VAN TOUR  | Amazing Van Conversion Tour by Couple with NO Experience

[Music] hey beautiful people i'm krista i'm brian and we're van gaal adventure and this is our van tour come check it out in 2019 we sold almost everything we owned packed up what we had left and hit the road to build our van at my parents house what we thought would only take three months took us nine long months and a whole lot of blood sweat and tears to build in the damp soggy weather of the pacific northwest with the help of a few friends we finally hit the road in august of 2020 and we've been traveling around and hiking ever since this is our beautiful baby beatrice the white whale she's a 2019 dodge ram promaster we got her when she only had 10 miles on her and she is front-wheel drive and she is one sexy mama before we head inside be sure to subscribe to our channel to stay up to date with our adventures and other van life tips and advice from the road let's see what's going on inside the van [Music] hey welcome to the cab come on in and you have my collection of cobia masks and my favorite part up here is my light switches that i put in which turn the lights on outside i have a led bar on the front on each side and the back it lights it up like a stadium another thing we added was this nice curtain and it rolls up we want it can slide back and forth but it's nice divider from the cab to not see all this up here and another feature our last feature up here is the swivel chair and the passenger seat just do this clamp spin it around like so and there you go ours is a little squeaky up i think we need a little grease down there this is my favorite part of our entire van and it's the kitchen the slab that we have here is actually a hemlock slab and this is one full piece and then this comes out of the sink and this is our cutting board so we don't cut on the rest of the counter and then every van lifer needs this so this was something we bought to use as a colander which pops out again so it pops out as a colander but we actually use it as a drying station for our dishes so this has definitely been a space-saving idea of how we did this and i wouldn't change anything about it we took the end slab this piece and we cut it off the back because i knew that i wanted to have an area for fruits and vegetables and to also have herbal infusions and maybe some plants and stuff like that that wasn't going to get in the way when we were cooking so we made this herbal fruit vegetable trough that's what you call it another good feature in the kitchen is the max air fan it is a must-have this can suck the air out or it can blow air in it's great for cooking when um yeah you're cooking especially us because we have a butane propane stove so we need to like ventilate the place while we cook obviously but this thing is powerful so we have a swivel faucet just like kind of everybody else does and also this detachment so this is already filtered water but then we have another filtration system we just wanted to double our filtration and this is for drinking water right here so if there's non-potable water we can still fill our water tank with it these are some of our spices and herbs that we use regularly there's a ton of them here there's two rows of these bigger jars and then one row of these smaller jars and then if we look up here this is our mason jar tincture capsule area tea area so we have a bunch of stuff that we just keep on hand like beans coconut flakes chickpea flour some herbs spices and then some of our personal things that we take every single day [Music] we wanted to make sure we could stack stuff so even if we weren't going to use mason jars we can stack a lot easier because of this second area we installed gas struts on each side of the cabinet here that keeps the cabinet door open and we also have two latches i put two in here just to reinforce it leave a lot of glass in here when you're off road and you're going over bumps like all that weight just kind of knocked open this cabinet at least it did that one time so i put a second latch on here um so we haven't had a problem since these are our other kitchen cabinets they're pretty big so just like random sauce stuff tamari apple cider vinegar things that we use a lot and also our tea cups we also have a citrus juicer and our vitamix so we make smoothies with it all the time and then we have our other kitchen cabinet which is basically cups plates mixing bowls and our cookware a plus to having this wall here is uh we made a little cubby space behind the driver's seat to put like our brooms mops and some extra shoes and stuff very important to have a broom in your van because you will use it 10 times a this one little space right here this is a decision that took me a long time because originally i thought we weren't going to be able to use regular tile we're going to have to use vinyl and it was getting really confusing but we realized a lot of people in venice they said their their tile didn't break it was something we're a little worried about but so far it's been good so we just went with a regular subway tile i'm pretty proud of this because this is part of the band that i actually did with our friend miro so shout out to mirosh for showing me how to grout i think that's what it's called how to do some grout work so shout out to miro for helping me teaching me how to do this so right here we have a couple switches one is for the gray tank and we can turn this on and off with an electric ball valve that's attached to our great tank outside so