape real primo job here i've got the bed folded up which i love doing i call it opening up the dance floor and i've got the 17 mil crates that i have for my storage back here so to really give you an idea of how much storage that is i'm gonna just pull all my milk crates out here make a little stack of them and we'll see what this actually looks like milk crates are eight dollars a piece plus a couple magnets way cheaper and easier than building actual drawers and i love it it works great so on each milk crate i put these two steel strips which i had to put a little piece of wood to shim them out to make the correct depth for the magnet and if you look in there you'll see the two magnets they're each 55 pound-force magnets they're pretty strong my girlfriend does not like pulling these out it's kind of annoying but i've never had one fall out while i'm driving which is great and if you pull like this you can see it's really in there pretty good but the trick is if you come up it breaks the magnet and that somehow i didn't design that it just somehow worked and lucky me so um cheap simple and the way that my storage works with the bed down if you had a drawer that pulled out then you could never get in there so you have to have a thing that comes out so you can put it on the bed and get to it i've been traveling my whole life i was in the air force for six years and my time in there of course i spent flying on missions and cargo planes so every month i'd spend about 10 days out on the road traveling living out of a suitcase so i'd be out on the road living out of a suitcase minimalist everything was great i would come back to my house and there's all this stuff piled up in my bedroom that i barely use and i'm paying money to store it and why do i even have all this stuff and then fast forward a couple years after a lot of traveling a lot of backpacking traveled by motorcycle camping um and then in 2016 i tore my acl and that was just like the inspiration for me to deep dive and research van life but basically the reason i do van life minimalism um living sustainably i live off the solar panel out of my van that provides mostly electricity for my daily life and being more integrated with nature i've worked in offices where i wake up in my house and i'm in my car and then i'm in an office all day and back in the car and back in the house and i spend actually zero time feeling what the temperature is outside or breathing fresh air and living van life is just a much more intentional way to live and i love it after you know struggling through my acl and designing the van i finally got offered a job uh helping to make a movie in kentucky and because of that job offer i was like okay i'm going to pull the trigger and do this crazy thing or i'm going to buy a van living it now i have this job offer that's going to pay for a big chunk of the van and we needed the van to make the movie so i bought the van me and my buddy chester stacy thanks for hiring me for the movie we loaded up all our gear in the van we drove to kentucky and we made this movie i was like slowly starting to build my van on during that trip and then we got back to maryland after the movie and i built a lot more of the van and then i got invited to a rugby game up in canada and i had in my mind that i wanted to come to the west coast in the van and i was like do i fly to canada and then come back and then drive west or what do i do and i was like screw it i'm just going to use this rugby game as a sign that i should just head west went up to canada played the rugby game and then i just kept going west and i came down down the west coast and i met up with a buddy of mine who was hiking and he was hiking the pct all the way from mexico up to canada and i intercepted him and i started hiking with him and he got invited to this big party that was on a river that was like a couple hours back from from where he was hiking at that time so i loaded up him and like eight of his dirty hiker friends in the van we drove an hour south and i got my pack out and we hiked into this spot and there's like a big rave going on it was like pretty awesome party i've never seen a party like that from the east coast and then at that party i met this beautiful woman farhad and through meeting her she lived in the bay area and i was like maybe i should hang out in the bay area or this this chick's pretty cool and then fast forward three years still here still with farhad and i got a job at a company glampervan which we built camper vans and when covet hit our shop shot down because we didn't know what was going on so i seized that about two opportunity when the shop shot down to tear everything out of my van and rebuild it properly because i just kind of been throwing it together building it on the road i was like on top of pallets in the home depot parking lot like working on the roof deck i was out at a farm in mendocino like doing my flooring like working on like in a yard basically doing it like the hardest way possible and so in a five-week mad sprint i was like going insane designing and building things making it extra hard for myself for reasons i don't really know why but this is what came out and it's pretty sick and i love living in the van and saved me a lot of money being in the bay area for years now haven't paid a dime in rent and can't say i make a ton of money but i do well and it's a good life and i would love for people to copy the things that i've done imitation is flattery something something some form so i'm saying there some of the benefits um i'm a very active person i'm always out about doing a bunch of stuff so if i'm out at a friend's house or at the beach or doing whatever i don't have to like drive all the way back home to sleep i can just sleep where i'm at and work my schedule around what's happening in my life so i have some friends out at ocean beach i'll go and visit them i'll sleep around the area i'll wake up near the beach hang out a little bit more and then get along with my day instead of having to you know if i'm partying you know you can't drive drunk so that works out great to not have to to be able to have your bed with you everywhere and yeah just love it van life is not easy um there's a different set of challenges that you face living in a real house uh rent is zero which is great uh however using the bathroom is a lot more challenging i have a thousand dollar toilet in my van which is not everyone has um and even that which is like the nicest fanciest composting toilet you can buy the nature's head you still have to service it once a month or two you have to empty your urine tank out you have to find fresh water you have to find places to park and you don't have a lot of space for stuff so you're forced