Nomad For 7 Years Living In a Tent, Mini Van, And Now Built a Home In An Old GMC Van | VAN TOUR

[Music] this is probably one of the funnest van tours i've ever had the chance to film this girl is colorful fun energetic and just has a damn good energy she's been living the nomad lifestyle for quite a while she's been in this van for four years before that she was in a minivan and before that she was sleeping in a tent down by the river alright let's go meet amanda and this is her dog frank hey there my name is amanda and this is my van truck hey there my name is amanda and this is my van truck truck is a 94 gmc g3500 i've lived in truck for about four and a half years and i had different vans for about three years before that [Music] this is where i spend most of my time in my van sitting on my stoop looking at the world and uh so i made it nice i made it nice for hanging out i made it nice when i come back i want my van to be soothing so painted it green and purple which are my favorite colors as you can see i was uh very inspired by my favorite backpack so uh yes i've just ended up one with the van but i also uh do all my cooking outside so this here is the cook station and i got the whisper light stove in here and the lighter on the magnet so i never have to go looking for it always accessible let gravity do the work of keeping it in place and if anyone wants me well [Laughter] yeah that's not in here crash pad storage because i like climbing but everything's got to have a purpose so got a little beach with me and a nice couch this is all food food storage food box this is a this crate i found in the wildlife preserve on salt spring island and turned into this uh wooden food box to keep my potatoes in the dark so that's that there somebody left that in the woods and then i got my to-go coffee station for you know those scenic coffees that we know every van lifer loves to uh partake in and then as if scenic coffee wasn't enough i roast my own so getting low on roasted but i got some tanzanian and some brazilian and i got a few more on the way so you know try to keep these in here looking nice yeah and then uh family heirloom spice rack so i found this when i first did the build uh here in cumberland at my grandpa's this was in the uh his old tool shed and i found that all dusty in the back corner and decided to just clean it up a little bit and then fix it in here to hold all this other stuff that floats around [Music] and then because uh my van is full like i'm secretly a hoarder um i have a mind-blowing amount of stuff in here and an even more mind-blowing amount of food so we got the three crates of food over there in the spice rack but we also got food food food food kitchen stuff food and kitchen stuff and all this is food and then there's canned goods under the bed so i'm good for a few months if things get worse i got about four months of dried goods at any one point and then usually about a month of more fresher tastier stuff going on so um that doesn't leave a lot of room for other things like clothes and gear which is why there is gear hanging all over the place and worked into the uh the furniture of the van so we got the crack uh sleeping bag stuffed back here holding the couch in place and water jugs be in the back rest and these used to live somewhere else and i hung them here temporarily several months ago so they just live there now it's just it works so there's no need to stress about finding somewhere else to put it and then uh you know then my other favorite part of the van is my bed which thankfully i'm not too tall so this bed works so well i sleep every night and i just fall asleep and it's amazing that was so good but it's uh it's just one one and a half inch maybe two inch piece of foam from the foam store and then a pile of blankets as colorful as everything else so this here is an adventure blanket wrapped over my pillows because i got a dog and his favorite thing to do is to go from outside to putting his paws directly on my pillow so we cover the pillows during the day so i don't sleep with a face in the mud which is fine but uh you know i get some looks from town's people if i show up but it's all muddy so you try to keep that to a minimum you know yeah and then this here is my uh serenity shelf all the things that help keep me centered and you know i spend a lot of time sitting here and i thought it'd be nice to have something calming to just kind of gaze at when i'm trying to figure out what to do with my life because let's face it i never know where i'm going i don't i have no idea where i'm going after this that's the greatest thing in the world yeah i grew up in the comax valley here and i spend about a month here a year with my grandpa so i got some projects coming on the van i'm going to after four and a half years finally insulate and put a ceiling up in the cab so that's exciting last year's project i put this uh shelf just like the kitchen shelf mostly so when i take photos for instagram you don't see all the junk in my garage that's the truth of it it has a function but i barely ever actually use it for its function so i can access all my garage extra fuel you know i usually have a couple months worth of fuel going on and you know uh project stuff and gear it's a garage so and then this the dream with this was a standing desk because i cannot stand in my van so i have a standing desk or one day when i can have friends again we could do taco night which is the other thing i imagined when i put this in last summer so it also does a really good job making the doors tight so sometimes i get the excitement when i'm going down the logging road of looking in the side view mirror and seeing my doors flapping in the wind so yeah i got to uh really got to really make sure those doors are latched before i take off latched and locked [Laughter] because uh yeah that doesn't