Ultimate DIY Camper Van ~ Pop Top, Bathroom & Shower Built In

hi my name is Andrew and I'm Katie we're from Florida and today we're outside of Seward Alaska this right here is the flak wagon FL being Florida a K being Alaska we drove all the way from Key West to the end of the road in Homer and here we are in Seward now we quit our jobs and we decided we wanted to travel for at least a year was our original plan and not really knowing exactly what we're gonna do up here just just wanted to go for the adventure so the trip up here mechanically went off without a hitch we spent a lot of time and effort repairing or pre repairing any wearable parts that could go out spark plugs brake pads rotors leaf springs have been beefed up pretty much everything was prepared for the trip beforehand haven't had to make a single repair since then other than you know break it a few hinges here and there yanking doors off so this is our kitchen this is where we do all of our cooking we actually made these wood pieces to fit on the doors and I painted them and he did most of the woodwork and on here we put some of our leftover vinyl countertop it's a countertop from the interior that we had leftover this is our stove typically what we've been doing is we cook mainly dinner on this and and breakfast we make coffee and bagels and things like that pancakes but for lunch we try not to it's just it's hard to constantly use this cooking because it's is a process these are propane tanks just a standard camp nothing fancy again this was just a coleman general camps of and we've actually been using the same stove for four or five months now yeah haven't had any problems with it so we're really happy with that we do cook inside we just make sure these windows pop open so we make sure those are open and there's a window in the back that opens as well there's also a carbon monoxide detector immediately above the stove that will go off should we cause any fumes haven't had any issues cooking inside and we actually do cooking a lot because of the rain so when you're cooking outside in the rain it's not that watch it's gonna wind more than them in the wind to here so pulls out the stove another thing you'll notice we did on these boxes to all the doors lay flat this is extra workspace everywhere just to make it easier both of these cabinets fit right inside this door jamb here one thing with the van or any other tiny home you want to make the most of any space that you have so I saw dead space there I need a place to put a kitchen there it is and it folds up and goes away nice it's more storage there's also space inside the doors here as well that's being utilized on both sides - I mean there's extra propane olive oil hoses and behind this is all insulated as well you can't really can't see it but makes it warmer the whole van is insulated really really well insulated starting from the bottom up there's a half inch foam insulation and there's half-inch plywood than those vinyl floors so why don't we move on in and we'll go talk a little more about that this was probably my greatest junk yard find I found a sports 'mobile in a junkyard and the guy didn't know what it was and he charged me 50 dollars for the roof it took me a long time to get off and it took me a longer time to get it on a lot of things need to be repaired on it and I give a lot of credit to the guys on the sports mobile forum who gave me a lot of good advice on how to do exactly that there's only a handful of people outside of sports 'mobile that have installed one of these themselves and that was a long process and I was able to track down the factory that makes these canvases we were able to get a new tent for it because the old one was pretty weathered it came off of the same 1994 that we got the doors from and from that as well we got the swivel seat here that turns around and we'll kind of work our way here now up here in the front we also got the swivel seat off of that old sports mobile which gives us a lot of extra living space is really nice a few other things to note up here insulating curtain one thing I would definitely recommend if you're doing van life army life bus life anything blackout curtains because inevitably you're gonna end up in a Walmart parking lot and you're gonna want to block out your windows so I made these inside as insulation and these are completely blackout curtains so we snap them on so you put these marine snaps onto the the door so you can see them all around and no one no one can see and you can't see out it's completely it's completely dark if you just warm or - and cooler if we want to stay cooler so this is my electrical control panel back here there's a fuse panel that everything that runs off of 12-volt power goes through that fuse panel first I have an inverter 2000 watt inverter for charging appliances that don't accept 12 volt charging or running something like a blender or anything like that I would say that having an inverter is not essential it's a lot of money for one but we do use it almost every day for smoothies but almost every appliance that we have is 12 volt the fridge is 12 volt the fans 12 volt all the lighting is 12 volt LED and if you want to get more 12 volt appliances just look in the RV in the marine industry they already exist there are 12 volt blenders you can buy if you want to dedicated 12 volt blender there's a couple switches here