when we're in the appropriate area turn this on and our 11 gallons of gray water tank empty out other switch here is for our nature's head toilet which has a fan that's constantly running 24 7 inside the toilet and that hose that fan sucks out all the poopy air so that's why it never smells in here but when we take a shower we have to remove the toilet and unhook that wire i didn't want to have like a live wire just hanging around the shower over showering so i added the switch i can turn off that power just a little extra safety feature we put a lot a bunch of different like little nooks around the van so if i wanted a plant or wanted books we had an area to do it so this little area houses our plant that he is actually doing pretty good not bad wait i thought he was kind of on his way out but he's definitely come back welcome to our entryway here we have our carbon monoxide monitor station now that we have propane and butane stove this is good to have to make sure you're safe and we have two dimmer switches one is for our under cabinet lighting and the second is for our ceiling lights we use puck lights and led strips under the cabinets [Music] we have a couple nice hooks here just like storing shirts or jackets and you can fold them up and down you know poke your eyeball out here we have our little storage lofts which we have yoga mats our window covers and some random just a couple other random things you don't have a lot of room in a van so you really have to think about the things that are going to matter but this is one of those things we don't necessarily need but definitely wanted to bring [Music] so there is your moment of peace for the day these are our beautiful cabinetry but we went with this kind of retro green because brian and i are both into retro and vintage stuff quite a bit and then down here this is our garbage we custom made this so it would actually fit the size garbage can we have our first aid kit down here cleaner just stuff like that and our filtration system and that is our fridge so we have a dometic f what is it b it's our dometic cfx65dz yes that is what it is and it is a fridge and freezer as you can see we just have a ton of stuff in here and then we have a freezer which is packed because we make smoothies every single day so we have a lot of fruit that we go through now the reason we went with this kind rather than the regular stand up is because we knew we were going to be able to fill it versus if you open the door on the other ones things could just come piling out and falling everywhere and just shuts and goes back into here voila so to cook we wanted to make up most of this slab area which is why we decided not to actually put our burner on the top we decided to go with something that could actually stay in a drawer and originally we had a induction burner that was inside here but we realized it pulled way too much power so we switched it out for this sweet little number so this is a propane slash butane stove and so we actually keep it in here when we cook so we just flip this over put the butane in turn it on it works amazingly well and you can take this outside [Music] so under the passenger seat we have a wabasto heater it is fueled by our gas tank we have a tap that taps into our fuel tank also powered by electricity the blower but the combustion section is fueled by our gas tank so it's a digital control panel it's over by our bed i'll show you in a second and we can set the timer for uh three times a day seven days a week of what we want the heater to come on and what type of chair we want to come on and we have it mounted right above our bed so when it's cold out usually we turn the heat on before we get out of bed this heater's been great we've been in like super cold weather like i think as cold as what 15 degrees in stanley idaho and it keeps the van warm we run it a lot during those cold times but it keeps the van warm does a great job oh hey so while i'm down here i'm also tell you about our floor underneath the floor is just half inch plywood for our subfloor we did not insulate the floor regarding that um this flooring the actual flooring is vinyl flooring snaps together it's designed for a floating system where you just put it on the floor you don't glue it but i glued it and snapped it on and it works great they say you're not supposed to do that but i did it anyways and i'll do it again this is our nook brian and i both work full time while we're on the road so it was really important for us that we had somewhere where we could work without bumping each other's elbows because brian and ice already saw that would probably be an issue coming if we were working side by side and we also wanted to be able to look outside while we were working too so we weren't enclosed next to the bed i also wanted a place where not only we could work but i could also do my makeup and we also wanted a couch and we wanted another bed so this is literally our all-in-one space and i think this is like pretty unique also to our band as well [Music] we have this table on a lagoon so it moves around and this also unhooks to open up into my vanity so this is i'm super stoked on this b did a really good job on this it also has some beautiful hollywood lighting as you can tell very very high end of course and then it lights up [Music] we noticed when we started driving it's kind of moving all over and we got a couple little dents in our cedar we just latch this in whenever we're about to drive it is sturdy and it won't come loose and this also drops