go well taking inventory making sure nothing's down the dirt road yeah so but mostly it's just here to make my photos look a little tidier all right so this past summer when i did all the the bodywork you know i had a lot of dents from hitting trees so fix that i put on the tire mount because this used to live in the van with me and this was taking up a lot of space for food so got that on the back door and it doubles as my way up so just climb the back save money on a ladder but this rack here this rack my dad built a few years ago from a minivan because i go mushroom kicking so i needed somewhere to put all my buckets and stuff because there was not room in the minivan so we put the legs on we modded the rack to then clamp on these gutters and this is his and we looked at some pictures online and he came up with this he says it will handle my romping so uh built the modded the rack for this van built the mount for this aluminum box i got off the internet so that that locks is on there and then we put in a cedar deck mostly i like to drink coffee up here like a little yoga i can do a lot i can do a lot of yoga in my van laying down or sitting but it's nice to build to a stand up up here you know be with the trees it's very nice so but uh we built this rack i would say all the materials about four to five hundred dollars you are not going to buy a rafter that much online so uh get yourself a fabricator friend if you want a badass rack and like things like this these aren't wired in my dad just thought it'd be cool if i had lights on my rack so i wasn't in my design they just appeared and in time they'll be wired in and and i can i don't know light it up i guess i don't know what i'm going to do with them but it'll be lit as the kids would say these here are the coffee jars they're a new addition to my van i just took up coffee roasting in september so the trick to this is i one paint the lids because they look way nicer but if you look under you gotta put two screws or the whole thing will just swirl around and around and around so two screws through the the lid short enough it doesn't go through the other side of the wood and then you want to before you crank them right down position this so that when it's screwed in you don't have you know just the little things you think ahead and you have a really nice finished product so me and my grandpa built this van out about four and a half years ago we did it through a november december or something so it worked out pretty well considering the weather but i really wanted to save on material and like the cost of material so one thing we did is we just did on a table saw did the little uh quarter inch groove here in the wood and then i just sanded the the top and bottom of the door which is quarter inch plywood to make it just thin enough that it could slide and so what this did is it saved on hardware so i didn't have to pay for any hardware no latches hinges anything like that and also they're nice and snug they don't come open there's no worry about them coming open on back roads and i like to romp and some stuff gets everywhere but nothing comes out of these and then also it maximizes the space inside whereas if you have a drawer there's always a little bit of space you lose so these i can uh you know just pack them right full and just you know this is this one's a good example of uh how much stuff you can and you just press it and just like that you just really get as much stuff crammed in your cupboards as possible which is great when you're a hoarder especially a food hoarder like me which you know is an interesting combination living in a van so it also makes it hard for anyone with fat fingers to come into your van and steal stuff yeah so that's why we went with the uh this uh this design you just got to get your numbers right because you kind of build it from the bottom up so once they're in they're in you know and as you can see some of our calculations i don't know how but they didn't quite they didn't even out at the end and that's just fine because for a while i clipped the curtain there before i hung them on the on the strings so um the other thing i like about my build saving money is i couldn't figure out what to do with the floor so there's actually there's insulation there's foam board and spray foam and then there is a plywood floor underneath but then i just cut out the old original cargo rubber mat to fill the floor area so it does a really good job collecting all the dirt and dust and making it really hard to sweep out of here and it's also waterproof so the waterproof is nice living in such a wet climate the dust situation not so nice but you know you gotta balance everything so he's like what the heck with the camera frank it's okay it's okay buddy yeah i know it's just a little camera you have my camera in your face all the time frank and i here we moved into a van almost seven and a half years ago we were living in squash and uh when we moved there the town model was live work play well that wasn't really that possible anymore with the way the town was going so we uh gave up the whole work and play thing no we gave up work and moved into the van so we could still play and have somewhere to live we could not afford to pay someone else's second mortgage anymore and i was not willing to work multiple jobs so someone else could own other houses so when we gave our rental notice i actually didn't own a vehicle uh somebody didn't want me living in a tent in the middle of the estuary so they gave me an old van and that van lasted about five months the engine seized the weather was nice so i lived in a tent for about five months down by the river which is definitely not allowed anymore um but it got me going so i then could buy a minivan and so we lived in a minivan for over two years we couldn't even sit up straight you know if it's raining