you can notice as well this top one turns the solar on and off it always stays on it doesn't always work so great up here but the bottom switch connects this onboard battery bank to the alternator so if we're going on a long drive I can charge these batteries with the engine while we're running always have to be very considerate to turn it back off when we stop though so we don't drain the van battery because it doesn't have a one-way voltage sensitive relay we probably maybe once every other day will charge the batteries with the engine however it does take a long time to charge the batteries all the way up whenever we can we plug in the van and top the batteries up and get like a true full charge and we have to do that probably unfortunately almost every other day while we're here otherwise the fridge shuts off and I've kind of been tweaking the fridge where we'll turn the fridge on only at night and through the day it just acts like a cooler that keeps everything cool I monitor the temperature of it if it gets above you know upper 40s 50 degrees we'll turn it on or I'll run the van for a little bit get it going the top degrees is the fridge and then this is outside it's real time we keep track of it yep and if it's too hot they get too cold even it happens sometimes we leave the fridge running too long and it gets down to 25 degrees your stuff freezes installing onboard propane is very expensive has to be done by a licensed propane installer and I couldn't get it done for less than a quote for like fifteen hundred two thousand dollars for onboard propane you can buy propane kits for vehicles but even a new propane vehicle ready propane tank is going to cost four or five hundred dollars and then you still have to do it yourself and moving vehicle with propane tank that I installed myself is kind of one of those things where I need to draw a line somewhere you know I'll do electrical work I'll do 12 volt appliances I'll cut holes in the fan but if endangering or safety is not something that I'm gonna do the charge controllers back there to the 12-volt remote switches back there as well I ran everything through this part of the kitchen unit here before installing it and that was another thing I did I pre ran a lot of my wires you know before I put the wall up I ran wires for things I knew I was gonna need and then I ran extra wires for things I didn't know I was going to need until I needed them later so there's there's three different types of insulation in this van the first layer is reflectix which is the foiled bubble wrap and that went directly against the wall in larger gaps we put fiberglass insulation something you need to be very careful about with fiberglass insulation is it absorbs moisture so if you're heating your van or cooking in your van it could get wet and it could be a sponge that's gonna rust your van from the inside out all the fiberglass in here is bagged so it will not absorb moisture a vapor barrier is another way to prevent moisture from absorbing into your fire glass and then on top of that there's slats that run the length of the van and in between each of those slats is the foil backed foam three-quarter inch foil backed foam and the fan stays pretty toasty with the pop top down we don't lose a lot of heat especially with the curtains up we did a lot better before we did the pop top because the pop top is a fiberglass roof with just a thin piece of the reflectix inside of it so that did decrease our r-value quite a bit and we do have a little buddy heater if we need very rarely do we have to use the buddy heater it's nice every now and then but we can always just turn on the van and turn on the heat and it does heat up back here pretty really fast and then it kind of retains that heat we've only we've only used it maybe once or twice and I'm almost eight times now that we're talking about I'm thinking about it why do we even have so moving this way around the van this is our kitchen unit we built this as well I was very fortunate Katie's dad was really nice to me and builds pool tables and hotel furniture and let me step into his workshop for an afternoon crank this thing out in six hours yep and everything else took so long I mean yeah just like these boards I have tools to get you know general woodworking done he had the machinery that we needed to make a nice clean cut on large pieces of plywood and then we painted it we antiqued it we glazed it a laminate countertop and cut the sink into it and it's purpose-built it's built to fit exactly the layout that we wanted it contours to the back of the van so there's not any large gaps in it the fridge fits perfectly we have a little freezer in here as well I would love a bigger fridge because we find ourselves growing to the grocery store once once every week it adds up because instead of buying in bulk which is ends up being cheaper you have to buy less you end up spending more if that makes sense whereas if you go to Costco you can get really cheap things but we do have these storage units and these also contain food as well and then we kind of limit ourself on the refrigerator because it does sometimes get up in the 50s so down here we have some general storage as well too and these are where the batteries are these are this the 6 volt they are lead acid batteries so one thing with lead acid is they can't tip over the leak and they need to be ventilated