Old delivery truck outside, fast-transformer homestudio inside

there's many possibilities in terms of like what you can live in and what you can turn into your home and that's all i want to do is like spark that imagination so before amazon prime deliver groceries to people there was pea pod so this was it delivered groceries a lot of people living out of their vehicles this is a popular street for rvs but they're not supposed to park here based on that sign right there over seven feet high and 22 feet long you can't park here which essentially is that's my vehicle but i can get away with stuff that these others can't though because i don't look like an rv i look like a delivery truck and that's the beautiful thing about having this something that i didn't even realize would be a thing until i started parking in urban areas and people think you're just delivering people think i'm delivering i'm delivering happiness [Laughter] gas mileage gas mileage is horrible probably like 11 miles to the gallon so you don't bother something terrible i can i don't mind i don't have any rent so i have the money if i wanted to i could but i don't drive every day yeah and here i mean it's the cockpit right i wanted to kind of leave this alone so when people pass by it still looks like a delivery truck behind this door is where the magic happens we have the front lawn right here which is my favorite usually we take off our shoes you have my kitchen here with the stovetop burner underneath this i have my refrigerator that pulls out it's dual zone refrigerator and i basically have two zones they're both set to refrigerator right now but i could actually make one a freezer and one a refrigerator natural light is my favorite so i created this window and at night i just close it up and during the day to let my light in i put it up and hang it up there and i have my plants and my say got to have the plants but also this is locked down with industrial strength velcro and it stays there while i drive so you have like these are just metal cuts but i put some magnets up here to allow the cuffs to be up there that brings us to the sink running water what kind of pump you have it looks like water that comes fairly easily so it's about a 3.5 gallon per minute pump that's installed right under here this is the switch that will turn the pump on just a single throw switch which connects the circuit and i just got one of these five gallon jugs right here i have it connected to the water pump and it goes into my sink here's the gray water tank and this is a temporary setup for now did you have building experience before you did this one not really okay i've always been an engineer so i understand how things work and i understand how things are built because this van is low tech and i don't have the ability to have like just an electrical lock system it's all a manual latch system so you know the door opens with this latching mechanism it's pretty hefty i didn't have a way to kind of secure this if someone broke the window and they reached in here how to stop them from opening that so what my solution was was actually using the same magnet holds that you find in hospitals so when the door shut like that hospital door locks and you cannot get into unless you press a button or you have access so what i did was mount this 600 pound force magnetic lock vertically mounted it to the frame of the truck where the door is at and then this is the catch plate with a modified frame that i made out of wood and so when you lock that the light turns red and there's 600 pounds of force so you have the magnetic lock right here it's not active right now after 10 seconds it's ready to be active again and so i can shut this door it turns red and now if i try to open it it's not it's not going to open at all unless you're superman i have this remote that deactivates it to get out or to get in so now it's deactive so that's my low-tech solution to keeping this door secure so even if someone broke a window they wouldn't be able to open the door they'd have to climb in the window and if they got in here to steal something they'd have to climb back out so if they took something and they got out they deserved it the bathroom's actually in here curtain back i have a dry flush toilet shower skylight this is one of my favorites i needed natural light in here i have a couple hours to spare and i got some aluminum channeling some l brackets this is a piece of lexan i'm going to try and make a window frame so i can put it up in the roof there was more light coming in this skylight right here but my plant has grown so much but i i basically created my own skylight with a piece of lexan which is a little stronger than plexiglass this was one of the first skylights i put in because i wanted this place to be like my sanctuary it's just a really special place for me and the fact that i now have a plant thriving in this vehicle in this delivery truck so yes that's the living room we have bench seating on both sides i've had comfortably about eight people in here at once so this table kind of like moves around it's very handy i have storage on both sides with my furnace underneath here propane powered furnace keeps this place up nice and hot and then on the other side i have storage and this one actually goes all the way back past this wall this mural i painted it's the best zoom background i've ever had but it's also dual functionality this is actually my bed this is my murphy bed that folds out from the wall center the table pull it down and there's my bed how much time did that take you yeah i've timed it it's like 13 seconds or something like that it's the fastest bed setup of any van unless they have their bed like already a platform but if you have to make up your bed in your van this is the fastest setup no one else has a faster setup than i do and go stop did you build that i did these will control the swivel of the bed and i got these because it's low profile these were considerably less instead of the standard murphy bed hardware i have both hinges done and so it'll fold out from the wall like this when i built this at the time i hadn't seen any vans with murphy beds there are people doing them now which i love so you're using the benches as the platform the benches are the platform the bed is also it has a structure yeah it has slats in here and this is a full-size it is thick mattress full-size bed it's super strong like i can jump on it you know it's not going anywhere it's supported in terms of me lifting it up and putting it back it's supported by two gas struts that give kind of like a 40 pound help on each side i'll lift this up but you see i can like put it away with like one hand it stays up yeah so the gas struts yes the gas struts keep it up when i'm driving so like you can you can pull it and it'll go right back to where it the the bed was easily one of the most challenging parts because i needed to accommodate for space in the back without taking space from the living room area i also needed to accommodate for the