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hello this is Patrick with New Jersey's outdoor adventures a YouTube channel is camping out today and I bumped into Sarah and Jess with uphill adventure they have a really cool Instagram account and they have a youtube channel with lots of really cool tours and they're going to give us a tour of their Sprinter van conversion today hello and welcome to new jersey outdoor adventures so this is our 2019 Mercedes Sprinter van it is 170 extended model it's tube it'll drive its four-cylinder and it's their gas model which was new last year when we bought it yeah so we love it and we converted it with two of our very good friends at Frank design company they're here in New Jersey and we've known them for a long time and they helped us build this thing absolutely yeah so we can go ahead and step in this right here is where we keep our shoes we yeah thought long and hard about where to store these and this just worked for us because Jessica here needed a plant balcony mostly the shoe storage is because we needed the plant balcony and so what to do with this other space yeah yeah yep and as we step in here you know the first thing that's noticeable is that we've blocked off our cab we did this for stealth we did this for insulation and we just like the aesthetic look of it so we do have this door here that we can use as a pass-through we use this a lot more than we anticipated we kind of thought that we would always open up the front doors and come around when moving back and forth in between the cab and the body but we actually crawl through pretty regularly up top here is the headliner shelf that we built we store our window coverings in here which we made with my mom using fabric from a local fabric store and our wool insulation so we did insulate the body of the van with Havelock wool insulation we use that on the ceiling and the walls the floor we used like a thin board insulation the foam board which we did to give us the most amount of head height and kind of standing space in here so if we look here at our bench this is all open storage we store our backpacks in here we have a tub in the back of like sweaters and winter clothes but it's pretty open as you see we have plenty of space and then if we move it right into our kitchen here so we have custom cabinetry that we built to fit our space our first pullout drawer here is our toaster oven we're an all-electric build no propane so we cook using our toaster oven as well as our induction burner and it's one burner we keep it in this drawer and we take it out plug it in on the counter top to use it we thought about doing like one of those inductions let's inset into the counter top we actually had that in the plans but when we could have mapped it out and saw how little counter space we would have if we did that we decided to go with the freestanding ones instead if we move along here to drawers this is our kind of silverware miscellaneous drawer keep all of our goodies in here we've got a fold-down drawer here for our toothbrushes face like that under the sink mister our trash can got our cleaning supplies our shampoos and conditioners down here there Pyrrha see which is completely biodegradable product and then we have a big hot water heater it's a four gallon electric Bosch hot water heater we have only used two handful of times up until this point but it's been nice and when we used it for the shower we don't use it for the sink next we have our isotherm it's a 12 volt fridge we can store a ton of food in here we don't like much right now but it's got its own little freezer as well where it just makes her coffee ice cubes and it's great on energy and efficiency because it is 12 volt so we don't need to run our inverter to use it appears pantry storage and all of these cabinets these ones up here are have magnetic catches on them to you know prevent them from opening as we drive we've noticed that we've had to add a few more here in there as we've gone along we've got two on this one but in here we store food and our plates our pots our bowls things of that nature up top got more storage we've got cups and just various kind of small food items that we kind of tucked away in these baskets here we've got our backsplash here which is a stick-on tile so it's not real tile it's just a sticker but our friends with Frank design did a great job you know lining it up making it symmetrical and we really really love it it adds you know a nice color in here over here on this side is technically it's a knife holder we don't use it to hold knives and we have a couple of different hooks that we put up here we'll put glasses rings on them jewelry things like that just to keep them out of the way we have light switches here for our under cabinet lighting all of our lights are on a dimmer we kind of normally run a little bit overboard with the amount of lights that we have we've got two here under cabinet we have one two three four five six seven eight in the I guess living space they're on their own switch and then we've got four over the bed group on their own switch and one in the shower they're all doing we don't use them all but we like to have them our ceiling is tongue-and-groove it's pine it came from just your local hardware store very easy to install and we love the look of it we really like the natural woods we just sealed it we didn't do anything else yep nothing else to it just put like a coat