and becomes a couch which brian is going to show you and it also becomes a bed because we thought maybe somebody would want to come traveling with us once a while so far that has not happened yet but one day we're ready we're ready for company when they do come so it's crazy and this goes into couch mode and i'm going to try to do it right now check this out this comes out [Music] couch mode these pillows they're multifunctional they go on the bed they work for couch mode and they store extra clothing so a little van life tip is you don't have a lot of room for clothing all the time so we have clothing in them so there's extra sweaters like sleep shorts things like that so all our pillows except for the ones we actually sleep on at night are all multifunctional uh so that it's space-saving and you can just pull out stuff whenever you need it so behind these walls and all the walls in the ceiling we use insulation and what we use for insulation was havelock wool we wanted to do something that was um not toxic and so we went with the havelock whoa it was easy to install have luck well good place we'll leave a link down below in the comments check it out i want to do another shout out to the needle and i up in chamicom washington so she did these which are water resistant stain resistant they're actually made for outdoor furniture so these are awesome and they're super comfortable these are actually on velcro so this back comes off and so does this bottom one and inside we have a bench that opens up so it's kind of like our do we have room for the food up in our regular cabins no then we just put them down here all right let's talk about the second bench inside is where we charge all of our electronics so we have a couple slots here for our laptops which i've made some nice little foamy dividers here to keep them safe and tight and while it's in here you can actually charge it i've installed an outlet back here you can't see it right now and just any other miscellaneous electronics that we have and we keep it safe and locked [Music] we have this little guy right here this is another closed hook so we just pop this down we have our ipad we'll put on a movie and brian and i can cozy up on the couch and we can watch movies at night and now i'm gonna put it in bed mode this cushion [Music] pull out this this is for the back support and we got these things here and we installed these little guys in there there's one on either side and they lock into each other flip this around and we got two more on this side i want to see on that side take a look over there and then these slide in you got this oh yeah [Music] it's basically like a seven foot long bed i feel pretty good where would you give this airbnb what rating uh five stars five star airbnb super host super hose sweet and for the window covers we had my beautiful aunt janet thank you so much she actually made our window covers so an important item to have in your van are these window covers we bought these from van made gear so there's magnets in here along here and it's insulated great for stealth cam is the must-have close it up looks like the lights are out and we have those for all the windows except for one but they're all covered and it comes with this carry bag too for storage boom so under the driver's seat here is our battery isolator switch we have a blue c mlr switch and what that does is it connects the alternator with the back batteries that power the whole van so when i'm driving it charges the battery off the alternator there's a few different ways to charge the batteries there's shore power solar power and alternator and the alternator is used a lot when you're not getting a lot of sun outside or shore power to charge your battery so another way to do it is when you're driving to your next destination your batteries are charging while you're driving so it's a very helpful super helpful tool to have oh hello welcome welcome to our beautiful deluxe shower bathroom area so we have our compostable toilet down here and this is a nature's head we are very happy with this purchase we highly suggest it no smell whatsoever unless you let it go for a little bit too long we have a mirror so this is actually not glass i custom ordered this i forget what it's made out of but you can check the link below so the other part in here that we have is brian built these amazing shelves and we probably took an extra week or two weeks how much long was it it was like another extra two weeks an extra two weeks brian did an amazing job on these and we also have this so this is a handheld one so you can use it wherever you want or you can just spill there or you can just put it up and be ready to go we saw some people that said they were knocking their handles at the water was turning on when they were using the restroom or when they accidentally hit it and so we got this european shower mixers and this works great because you actually have to press a button to turn it for it to turn on and we do have hot water so we turn the hot water on and we have enough for definitely a five minute shower each we have 33 gallons of water and we have a seven gallon water heater i believe is that yeah brian's nodding in his head yes we have a sweet little clothesline that goes across so that when we have wet swimsuits or towels that we can actually put them on the clothes line we decided to have our friend sydney who's amazing seamstress thank you sydney she made this actually shower curtain for us so i took a blanket that i had from some of my