width of the bed coming down right and so when it does come down you can actually lay another person right here which i love but full size bed i wanted the depth i wanted the space it's also silent right i didn't hear it's a yeah you know it's not but you see i can i can i can hold up with one hand it's not it's not terribly uh heavy at all either you are super strong the gas it's the gas stress but like you know i can but but that's because of the help if i didn't have the help from the gas struts which i absolutely put the i had to put this in before i installed these and it was heavy i have to get it okay that's right enough with your legs it took me and my mom to do all right that how did you like sort that out with the gas struts there's a lot of engineering these are the same gas struts that help your trunk lift up in your car they're the gas struts to help the back doors lift up in an suv but i didn't know what size what i'm doing is i'm actually using a vice grip to compress the struts yes just like that there's also no instructions on how to mount gas struts right like what position they're supposed to be in to maximize the power and that's something i actually want to work on it comes down right here yeah this was like prototype one and what did this look like before this was an empty truck metal yeah i got this from indiana and it was just empty it was an empty shell affordable it was 9 500 and i and i spent around 8 000 on the build okay with everything for a full home pretty much i got this truck with 260 000 miles on it and it's almost at 300 now i took apart the instrument panel there are two missing leds and one of them is for my engine light let's turn the key boom that's what should be there beautiful i had to change the radiator which is expected after 270 000 miles i changed the alternator myself spark plugs i hope this is it i changed the starter myself it lights o2 sensors various things but nothing crazy let's try it oh boy it actually looks like my roof can withstand some weight don't push on that i need to create extensions for the mc4 cables the mc4 cables are actually the ones that connect to the solar panels and come down through the roof right there how much security to build it out like overall if you condense all the like every day i worked on it probably be around seven months it has power and this is not a home this is a truck and a van so this is my electrical closet so some of these things i had to kind of figure it out because there was no documentation for it there's nothing no blueprint for me to follow in here i just have the charge controller and this basically determines how much charge the battery gets this is the inverter which converts the 12 volts coming from the solar panels and the battery and it converts it to 120 volts for our standard electrical appliances over here i have my 12 volt terminal buses and these power most of the things in this truck so the water pumps the camera monitors the cameras my lights my usb ports it powers pretty much everything there are two lithium batteries these are very light 30 pounds each but i have my breakers in here just in case there's an overload i have my induction stove the only problem is that it uses a lot of power so that's what i'm doing is like while the sun is out batteries are at 100 i understand how things are built but in terms of like me actually building something like this and building a base cabinet or building uh benches or shower even like just the shower and the plumbing stuff i've never done that before but i figured it out this is my closet it's accessible all the way down to here so i can open up these doors and access different parts and then up here i have like my hanging clothes and this is literally all the clothes that i have i don't have much i keep it simple yeah and then just like different materials like the corrugated metal was something that was like originally in my brain when i had this vision of this truck this is still my one of my favorite things when i walk in the truck is like this this material and this use just makes it feel like so industrial and then i have my pipe lights that i built i love these so these kind of go along with this but everything just really works for me it's absolutely a personification of my personality i have a little seat back that i built that's natural resting but if you you know need to sit back you can just kind of put that up and just sit back this is nice and comfortable and you used what for the box [Applause] yeah so these are locking shelf brackets they can collapse they can come up but they can hold a lot of weight and they're solid steel they just have these little clips underneath that you clip down and they put they go away so i took that and i said how can i use these to then install like a seat back and so i actually drilled holes through each bracket i got an aluminum tubing some l brackets and i got a threaded rod and i drilled it all the way through and then i mounted the l brackets to this piece of wood and now i have a seat back so i was pretty proud of this when i made it because it was something that i fabricated to work exactly as i envisioned it it also holds these pillows in place [Laughter] there's a screen right here and when i'm done you know just put it away so now we have my music closet so i have a bunch of guitars keyboards but i've been playing music for 16 years i love it and then the garage so i have my bike back here trash i have some supplies and tools and stuff but for the most part this is the garage just like anybody else's garage where things go that you don't have a place for it you go get to the back open the doors pull it out easy right is my company punoma is from a language called igbo which is derived from nigeria it means beautiful home so unoma means beautiful home and then house is the german spelling i have german roots i also have nigerian roots and it was kind of an ode and a nod to both of those genealogies and just kind of like changing the landscape and changing the narrative of what it means in terms of like what a home is but also the people living in things like this i want to be that safe haven that example that trustworthy figure in my community for people to do this i got some snacks in here though good healthy food i'm vegan it does help keep food in here but also i love junk vegan food they're vegan donuts that i love i love fries like

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 923,414

Keywords: stealth van, delivery truck home, delivery van home, converted delivery truck, vaughn dabney, 17k home, murphy bed, wall bed, customized home, hyper customized home, dry flush toilet, dual zone refrigerator, magnetic lock, DIY magnetic lock, solar truck, offgrid home, self sufficient home, tiny home truck, lexan skylights, DIY adjustable seat, los angeles boondocking, boondocking, unomahaus, stepvan conversion, stepvan, delivery truck conversion

Id: 3bNrn5b5qBA

Length: 15min 58sec (958 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 12 2021