of poly over it and that was that so if we want to move it over here into I don't know I guess like our sitting area and we have this fold up table that we made we just recently installed this block on it because twice now twice a few times we had bumped into it and the whole thing came crashing down but now with this lock that we put on here it's you know pretty good to go you do have a small wooden folding chair that we keep in the cab behind our passenger seat which we pull out and we'll use as a chair in the middle here and one of us will sit on our little one-two punch and and we have a van to our video out and one of the comments that we got so often on our van tour video was that this bench is not adequate as a seat as a seat and it was never intended to be you see it covers our wheel well and inside it stores our laundry it just kind of was a the bonus that someone could sit on it so we put a little cushion on top and are making the most of it yeah so if we scoot over here this is our bathroom space it is a well what we have in here is a composting toilet it's the nature said we had never used a composting toilet before this but absolutely love it we know that not everybody opts to have a bathroom or a toilet on the road with them and we certainly couldn't live without it we have a shower as well which we've used a handful of times we sometimes we tend to shower at gyms if we you know have a membership to like a climbing gym or something like that but it's not always something that we you know will get if we're not in a city so it's nice to have a shower here it makes us you'll be able to live off the grid and you know not worry about you know having to get to a local gym or you know somewhere especially having a toilet as well definitely we have the Nautilus kind of retractable self cleaning shower door here what that means is that the water can excuse me this way off as you close it and inside the floor of our bathroom it's cedar planks that we put together with our builder and if we will pull this plant out of here from now and the whole thing is removable we used the same wall board on the bottom I think it's the FRP wall board and you know it gives us the flexibility to be able to take the whole thing out and it works really well it's kind of like a little luxurious touch so you know it just makes the whole bathroom a lot nicer next we have our max air fan we've got our controller for it here it sucks air in as well as pushes air out which is great for ventilation because we don't have air conditioning in here but if you crack open some of our windows turn the fan on it gets the circulation going really really well it's an automatic open and closed so it's really nice next in here is Erik control panel we've got our AC and DC panels we've got our inverter control here as well as our CTEK battery monitor so it's all very easy to operate if we want to use anything that's 120 volt we just turn our inverter on turn on the AC panel and then if we want to turn our outlets on turn on our toaster oven it's a visit we have a couple of extra switches and then you don't have air condition we don't have an air conditioner we don't have a heater but that's what their names so the next thing that we have going down is our closet which we absolutely love it maybe was part of the build maybe favorite part of the build it was essential to us to have good clothes storage we don't own a lot of clothes at all we're very minimalistic we actually sold all of our belongings just over a year ago when we left to hike part of the Pacific Crest Trail so coming back and moving into a van we're used to living in a backpack in a tent so this is very luxurious and we don't have a lot of things but I didn't want to do the packing cubes I didn't want to you know struggle with like a top open shoving all the clothes in so we came up with this design of doing just the pullout drawers and they are huge they store a lot of clothes there's Deepa's in the back of the van here we share the top one we each have separate one during the wintertime just had a third but it's turned into miscellaneous drawer here just distort kind of things that we are struggling to find a better place with and then down here is like our toiletries we've got our toiletry bag our little vacuum just you know mixing knacks and other things that fit our nicely down there our towels get folded up and go down there as well so if we circle back to the bed area here our main concern or a main priority with the bed was our ceiling height or having enough space to sit on the bed comfortably we didn't want to bump our heads we wanted to you know make sure that we could you know kind of exist on the bed and not feel claustrophobic because we don't have bikes we don't have anything that needed to raise our quote-unquote garage in the back up higher so we were able to prioritize our head space that's the big thing for us as you can see we put in all of these windows so we bought the van as a cargo van which Bennet had no windows it was a big giant empty white box it was a priority for Jeff to get as many windows in here as possible so we put the big window on the slider door we put this would know here we had our two back windows installed professionally because those are adhesive base and it freaked me out to pick them up with the suction cups and hold them on there with the broken windows for a hot minute that you could do it and I was I was like I want