to you know be very selective with the things that you acquire so the total cost for me to get into the van um wasn't cheap um part of my mission statement for the van was i want to build the best van that i possibly build nothing is going to prevent me from doing something that if i think it's cool i don't have a lot of money and it took me a long time to build up all the resources to finally get here i was living in a partially built the first thing i did was bungee a mattress to this wall and i would lay it down to sleep on it now i have this really really awesome camper van so i bought the van for 22.5 in virginia um i traded in my truck and i took a loan out for most of it i spent probably i'm not very good at spreadsheets or keeping track of things in between 20 and 30 000 on all the rest of the stuff so all in less than 60 thousand dollars somewhere in the 50s probably and that was spent over a number of years a number of years of living in partially built van only a year and a half ago all of these walls and nothing was up here it was just insulation and wires running all over my van it looked crazy i don't know why my partner stayed with me and was okay with sleeping in the van but it's paid off now because it's all finished and looking good but i definitely was not rich but what i basically did was instead of paying rent for four years i have been putting that money into the van to slowly build it up you don't have to spend a thousand dollars on a toilet and fifteen hundred dollars on an oven and another thousand dollars on a fireplace and another thousand dollars on a second fireplace and a bunch of stupid stuff that you don't really need um but for me a lot of it was um understanding the technologies developing skills to do this stuff and that has transferred into me getting a job on the west coast building campervans now to answer the question a little less than 60 000 for the van i would definitely recommend van life for anybody that's interested um it's not always easy it can be a bit of a bit scary i thought i was nuts when i was buying this van i was like what am i doing um and i'm a pretty adventurous outdoors guy and even i and i thought it was nuts but the reality is that the technology has matured in the price of solar panels and batteries that that's a big reason that the whole van life movement has really taken off over the last five years basically because you can throw a solar panel on top put a lithium battery inside the van and have basically unlimited power to run the fridge and all the things that you need with those technologies being available to anybody a price available to anybody nowadays there's really no reason not to have a van even as a second vehicle you can rent out a van on outdoorsy.com it's like airbnb for camper vans so you can make money back on your camper van renting it out during the week it's there for you to use and it's it's just a great thing some of the unexpected realities about van life i've always been a really social person i've never lived by myself uh the last place i lived was in baltimore in a row house there were five people in the house made me feel cozy to be with other people and the reality of being in a van is that honestly you spend a lot of time alone and that was a big transition for me and you know made me sit with myself a little bit more and dwell on some thoughts and unpack some things that maybe i'd been running away from for a long time and it's been very good for me to slow down a little bit live life more intentionally and learn to be be good at being by myself and being myself um so that's been a hidden blessing through van life and the community is pretty amazing um you can head south in the winter down to quartzite or sedona or many other places and there's huge gatherings of people that are doing van life and you can choose to spend as much time by yourself or joining van circles as you want and it's a really beautiful thing my personal philosophy on life live it um do it don't don't not do it don't regret not doing something um i was in the air force at 18. i got shot at i airlifted coffins out of iraq and a bunch of kids that died at 18 and never got to experience life and it's pretty sad and so i've always felt the onus of responsibility that i have to go out and enjoy life fully and take advantage of my time while i have it and i have lived up to that very much so i've quit many successful jobs to go out and do crazy things um like i went to new zealand with a buddy i've been traveling across the country left successful careers built this van done a lot of done a lot of wild stuff and very happy that i've set forth on some crazy paths and most of them have always worked out really well what's next for me so i'm going to start a company building net zero tiny houses on wheels i'm really excited about it my time in van life living and working van life i also build camera vans right now has prepared me to take this next step so net zero tiny house on wheels a house that makes as much energy or more than it consumes and hopefully you'll be able to tow it with an electric pickup truck charge your truck from your house run ac um all sorts of cool technologies there's atmospheric water separators that are coming online the technology is maturing where you can actually pull water from the air and condense it so you can cr man you can create water from your house so you can and also starlink internet is coming online so you'll be able to live in the desert food is easy to store you can get a month of food in a house no problem create your own water have high-speed internet and work from anywhere so that's something i'm really excited about doing on instagram i'm tall man in a van because i'm six foot four and i live in a van you can follow me there and i'd be excited for anyone that has questions about van life or is inspired i love motivating people to take the plunge and do it there's a couple people that live in vans right now because of me specifically i've like inspired them and helped them launch on their way and it's really satisfying for me to see someone improve their life like that so anyone that is nervous about taking the plunge feel free to reach out if you would like to be featured on different media there's a form you can fill out to be on the podcast or to have your van toured and if you're interested in watching more alternative dwelling tours like this we upload every single sunday so hit subscribe and new van life and chill podcasts every thursday thanks everyone for watching

Channel: Different Media.

Views: 772,149

Keywords: vanlife, van life, living in a van, realty of #vanlife, vanlife documentary

Id: nUnS0vmVRqU

Length: 23min 48sec (1428 seconds)

Published: Sun May 08 2022