or they'll give off potentially flammable or toxic gas fortunately with the fridge and events back there that ventilates them enough that's okay I did put them in battery boxes as well just in case of something sloshing around and then we have just general cleaning supplies down there and inside here as well as where our water tank lives and this is another scenario where I've built a water tank or bought a water tank that fits perfectly inside the kitchen and I had the fridge and I knew which water tank I was going to get and I had the batteries before I built this kitchen unit and the sink as well so I knew exactly what size this thing needed to be in the 16 gallons doesn't sound like a whole lot but that's enough to last us easily three days for cooking probably fishing we've probably gone a week on just that water tank alone just try to be considerate washing dishes so we usually fill up the sink maybe halfway and then we try to conserve water that way instead of leaving the sink running we don't leave a sink running brushing our teeth and it's just it's kind of eye-opening you realize how much water you use and it runs on a 12-volt pump as well and this is just an RV water tank pump I have it on switch so we'll turn the pump off when we're done and that's important because should you spring a leak you don't want your pump to cycle out all your water into your van or bus so these two are lights and this one is a porch light that's out there and the other two are just open right now in case I want to wire something else later we also have a remote switch for turning on the inverter and then 12-volt charging station and we have one of those over here as well where we charge our phones yep USB charging station on the other side I should show them what I'm sitting on so this is not only a nice fancy steep or footrest but this is where we do our business it's just a simple you know self-contained toilet and it is really not as nasty as it sounds so for number one only please but it really is simple to take apart and it's you don't have to get your hands dirty doing it you just carry that tank to any toilet and dump it in push a button and then you're off and that's it so that thing has actually been really really handy it's nice to have your own bathroom in here yeah so a lot of the times we just camp where there's no bathroom I mean a lot of the times we can't off-the-grid I would say well for out in the woods I'll go to the bathroom in the woods but if we're in a city city yeah and there's not a bathroom immediately available this is nice to have so this is our bed it is in couch mode right now so this does fold out and lock into this channel right here and we built the frame ourselves so the frame is just wood frame and underneath is storage so when we slide this all the way and we bring this piece of mattress up we can lift up the storage unit in our storage there we have a lot of emergency foods just in case we were driving on the Alcan so we are worried that maybe we would get stuck for a long period time luckily it didn't didn't happen in there's also a lot of our winter gear so things we don't need necessarily right now and we'll put our summer year and there when we switch to winter we did spend a lot of time picking out the bed because this is our bed it's not just we're not just camping in this for the weekend we are sleeping in this every night so we needed it to be comfortable for us but what we did was we cut it with a turkey Carver and then we we had to make the sheets custom we did by sheets and then we had to cut them reso them to fit our new mattress cut in half we have a lot of canned goods so we we basically rotate our meals we Mexican food so we do tacos burritos so things like beans rice vegetables and tortillas tortilla chips avocados and then we do pasta and then we we do something else we don't really get fancy with our cooking because we don't have an oven and we don't have much storage but it's worked out pretty good so far wait well tell him the truth what tell him that you're vegan oh yes I'm vegan too so yep I'm I'm a vegan he's a meat-eater so it's a little interesting cooking for the both of us but we make it work this is our closet this is all of our clothes all the clothes that we use so I had to downsize a lot on my closet these two are mine these two are his and then down here we have toiletries medicine and then we have our electronics all in here and then we have bookshelves so both of these back here our bookshelves and then back here is our towels so yeah we had to downsize a lot of our possessions we sold a lot of things donated a lot of things I went through my closet and just you know so there's a lot of things you just don't need that's what we found it's pretty freeing actually to get rid of material goods so this is something that I would definitely change that I want to change maybe over the winter because you know our stuff is just all visible and I would I would rather it be in a closed space that way things don't come falling out which if you pack it in well it won't but there is times where we go over a bump and just everything falls out back here picking up the pieces but it's it has worked out but I would definitely want a cabinet system so this is a sports mobile pent house I would not recommend that anybody install one of these in ourselves it's an extremely complicated system and