those windows and I don't want I'm shattered yeah so we had those things put in professionally but all the rest of them we did with frame design company yeah um as far as the bed goes our mattress is a 6-inch memory foam we find it to be very comfortable absolutely um yeah I know that six inches kind of small but it was working very well for us and underneath of our mattress again it was a priority for just to have we don't want to run into any moisture issues which I know can be a problem with the memory foam mattresses so on our bed frame we have lots of hole drilled in to allow for the airflow and then before that we have what's like a dead and dry I think is what it's called yeah we've got this pad to help circulate the air yeah then we have these holes drilled all the way through yep I see that being used on siding four houses behind cedar shakes yeah so that we just wanted to make sure that we had no moisture issues there so on this side of our bed here we have our light controls for the bathroom for the overhead the bed lights this is one of our mains we have another main on the bench there also on a dimmer and then here we have our heated floor thermostat so we have electric heated floors they are made to run under vinyl which is what our floors are it's a luxury vinyl plank flooring and the electric heated floors they work well to heat the floors I would not say that they are a substitute for Heat maybe it raises the temperature in here by 2 or 3 degrees but it's just like another little added luxury we turn them on they don't use much power at all even though they are 120 so they require the inverter but they don't use a lot of power it's like a slow drawl over a long period of time so we turn them on for a bit and get our toes nice and toasty turn them off you always talk about under the bed I would love to talk about under the bed so we designed this van knowing that we were going to adopt a puppy one day this space is for the puppy when we have him we'll probably stick a crate under here or at some point we might build a door in so that we can just open it close it there is also a little outlet back there that you can't see quit yet it's on the other side of this where we're gonna install a pet air conditioner if it ever comes back in stock that way he has plenty of airflow back there yeah other than that this guy it's just a little pullout drawer for our toilet paper and laundry soap and a couple of other medical things band-aids and such yeah yeah we hoped to put a pet AC in when we were doing the build but the one that we were looking at has been out of stock for over a year now we're hoping then it comes back this summer but what we'd like to do is put like the condenser under the van and then you know have it run kind of right into that corner there especially you know just so it's safe for for the pup it hasn't gotten that warm in here but that is a priority for us so I think that kind of wraps up the inside of the van if we want to move around to the back [Applause] so this is what I guess van lifers referred to as the garage as you can see we were able to store a lot back here we have both of our hiking packs which it's a priority for us to bring these we did I guess I'd do about three and a half months of long-distance hiking up before we moved into the van so we wanted to make sure to have these with us we've got this nice floor that we put in here just to kind of I guess keep things clean in the garage it doesn't look that if it gets dirty if it scratches it was very inexpensive so it was good for us to you know just put that in this side holds our water so we've got our gray water gauge we've got our outdoor shower hookup which we plan to utilize a lot with our puppy and we have our fill for our freshwater inside here we've got a 40 gallon freshwater tank we have the shurflo pump and accumulator with that we use the PEX piping everywhere it's not that flexible is a little bit difficult to work with but you know overall we got it to a place where we're very happy with it and we like the setup that we have so anyone that's seen our van tour uphill Adventure will notice that this looks a lot different so the earlier I guess last month we hung out with our friends at Frank design and redid the back section we weren't happy with it when we left in January but it was time to go it was way too cold here we couldn't get anything else done so we just chucked in two extra batteries that we had to buy and hit the road but now that it's warm we came back and it was our priority to make this garage more of what we intended from the start so when we built it we had planned for this section over here to be our electrical so as you can see we have a lot of storage on the top here we're able to store our tool box this container here holds our hose our outdoor shower pump our water filter which is just like your RV filter we are planning on getting a little travel Berkey for drinking water because apparently this filters everything but it doesn't taste very good and this is just like our miscellaneous junk drawer it's got manuals for things that are in the van that all these things that I don't think we need but better safe than sorry I guess way in the back there we have more storage which shoved our shore power cord back there as well as we have some socket wrenches again just in case it feels like smart things to have so inside here are the guts to our kind of electrical component