Unique and awesome DIY Sienna campervan for adventures (ridiculously comfortable bed!)

hi there so I wanted to give you a tour of my campervan the YouTube community has just been amazing for me in terms of getting ideas for this and setting it all up so I wanted to kind of give a video of what I've done here and let you guys know what it's been like so this is a 2007 Toyota Sienna it's front-wheel drive it's an le model and I use it as kind of my camping adventure road trip vehicle everything from kind of weekend trips also to you know one three week long road trips with mountain biking and hiking backpack and all that kind of stuff so two main drivers for this setup one is that I wanted everything to be not permanent and kind of modular so that I could easily pull everything out and just put it back into passenger mode which I do periodically and then the other thing for me is when I camp I really want to sleep really well and so as you'll see the bed system here is all designed around comfort and being able to like really sleep through the night so that coming back from these trips it's you know it's truly a refreshing vacation so so we're more inside the van right now this is an 8 inch thick foam mattress it's technically a futon mattress it's super super comfortable and right now it's set up in couch mode which I do when the weather is not super great and it also provides a nice back support rest too so as well as basically a built-in ottoman - alright so now I'm going to show you how to convert the couch into the bed and just for a frame of reference I'm about 6 feet 2 inches tall so we lift the mattress hinge this out grab this guy just a simple bolt run that through here into the leg same thing on the other side and then you just pull the mattress out and the bed is all done just like that so when you want to convert the bed back into the couch real simple pull it out a little ways bring it up then all you have to do is close the hatch and kind of reverse the hinge on the bed and then just push this back down all right so what I've got for my kitchen box is this cabinet right here this is a used wood cabinet that I got at a building supply store shout out to bring recycling got this for six dollars I painted it and basically this is my kitchen box I've got pots and pans stove dishes spices all that kind of stuff in here I've had kind of an evolution with the latch system to keep the drawers from sliding out I tried straps I tried bungee cords right now I've settled on kind of a hinge snap kind of closure type style like these so basically just with one hand you can just pop in it and then drawers open and then real easy I also put a shelf on the side this guy here so it's just a real simple bracket system on the sides and then you got a shelf for you know cooking doing whatever you want I like this because with the bed and the hinge I needed something that installed this way I couldn't have something that folded and I also like having the adjustable height that's super nice and then I've got this secured with some straps kind of you can't really see behind the way there that attached to one of the arm grab things and and then the floor here so this is a click together flooring that I got also at bring recycling and then there's a plywood underneath that so it's basically kind of a repurposed no wood wood floor basically and another reason for kind of the modular thing here is that underneath the floor there is a bolt for the spare tire so there's a nut right here and basically you'd have to take the floor out in order to drop the spare tire that's right here so and then this little backseat organizer thing this is just for snacks and food I've got some oatmeal stuff on the bottom and then energy bars and things like that alright so I'll show you a couple other random things so I went with Yokohama Geo Lander tires absolutely love these things so far I've only had them for about a year but they've been great and snow and gravel roads and everything the window deflectors or weathertech got those on the front windows and also the middle windows here really happy with those they're super low-profile and in terms of having the van be you know vented while you're camping in there I've never had an issue with condensation and then for longer trips I usually will put a rooftop box up here and sometimes throw a full-size spare in there or you know just mountain buy gear stuff that's stinky stuff like that so just show you a little bit of the body here so kind of get a sense of the amount of room in here I've got the front seat pulled forward a bit usually end up just putting a cooler right in there but again it's pretty simple it's a mini van these things are awesome all right so I'll show you some random things here on the inside so I've strung an old climbing daisy chain between the seats with and sometimes then on shorter trips I'll load groceries and things like that and these bags and then when I get where I'm going I can just swing them around to the front see and then they're out of the way in terms of window coverings got this idea from other YouTube videos this is reflectix this is the yellow part is just cotton cloth and then the flipside is felt and it's just spray adhesive on there so all you do is get where you're going and then these just kind of wedge in like that and reflective you know insulating and all that the yellow makes the inside a little bit more pleasant and the felt kind of matches with the window tinting and for lighting in here what I've got is these LEDs on a string they go down to this base unit here it's a Lucy brand solar-powered charger and all I did was I just ran the cord basically between the plastic and the headliner so it's real easy to just kind of pull these out push them back in that keeps them a little bit more out of the way and then over here this is the USB charger for the lights down in here I'll keep usually one of these ravpower battery bank things so I can charge that also charge my phone in there again really simple alright so a couple of the things so last year what I did was I played around with mosquito netting on the outside and I held it in place with magnets that worked okay this year I'm going to try having it in the headliner and then when I get somewhere I'll just kind of fold it out so we'll give that a try I have two of these collapsible tent poles from REI and what I do is I set up an awning that's attached to the roof rack and then it goes out via these poles and and forms kind of Sun and rain protection the bed platform is only about four or five inches off the ground or off the floor here in the front and then in the back it's maybe an inch at the most there's not a whole lot of storage under the bed but I'm ok with that it gives me a lot of headroom and then I can still get the nice mattress in here and again because I don't live out of this van I don't need a ton of storage so that works plenty for for these trips that I do couple other things that I learned in this process one if you are shopping for a used van I would highly recommend getting it inspected by a mechanic before you buy it in my experience a lot of used vans out there have been driven pretty darn hard and so chances are it's probably gonna need quite a bit of maintenance in order to get it to kind of a really solid reliable level this one I got a dealer it was a little bit you know better taken care of but I still had to put a few thousand dollars into it in terms of tires brakes fluids engine tune-up all that stuff but nonetheless still it's a paid-for vehicle got it for less than 15 grand total all in with everything so definitely happy with it so far minivans are great vehicles they drive super well they're easy to park maneuver great you know height so all of that's great this is a generation 2 Sienna this one has the newer style engine it's a 3.5 liter it's a little bit more powerful and it has a timing chain instead of a belt it's the same engine they put in a lot of other Toyotas so it's super easy to get parts for and they made hundreds of thousands of these vans so yeah super happy with it it's a great road trip adventure vehicle so yeah hope you guys found that helpful and good luck with your van builds

Channel: Alan Twigg

Views: 170,891

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Id: 1LT_kqNRoFY

Length: 10min 29sec (629 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 17 2020