there's a lot of moving parts there's a lot of dangerous moving parts here too there's a there's a spring here that extends almost six feet long and it's loaded with about a thousand pounds of tension when it's all the way extended these scissor bars come down and it pre loads this spring to aid you in popping it up and it's supposed to spring it all the way up however with the added weight of solar panels on top it doesn't work quite as well as I'd hoped this is another thing that I'm really glad we put it on the van however if I could do this again I would buy a van that I could walk into and stand up in naturally without having to pop it up or lower it down every time we wanted to go somewhere it is nicer because it keeps our center of gravity really low reduced wind resistance better gas mileage all those things but I would enjoy the luxury of being able to just naturally stand and walk around this was probably the most complicated this was the most complicated and time-consuming thing we did to the van it I mean cutting the roof off was very intimidating I used a circular saw believe it or not with a sheet metal blade and it cut through the roof like butter that was actually really easy to do but getting the measurements exactly right and it was it was very nerve-wracking because I only had one roof and once I cut it off that was it there's no going back so I had no room for error and having never done one of these before I was very hesitant to do it and the penthouse actually sat in my backyard for six months and I was just going to get rid of it because I didn't want to do it until I got probably I got brave enough I kept pushing yeah well I'm very fortunate again I mentioned the sports mobile forum if you're thinking about doing a van conversion not just a sports mobile there's a lot of general van conversion information on there and the guys on that forum are like engineering type mindset and they're gonna hold you to a really really high standard it's hard to make them happy but if you do then you know you're doing a good job and I and I really strive to do that and I've made a lot of improvements to the penthouse as well you know just upgrading the bolts nylon system here I put metal bars inside these metal bars because they were starting to bow and I didn't want that to happen we did all the trim work here we insulated it put the raptor liner on the roof new rubber seals reupholstered these things that were all over the place yeah this is one thing everybody should do you should have a fan in your van because on those nights when your Walmart camping you're gonna want a little airflow maybe and this is awesome and this is just a simple cranked up fan and then three speeds this is another one of those things I plugged into my 12-volt remote so if I want to turn it off I can turn it off with the remote without having to get out of bed so before I started to build I wanted to fix everything that was wrong with the van and things that I could pinch potentially see going wrong with the van and I had this really strange fear of rust so I rubber lined the entire floor of the van with truck bedliner before doing anything else anything that was rusty or any holes that were anywhere I bonded them I primed them and then we and then we rubber lined him then we did the insulation and then the plywood sheets that are cut to fit and then this floor is actually laminate flooring comes in a big sheet that might be might be final actually but anyways it was a sheet and I wanted to get the sheet that was like the fake fake hardwood because it's waterproof I mean it's a solid sheet so if you spill anything on it it's not going to go through the cracks anywhere so you could sweep it out you know if you get in a car accident bang your head a little bit it's blood on the floor not a big deal to just wipe it out so there's half inch of insulation and then there's a half inch of plywood and then the laminates on top of that so that gave us about an inch and change over top of this here so put a little aluminum l-bracket covered up hide the seams and then we put sealant and all that - so it's pretty watertight I'm not really worried about water getting underneath it anywhere and I did the rubber lining all the way to the front of the van just to make sure there was no rust so the exterior is one of the first things people notice and ask questions about probably more than anything is what kind of paint is this and this is Raptor on the top the black is this is a truck bed coating made by a company called you pol and to do it yourself kit it's an epoxy two-part kit they give you the gun in the kit and you can spray it on with just an air compressor and it's tinta bull to any color so I picked out this whitish grayish color and tinted it myself in my backyard waited for a clear day did all my prep work just went to town turned out great no I didn't intend on doing the whole van first I did the roof initially and got some bad wind and the black got all over the regular paint and we could not get it off we tried everything every synthetic every solvent every type of like synthetic cleaner acetone it would not come off so I was thinking if it's that hard to get off let's just do the whole van and we did and this is what we end up with and it's got it's not a bad texture definitely adds some noise reduction to the van itself salt protection as well