you open a door and it's raining inside it became a lot and the van the suspension couldn't handle the food hoarding so after about two plus years of murdering that van my dad found this van for me on craigslist and it was waiting to go to auction so it was about a week away from going to auction so we got the empty van we were this i was the second owner we got the van for about twenty six hundred dollars that was four and a half years ago don't expect to get a price like that now unless the person doesn't know anything about the value of these old chevy gmc vans so then we built the initial shell and over the years i've added things and you know done upgrades you know added the shelf a year later added the kitchen door a year later um you know then you know a couple years go by we built the crate we built the back back thing and then last summer with covid i uh i wasn't gonna i didn't feel right driving around all over the place and i didn't want to be around the crowds of people flooding to bc essentially so i hung out in my parents backyard and we did the body work we fixed all the rust and we filled the dents and we painted it green and did the party doors did the purple on the side and the back doors i had just bought a bunch of different colors from opus and decided i was gonna get them all in there and that's what came out at the end of the day there was no plan at the start of the day and that's what happened um several beers in and about eight hours of painting so it's a constant work in progress i have a long list of projects coming up you know i gotta i never got around to finishing the front so i'm gonna be insulating and putting in a cedar on the ceiling there so i just can save 10 minutes a day wiping down condensation keep a little bit of heat retention i've never wired power so i do have a panel that i can fold out and a little power bank but mostly i get just charge things charge power banks while i'm driving um so that's one of the things i'd like to do is wire into the inverter and it's just it's it's it's a home it's like living in a house like you always got projects when your homeowner same as living in the van i never had a bunch of money just to throw it at once so every year you know like round up some funds and put it into the van and do some projects spend time with my grandpa spend time with my dad you know just like having those memories of working on things together and you know learning some new skills so over time i just become a more skilled person can create more things and do things for myself and i also do pretty much all the mechanics on this thing so i've i've done a lot a lot of projects we've resealed the intake brakes um i'm mostly through replacing all the suspension i can do a full tune-up plugs wires everything within an hour so that feels nice that i've got that down real smooth but it saves me a lot of money so this van total into it after about four and a half years i have about 10 grand into it i've saved thousands thousands and thousands of dollars doing things myself and what you don't see in the the money i put into it is there's also about 700 man hours between me and my dad and my grandpa and friends that have helped me so it takes time it took a lot of time but this i feel like this house really represents me and it feels like the my favorite place to hang out in the world is inside this little box so i'm glad i did it this way and slowly and that i spent the time in the minivan to really be able to imagine exactly what i wanted so that when i ended up with something bigger i could commit to it as my forever van and make it something that just felt good felt good to live [Music] so one thing i will add having lived in a van for as long as i have is that it's not as easy as it used to be there's a lot of places that don't allow us to park anymore and unfortunately that's because of people getting into it and um maybe not realizing the consequences of their actions so i would just say please please never just leave your feces on the ground and pack out your garbage pack out the garbage that's there and just leave it a little nicer you know be respectful to locals if somebody doesn't want you parked where you're parked it's not worth getting in a fight with the locals about it just just move on find somewhere else let things be peaceful because that will is what will make all of our lives doing this a lot easier so yeah please because it's really sad to see all the places i can't park anymore so um yeah and if you're into me i guess and frank especially uh we're on social media at tideline to alpine so i'm on instagram a lot with that and i got youtube happening so i'm stoked that after seven years of uh of wanting to get it going and people suggesting i do a youtube i finally feel like we're old enough now that i can dedicate the time to editing videos and not just live in the go go go go go because i just i just couldn't i just couldn't imagine all that work back then but you know hey now we got time while you nap you nap i edit videos that sound good look on his face like yep all right thanks for showing us your home yeah thanks for coming by see you [Music] guys [Music] baby the reality is a family so close [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: VANCITY VANLIFE

Views: 284,631

Keywords: vancity vanlife, vancity van life, van life, vanlife, van life canada, solo van life, van tour, van conversion, van life tour, van build, tiny house on wheels, tiny home, rv, camper van, van, travel, conversion, tiny home on wheels, campervan, van build tour, van conversion tour, off grid, living in a van, camper, tiny house, diy van conversion, camper van conversion, diy van tour, cute van tour, tiny house tour, solo female van tour, solo female van life, van life build

Id: g1fZvPjMLxc

Length: 21min 33sec (1293 seconds)

Published: Wed May 05 2021