this whole thing comes out if it will cooperate but it might not right now because of our short power cord so we're just gonna fold it back we have a total of four 12-volt deep-cycle AGM renergie renergie batteries we started with - the plan was to have two but long story short we realized that we needed more because we're an all-electric build and the ones that we have or the ones that we had the two existing batteries weren't working their best we thought they might we might have wrecked them but they were salvaged it was just cold and we ended up adding two more batteries next to that we have our renergie 3000 watt inverter again which we need to run our 120 volt appliances we have a/c tech battery monitor and that includes a smart isolator so we charge our batteries when we're driving from the alternator we also charge them by the solar that we have on the roof we have six 100 watt renergie solar panels up there we started with four we'd hope to have four and then to have a little deck area at the back but again when we realize that our electrical needs we're not being met we had to install the additional two but since we've done that and we came back and rewired our batteries so we've got two under here and we've got our other two tucked under this side since that we have had great success with our batteries we've been able to run all of our high wattage appliances that have a big power draw at the beginning and we weren't getting enough voltage to do that because I don't think that our batteries were wired quite right but now they'll are and everything is looking great he deplores four days he did for four days yeah duster no no heated floors yesterday I was like are you kidding me but it's amazing how all this stuff that you have out here nice and neat in the back there you know people don't realize how much potential stores there is as long as you get their correct size bins and are mindful of when you're designing what you're gonna bring with you so you guys did a great job at utilizing the storage yeah yeah it was difficult to find like containers and bins to fit the spaces to be honest because we we hadn't planned well everything that we plan to be custom we built in so like we built in our closet drawers we built in our kitchen cabinets and all those things into various sizes so finding correct bins to fit those spaces were a little bit difficult but target was a win for that yeah so I guess to wrap up kind of the back section here we built these just out of plywood what comes on the van or the black kind of flexible plastic and there's something that it matched our aesthetic so we use them as templates and cut these guys out we've got our wool insulation behind here and behind all of our plywood on the sliding door well it's here just to give it a nice aesthetic because obverse [Music] we are trying to be safe individuals so we have a smoke detector slash carbon monoxide detector in here which sits right next to our weboost that we have we haven't used or weboost much I think we turn it on one day but we haven't really done any hitman camping out in the middle of nowhere since we like to go and visit cities so we spent almost two months down in Austin over the winter as well as places in Florida but we'll see if we if we need it it was one of those purchases that seemed like everybody that had a van how do we do so we were like we have to have a reboost we have a van I don't know I mean I would say make the decision for yourself for us it's one of those things that we'll see if it pays off or not I think does that do it oh we'll talk over here yeah we have our short power plug in here so that we can charge up at Kipp sites we've tried plugging into like our friends house and stuff I don't know if we just don't get enough like of a good power supply for that or what charges the batteries very slowly I think the insights at the campsite yeah top notch and guess so if we want to move up to the front here we will talk about the cab oh look at that spider oh my gosh my brave enough all right so here we have the cab it drives very very well another question we do get a lot especially because of the way we distributed our weight we don't have weight on one side of our van the passenger side first count as far as yes cabinetry things like that yeah we do have our water over there which a 40 gallon tank weighs 20 times 8 what 300 pounds ish when you fill it all the way and our two batteries weigh a lot and they're on that side now so it drives pretty well overall I have a Toyota truck at home and gets better gas mileage than that we put about 8,500 miles on it and it averages for that time seventeen and a half miles to the gallon which we think is pretty great so overall yeah I mean just a normal cab we haven't done any changes up here we would maybe like to get a new stereo system that was one of my wishes during the build process but as the budget kind of quickly got out of hand we realized that that wasn't gonna happen now yeah thank you for taking the time to provide our viewers with the tour of your van we have a lot of folks on the channel that are in the process of building their own van camper and it's helpful to see someone that has completed it and used it for a while and did modifications to it to suit their needs because you don't know you don't know you could read a lot you could see a lot online but everybody's gonna build their van to cater to their needs if they haven't