from rocks and I've even heard some people joked that it creates like a golf ball dimple effect and gives you better air resistance no better gas mileage harder to scratch yeah these are BF Goodrich all terrains I've gone through a lot of all-terrain tires in my lifetime done some mild off-roading and some mudding in Florida in my opinion this is the best true all-terrain tire that runs really well on the highway doesn't make a lot of noise and it's not too hard on the wall either and the rims were you know those were just an upgrade I didn't really need them but it does give me extra width with the tire so I was able to get a little more track on the tire that's the only benefit for that and starting from the bottom to the whole suspension of the van has been rebuilt my beefed up the leaf springs added an extra leaf I've added a rear sway bar to help with the weight of the camper from shaking back and forth Bilstein shocks all the way around upgraded coil springs up front and I replaced all the ball joints the tie rod ends all the bushings are replaced with polyurethane we can kind of move up that way a little bit I replaced the front brakes with power stop brakes and rotors the heavy-duty ones because we've got you know what an empty 5,000 pound dish van is now probably 8,000 pounds so you got a lot of extra weight I really wanted that stopping power going downhill there slotted rotors as well so they don't overheat quite as easily this is a two-wheel drive as much as I think 4x4 is awesome this is our home we live in this I do not want to put my house our house in a position where we need four by four to get it out so although we have been in some interesting situations that's the other thing too we've driven to Alaska with a two-wheel drive vehicle with an open differential Oh going up mountain up mountains places we should not have been in a two-wheel drive vehicle and I've never once had an issue with slipping or traction or wished I had four-wheel drive we brought up a motorcycle and it's a shame it's not on here right now because this is my motorcycle rack and it holds a Yamaha TW 200 it's a small dual-sport motorcycle street-legal so we can take it anywhere and it rode the whole way on the front of the van on the Alcan this is just a standard tow hitch that I put up front originally and right away I realized that the motorcycle rack was gonna sit way way too low and it was going to reduce my approach angle to any Hills or even a speed bump to almost nothing so I put an 8 inch riser on it first of all and then put the rack on it and all of these the rack is weighted for 500 pounds carrying capacity the drop or rise hitch is rated for just the same as well so we haven't had any issues with this surprisingly either that went off well one thing that was an issue was visibility with headlights the motorcycle blocked the headlights so that created a whole nother problem and I had to get snow plow headlights put those on there wired them in got some extra LEDs kind of crudely wired him in I didn't do anything too crazy just some simple relays I did have to do a little bit of welding I mean I made the grille out of an old RV tow kit for towing a car I didn't do any heavy fabricating I just modified things that already closely fit what I needed them to do one thing that is a little bit of a bummer about these for advanced is the headlights really aren't that great they don't put out a ton of light so going off-road or back trails it's really nice to have a lot of light especially if you're getting off the highway late at night you're tired you're trying to find a place to camp out down a dirt road we've used it a number of times great for wildlife spotting too actually when we're driving on a dirt road you can see coyotes or foxes and much much further off we do have solar panels as well so these are 160 watt panels there's two of them so we have a 320 watt system and it runs into a 40 amp multi-point power tracking charge controller and MPPT which is the most efficient type of charge controller you can get from there we actually run it in two to six volt golf cart batteries and I've wired them together to make a big 12 volt battery one hundred two hundred and twenty five amp hours and that battery power is everything in the van the fridge the lights water pump the water pump the blender for making smoothies everything runs off of those batteries they're really efficient so I had to pay a little bit of extra money to get the wattage I wanted in the smaller package that was gonna fit on the roof and be light enough to work they are mounted onto a track system that is designed for yakima roof rack this is another example of me modifying something slightly that already serves a purpose and just made some bolts that that go right into the track and it's adjustable too so if I needed to slide the solar panels forward or backwards we could or remove them entirely that's also possible so we have here a Swing Out bike rack I got this on Craigslist I got most of the stuff on Craigslist I was we've been planning on doing this for so long that gave us an advantage of being able to buy things used and be patient and just wait for something that we know we're gonna need and buy it when we see a good deal and I think I paid $100 for this bike rack and it's MSRP was like $550 same thing for the motorcycle mount up front I think I paid 150 bucks for