travels in bali and she turned it into this beautiful shower curtain welcome to our bedroom nook this is our queen bed that we had previously before we moved into the van but we took a machete to it and took a few inches off to make it work with the rest of our van layouts the one thing if you are going to cut your own bed that you have make sure it's not fiberglass because that can be pretty dangerous this is my side of the bed this is the other nook that i have we made sure that i could put my favorite tea mug in here or a glass of water at night and it's nice and big so i can take it in and out and then we have some bed spray some other little stuff and then here's also some books so i have a little book nook area in here is my secret not so secret jewelry area and then i have a place for necklaces and then i put cork board on the back so i could put in earrings and then i have things to hang earrings on and just a little nook down here for bracelets and odds and ends and then brian and i both have some reading lights they're very functional because we have usb outlets on both of them so we can charge our phones at night look like brian has up here he's charging something actually on my side of the bed for whatever reason so we have a charger up there which is pretty nice we have a couple big cabinets so these are definitely bigger than the other ones we have up front and we have our bags of clothing these are some compressed bags i think is what they're called we have a decent amount of room each for our clothing and brian has his up here the other thing that's over in my nook area is our light switches so we have three different dimmers here that are the same stubborns that we have up front but this one goes to our shower then we have our other one here which is for these top lights and then we have this one over here which is for our underneath our cabinets welcome to my side of the bed so i have a little nook as well definitely not as fancy as crystals so i got this little cup holder got it at the camping world store it's like five bucks there's different widths i could put bigger cups in there my thermos it works great got night light here too and i also double up this lighting with a place to hang my headphones and here's my little my little pocket just a little plastic thing i hung there and i got my phone charger and i am one happy camper a lot of people do different ways with their beds they kind of go this way or this way we chose the left and right side to side uh version and recessed the walls in so he gives you like an extra probably two or three inches per size almost extra like almost like almost a half a foot so i can stretch out and this is a much cheaper way to do it than some people buy those flare outs you see they're kind of like those things that flare out that pop out on the side those are like thousands of dollars when you can just make a note make a nook with the woodwork and frame it out differently [Music] we installed some uh shelving for our shoes we ordered these on etsy.com and they came out great we got four of them the only thing is that these the fabric kept sliding off the the rails here so i actually bought some toy wheels at the hardware store and just screwed them in so it kind of holds them in so they don't slide up pretty easy solution for that then i added some extra wood on the bottom to make it more firm so they don't sag these doors have one other function here take you up here we have yet another clothesline [Music] and this goes from one side to the other and now you could actually hang other things to dry like towels when we're swimming so we decided to go with bins instead of like the drawers or those big pull out things we just have so many different things going on all the time that our plan keeps changing i guess so we got to be flexible so we have like 14 different types of bins in here so there's a lot of storage in here i would say maybe like six or seven i think it's 14 you want to count will be let's do it hey we're pretty decent amount of we have a lot of stuff there's more and there's more so brian was right we had exactly 14 boxes i feel like you had an unfair advantage for this hey yeah so if you're living on the road you need tools power drills power screwdrivers battery chargers drill bits stuff like that socket set i use them a lot actually [Music] so you open up here you can see the water heater and the water pump and then right here is my gravity drain if i want to drain the tank over here we have our electric setup we've got a magnetic door here comes off got here our master kill switch all of our major fuses for our dc 12 volt system uh we have four 150 amp hour agm batteries from full river which gives us an amount of it totals up to 600 amp hours battery bank we have and here's our master kill switch and over here we have our ames global lf 2000 watt inverter sine wave inverter this thing's great and in the back here is our laundry chute at least the back of it and i'll show you that inside the van in a little bit right here is our our main fuse panel i made a back door so we can get back there for all the wiring because we got to adjust anything but usually we don't have to touch that at all so down below is our main fuse panel and monitor station all the electrical wiring all these off everything electrical ends up right down here let's take a look inside so on the top here this is where our ac breakers are and our dc fuses live down here is our monitor for our state of charge which is let us know how