done it before their initial approach might be different than their second approach now that you have it at this stage and there are some things that you know they're permanent cabinets you could always move them would you do anything differently if you were to build this from scratch again chassis motorhome conversions components do is there anything that stands out that you would do completely different I would say the number one thing for me is our electrical system when I was doing research on this lithium batteries existed but they were not widely used yet I would say and that was just a year ago you know they were certainly out there and I remember coming across them and thinking wow those batteries are very expensive but I don't see the point in that doesn't seem like many people are using them or just going to use these ones hindsight obviously I wish that we had gone with lithium batteries we could have seen hundreds of pounds in weight bank and space there's so much smaller we would have had a battery system where you don't have to worry about the drain that you take on them you can take their lithium batteries pretty much all the way to empty and not worry about you know having to mess them up Lawrence because AGM batteries you can't really take that deep or you know you might do some damage to them lithium batteries are a lot more expensive upfront though and I mean looking back at our process we would have had to give up a lot of things in order to be those afford to do lithium batteries in the first place but you're looking back I think we would have done that or found the money somewhere yes yeah other than that I mean we loved the layout of our fan we loved the open design the open field couldn't imagine that any other way to be honest no we are not lacking for storage in the least and then besides the cost of the van because people could buy used van they could buy a brand new one and spec it out to their knees and then do their conversion what would you ask to me the overall cost for someone to do a conversion like this so we actually have a video on that and the breakdown of everything that we put into the conversion on our YouTube channel uphill adventure hmm but I'll let you yeah our total our total cost for what we spent converting the dance was 20th to $23,000 that includes the labor cost for things that we had installed like our back windows that includes the labor cost for Frank design company you can do it for a lot more expensive you can do it for a lot less that's even people that do it for like five grand and have you know it's a fantastic band that suits their needs um it's just about what works for you but that's how much we spend on our conversion I get a lot of questions about insurance whether you insure it as a regular vehicle or do you try to get RV insurance is there any thing that you want to mention on that I'm sure so I'm a photographer and I actually have insurance through State Farm already so I just reached out to them and they were happy to give us a quote that covered the cost of the van and the cost of the conversion to insure it the way it is now so we have any issues do it all yeah which is huge because I reached out to the company that I have insurance with as well as four or five other companies none of them would insure the venn in its current state given that licensed RV Outfitters did not build the ban so state farms the only one that we know of that will do that so we have been insured looking just like this and then just so the folks our BIA is kind of like a seal that goes on the side of our V that's converted from a manufacturer and the insurance companies typically would insure an RBI a certified unit that it was built to safety standards for plumbing electrical egress fire safety so that's what they might have meant by that now what's next what are your next adventures we are getting a puppy very soon a little golden retriever his name is Oliver he's gonna sleep right there we've trained service dogs for years but this is gonna be our first forever dog for us which is very exciting especially we're very excited to take him out on the road we might go up to Michigan and actually do some camping maybe spend some time on the lakes teach them how to swim just to enjoy the summer yeah so that's our plan for the summer and then this fall we are getting married they'll hopefully fingers crossed so we'll be going back down to Austin for that which is very getting married well congratulations to you both looks like you have a excellent year ahead of you thank you for taking the time for new jersey outdoor adventures to give it tour your van I'm gonna make sure I include links to Sarah and Jess's uphill adventure Instagram account website and their YouTube channel if you want to follow their adventures well this is Patrick with New Jersey's outdoor adventures youtube channel hope you enjoyed this video please like this video comment share subscribe I love it and we will see you soon

Channel: New Jersey Outdoor Adventures

Views: 1,851,358

Keywords: #vanlife, vanlife, lan life, diy, homemade, camper, conversion, van, self build, mercedes, sprinter, pro master, transit, ford, dodge, ram, winnebago, solis, era, roadtrek, etrek, interstate, uphill adventure, new jersey outdoor adventures, van tours, camper tour, airstream, chevy, van life

Id: _3a6e0yawt0

Length: 33min 3sec (1983 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 03 2020