it regularly 500 so if you're patient and you know you're gonna build a van or you know you're gonna do this go garage saleing look on Craigslist go on eBay there's deals to be had go to the junkyard I love many hours there we're from Florida so the mountains is very new to us so we we have done some off-road trails but I'm not as comfortable as he is on a bike so I'm I'm still learning we're trying it out so there is a few things that I wanted to make sure to do with the van like as far as requirements I wanted to be able to use all the doors at any time that I wanted to so nothing could be permanently blocked or had to be like dismounted to access anything that's why the motorcycles on the front and not the back because if it was on the back I'd have to unload it every time I wanted to open these doors so the swing out hitch is really nice for that this is this actually mounts onto the hitch here I did weld this additional support bracket here just to give it a little extra kind of counter that leverage because it does it's a lot of weight and it hangs out pretty far just to be putting all that torsion on at one point there so that helps stabilize the whole system so there's a few other little features of the van as well I bought a 12-volt remote system and I wired up various things to it so we have a little porch light here on the back that and this is a simple amazon fifteen dollar kit it's not hard to do you just have to wire any 12-volt appliance into it our fan is wired into it there's another interior light wired into it and this rear light I have one extra just in case I decide something else it's not the very pretty side of the van no this is the as the rear of the garage you want to show in the shower yeah so this is our shower system which surprisingly we have not used much because we only have 16 gallons onboard of water so this goes very quick so now we have a shower I'll turn it on real quick yep and we have used it only a couple times bathing suit yeah we really don't use this as often as you might think kind of our go-to shower it's baby wipes baby wipes are use more often than not and we also have a gym membership so along the way we are able to use showers gym memberships are really helpful so it's not a lot of water pressure anyways and we find that with 16 gallons on board that if we were to shower everyday we'd be out of water every two days especially with all you know if it's hot you're drinking a lot of water depending on what we're cooking we cook most of our meals ourselves we very rarely eat out and then washing dishes 2 uses a lot of water does this is our water fill so all you do is unscrew the cap and then we have a filter hose and so we hook it up to any what is it drinkable any potable water sort of water it's only a tank on board there's no live pressure system we built the van to exclusively camp off the grid so there was never any intention to be at a campsite and I think we've only camped or paid to camp at campsites in Yellowstone Glacier National Park basically all the parks in Denali there's no other way to do it yeah and inside before the tank makes it to the sink there's a really fancy 3m water filter filters out lead contaminants anything you don't want to drink so I would feel comfortable drinking lake water if I had to her maybe not so much but also over here we have a power input so in addition to having the solar panels there's a 12-volt battery charger in here as well that will top up the batteries and I've done a few things with this plug I mean it goes to the battery charger it also goes to the fridge this is the rear of the fridge here and it's a 3-way fridge so it can run off a 12-volt power or it can run off a 110 and I'll I'll flip the switch and it will run off of the plug so that helps the batteries and stay healthy that way the fridge also does run off a propane but I don't have it hooked up to do that we have no onboard propane system but we do cook with propane so we had to do these all as well we had to cut the van so I got this fridge from a neighbor of mine a refurbished fridge out of an old 1986 pop-up camper and this is again being frugal I knew I needed a fridge in 12-volt or three way fridges brand-new of almost any size are like $600 how's patient I waited I was looking around looking around 40 bucks right here and it works it's not the most efficient machine on the market and this is probably one of my biggest gripes currently about the van it is using a technology I believe it's called absorption technology so any fridge that uses propane is really really efficient with propane but not so efficient with 12 volt or 110 power and this is the biggest tax on our battery is the refrigerator and depending on where we are it's a catch-22 sometimes here in Alaska the weather is colder so it doesn't take as much energy to heat the fridge however I haven't seen the Sun except a handful of times a summer but in Florida where we're from for example we get tons and tons of sunshine but it's so hot that it's hard for the fridge to keep up with it this is one of the things if I could change something about the van I would buy a dedicated 12-volt slash 110 for a two way fridge that uses I forget the name of the technology but it's it's newer it's much much more efficient than a 3-way fridge I think it saves you like ten times the power you're gonna draw half an amp as opposed to