much power is in our batteries and also how many amp hours we've consumed right here is our inverter remote the inverter is what converts the dc power to ac power here is our water gauge for our fresh water let us know when we're emptying full over here we have tank heaters for our gray tank we have a gray tank outside we have an 11 gallon gray tank outside so those cold cold nights we don't want a block of ice on down there in that tank so we turn this on it keeps at 60 degrees so it'll never freeze outside the pipes however they are not heated and that's it for the power station [Music] you don't want to have to smell your dirty laundry there's not a whole lot of room and you don't want it to be a second thought after you built the van so we created a secret laundry room door area so it's right behind this bench here and we use some of that same uh same stuff that we used in the shower the same paneling so this is also waterproof and it's easy to wash and clean another item down here is our solar panel breakers you turn these on and off if i got to work on the solar charger in the back or any kind of electronics i could just turn this off knowing that there's like any power coming down the lines over here we have our water intake and our shore power hookup it locks so no one can mess with it this connects directly to our water tank makes it very easy to fill up your water and over here we have our shore power so you have two different options when you go like an rv park 15 or 30 amps [Music] a lot of times i got the table and chair set up i'm working on my laptop i like to plug into here or if you want like twinkly lights on the awning we can plug in our lights here we're filling up uh air tube with our air pump or anything like that before we go tubing we can plug it in here just a good utility outlet one of the cool things we got in the van is this backdoor ladder by the company called circo bought it online uh it's very cheap affordable easy to install this clip just rests on the top that's it and there's two screws right here it's two screws and it goes in like five minutes or less in addition i added on some grip tape a little more safe when climbing up and down because otherwise it'd be pretty slick [Music] welcome to the roof over here we have our roof storage we have a lot of clothes like winter all different seasons along with our tables and chairs and some other recreational things but this thing is stuffed i also installed these wooden planks just so i would stop walking on the actual roof because i was doing that for months and i have three solar panels up here each panel is 175 watts over here we have our wi-fi booster this is our antenna this is our wii boost which is a wi-fi booster so this works well for our spots and this can take basically if you have only one bar it'll take it to two or even three bars this is definitely a must for bad life i almost forgot the most important thing that's up here and that's the awesome roof rack that we bought aluminum roof rack so it's lightweight the reason why i got this roof rack was because it's a flexible roof rack you can do a lot of modifications to it [Music] then we got this sweet awning from thule it's a 10 by 10. we got legs that come down or you can mount the legs to the van i haven't done that yet but that's what i want to do ultimately these little mounts that come right here or you can put them here and stake them into the ground everything that we're mentioning here as far as like solar panels everything on the roof roof rack awnings all those items will be listed in our comments below i know we're kind of just blasting through all this pretty quickly but everything's down below you can look at there's links to everything if you have any friends or family that are building out a van right now be sure to share this video with them so they can get some tips for their own brand build if you like this video please give us a thumbs up and subscribe so you get notifications of our weekly video releases and if you have any questions about our van build we'd be happy to answer them just leave them in the comments below thanks for stopping by we want to say thank you to everyone that's helped us with our build without your help i don't know how we could have done it so i want to start with my parents thank you so much and thank you to sydney for also letting us crash at your house and helping with the build let's give a big shout out to connor sisk connor helped me out from the very start starting with the subfloors framing yeah all the all the structural integrity of the van is basically connor shout out to my good buddy matt lawrence hey bro last but not least nero we salute you we salute you we would have been in a canoodle without you it really took a village to make this fan uh dream a reality so thank you love you all so much love you

Channel: vanhalla adventures™

Views: 1,243,619

Rating: 4.9324265 out of 5

Keywords: 3500 extended promaster van conversion, DIY van, DIY van, DIY van build, camper van, flying the nest, kara and nate, living in a van, off-grid van, ram promaster conversion, self built van, self-built van, van build, van conversion, van conversion tour, van life, van with shower, vanlife van conversion, van conversion, van conversion bathroom, van conversion promaster, van life couple, van tour, van tour promaster, van tour van conversion, van life tour, vanhalla adventures, van living

Id: Ma1Z8bbsRIE

Length: 32min 32sec (1952 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 25 2021