drawing five maybe ten amps twenty dollars out of a junkyard and it's double paned tempered glass and it slides open and there's a screen on it as well it slides open unfortunately we have a leak somewhere nothing is leaking inside the vehicle which is good news but inside this window we've got some moisture buildup and I'm not sure where it's coming from it's performed great so far and I haven't had any other issues with it so I'm generally happy with it well and tell them about how this was meant for a straight surface but we put it on a curved so we had to okay yeah so if you're going to install aftermarket windows on a van one thing you need to be very considered of is vans are curved most of them are anyways the older of some of the older vans are less curved some of the sprinters are straight if you get a window that's built for a trailer or an RV they are not curved at all so if you get one that's very tall in the vertical direction you might have a gap of half an inch at the top or bottom so you need to be very considerate of that this one was not so much like I could barely fit a penny underneath the top or bottom this is Dyke or RV window sealant on it really excellent stuff I've used probably two or three tubes of it around the van just sealing everything and I haven't had water get into the van anywhere you know on the roof on the sides through this stuff and its really been great so far the reason I bought a Ford van this particular model is because the body and the frame is the same from 1992 to 2013 that gives you 21 years of parts to scavenge through it's the most common van manufactured in North America anywhere in the country and in Canada and even here in Alaska you're gonna be able to get parts which is what I wanted because inevitably things do break and you need to be able to fix them what's really cool about it is this van is a 2006 and I'll show you here I wanted power windows and I did not have power windows on this van and I found power windows off of a 1994 in the junkyard so you can see the different colored door they were blue they were blue they were really blew the power window guts were inside the door so I took the door and I literally unbolted the old one and bolted this one right back up so you're talking about a van that was made twelve years prior and it was a bolt on application and even these door panels this door panel came off of a 2013 and it fit on the 1994 door which is really great common usage of parts there you can show them how it rolls down I didn't get the door panels with the original door they were destroyed and I had to wire up a new door motor relay system up in here you can kind of see Katy using I built just out of a plastic box and again I got this on Amazon paid like six bucks for it's just a little computer or electronics control box put some switches in and wired up my snowplow headlights the LED light bar the other LED lights and both the windows are wired into that little box as well also up there there's a switch that controls the backup camera which is inside the rear-view mirror so it's another fancy hidden backup camera system and that was really simple to install to you just swap out the old mirror run power to it and then hook it up to the camera in the back and that wasn't even that expensive either I think with the camera it was one hundred and fifty dollars Amazon as well yeah Amazon was one of my other go-to places for getting supplies and doing research and with prime I mean I could get things delivered to my house almost faster than I could go out to the store and spend time doing it because a trip to the hardware store we probably took three trips at the hardware store a week yep and a 30-minute trip turns into a four and a half hour trip almost every single time and I am exhausted when I'm done shopping at the hardware store [Applause] yeah well it's it's it's tough though shopping all the time so any chance I could save ourselves a trip to the hardware store we did and a few other things you'll notice up here I mean the roof we did all this put a new headliner on it just to give it a little custom color make it feel more homey we repainted a few things the plastic on the center console was a little worn so we freshened it up with some krylon plastic paint carpet on the dash floor mats I think those were both Amazon as well and they're cut the fit already so we didn't have to do any custom work on them that saved us a lot of time the doghouse pops right out and I can change the spark plugs did change the spark plugs from inside the van doesn't mean it was comfortable I'm not saying that at all actually hurt quite a bit but some of them were easy to reach anyways thanks for watching our video you could check us out on Instagram flack wagon Fla K W Agee so Florida to Alaska and that's how the name came about yep and it fits it pretty well because it is a rugged beast that has gotten us all the way here and I'm really happy with it thanks again [Music]

Channel: Tiny Home Tours

Views: 947,856

Rating: 4.8343129 out of 5

Keywords: tiny home, tiny house, tiny home on wheels, van life, camper van, shipping container, design, tiny houses, tiny homes, tiny house tour, sprinter van, sprinter conversion, vanlife, van conversion, camper, diy camper, diy camper van

Id: 9TmUAl1Utbg

Length: 40min 2sec (2402 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 05 2017