VAN TOUR | FORD TRANSIT CONNECT FOR TWO | BUDGET BUILD FOR FULL-TIME TRAVEL | USA VAN LIFE

hello and welcome we are chad and claire and over the past three months we've been living and traveling full-time in our 2013 ford transit connect we actually bought this van for 3 800 and it has 200 000 miles on it but it still runs great and then this past summer we built it out with just twenty two hundred dollars so for a grand total of six thousand this entire van build was made um we're actually going to break down our budget in a later video so for this video we're just gonna be showing you around and showing how we live in this tiny van so welcome to our tiny home on wheels alrighty we're gonna start up in the front which is the transportation space which we also like to call the pilot's deck makes it sound a little cooler so this is my seat i spend most of my time in this passenger seat um chad does most of the driving thus far and in my area i actually get to deal with the inverter and so this little guy will help us charge our battery through the car whenever we do need to refill on a little bit extra juice and so this will just come right in here we can plug in laptops phones anything that we need and then also glove box plenty of storage in here got some extra masks extra toilet paper if we ever need that and then i've got a cute little plant that makes me very happy it's been thriving and having a grand time and i've decorated it for the fall season with a pumpkin and a pine cone on to chad's side first thing i would like to talk about is my bento box so this is what we call basically my snack box that claire will refill for me so thank you claire and so that's important that's always right there whenever i get hungry while driving and then up here is my sunglass holder and another important thing is this photo of my friend ben as uh steve jobs just happen to have that up there and then right here is my phone mount so that's great because it's just a magnetic little mount stick my phone there and you can also stick the little lightning cords there love it just super convenient and that's pretty much my side so obviously you can tell our van is very small we're trying to take advantage of any space that we can possibly get and so even on the doors we have a completely packed i have bug spray suntan lotion regular lotion face mask of course citronella candle towels bags gloves for when we need to go foraging for wood so that is completely filled and on chad's side i've got a headlamp this little coin jar where claire likes to pick up coins that she finds on the ground and i like to help her hand sanitizer mask fire starter sticks and these off mosquito coils you can see here and also some essential oils and now on to the fun part the living space i'd like to welcome you to our little home so every single day when it's time to go into the living space i will come to the front and pull my chair forward and pull it all the way down and this will allow us to have way more space in the back and this is actually so that we can store our cooler right behind my chair so of course this back area is stuffed with all sorts of things like tents chairs even chad's french press however although it does hold a lot of stuff this is mostly for our cooler and so over the summer we came up with this really awesome cooler stand so that we can actually slide it in just nice and easy and so once you have that all leveled out nice and sturdy i normally just pick up the cooler just put it right there so now that the cooler is out of the way to the left we have our tiny little bathroom so starting off we've got a lovely mirror that allows you to use it outside of the van or inside of the van we've got one side that is times five and then one side that is just normal and behind there we've got a face towel some hair essentials things like headbands scrunchies and of course our dish washing scrubby on the last hook right here over here we have a ceramic cup that holds our toothbrushes our benadryl cream and any razors that we might need for the road toilet paper of course that's essential and then here we actually have one of my favorite parts of the van this is our funnel sink which we can use to spit inside of if we're brushing our teeth and it's freezing outside or it's raining and the great thing about this is it can actually be removed and so you can spit in it from here or from here wherever you need very practical it drains straight out of the van and not to worry we use biodegradable toothpaste and everything that we use is great for the environment so it is all good to go and then right underneath there we've got lots of storage these are all custom built to very specific things that i requested chad to make room for and so we've got pain medicines other sort of medications that we both take and then all of this area would be my toiletries so things like lotion face wash cotton balls all that fun stuff and then of course we do have to go to the bathroom and so we have a toddler's toilet and this thing is actually great this is for number twos this is for number one it's actually a jar that we got when we were gifted pickles and we have kept it around because it has a wide mouth and that means we both can use it for number one and so this is really great you can go straight in here pour it out wash it out and so it's just a more sustainable way of using the restroom so we get a lot of questions about how we shower when we're not visiting friends and we do that with this so this is a little camp shower this is what it looks like it's a five gallon shower what we do is we put it on the roof and you can actually let it heat from the sun there's like a little thermometer that'll tell you what the temperature is and you can just hose off we can both complete a shower with just this one bag which is really awesome and then it just packs right back in its bag and you can stow it away once you're done now over to the right we have this overhead shelf that we built out so when you actually first buy the van it ends about right here and so all of this space was wasted and so we want to take advantage of that this overhead shelf actually holds a ton of our stuff and we call it the pantry and the attic so on the left side we store all our dry goods all the food that we need to store when we're going out into the wilderness and then on the right side we have things like sheets towels the drone all sorts of miscellaneous items that we can't find anywhere else to put in the van so when we were originally planning out um what kind of system we wanted for our van we watched a lot of videos of couples living in a small van like this and they actually had like a fixed bed because that allows you to have a lot more storage for things underneath the bed but we actually didn't want that as much because we knew we were going to want to sit in here and work on our laptops and be able to have our feet down which i think both of us are really glad that we did that because you can still utilize the space put things on the ground if you need to but it's really nice to be able to just sit up especially when it's raining outside and so that is why we decided to have a living room our living room it is not much just three cushions that we've cut you can actually see the break right here these are actually fabrics that i screen printed back in school and the funny thing is we don't have them actually upholstered to a mattress pad first of all it's not even like a mattress it's a mattress pad it's three inches thick and so it's completely done with safety pins takes a while to pin it all together but that is how we have done our cushions now continuing down to the closet space got tons of storage over here so on this side it's all of my clothes and so i've got a little box full of all my pants on my bottoms and then this guy over here it's got all my accessories and my underwear and over here all my dresses shirts all the good stuff and we are actually gonna do a capsule wardrobe video later on so do stay tuned for that and then right over here we've got shoes that we don't wear as much things like hiking boots tevas and then over here we've got chad's closet in a nice cardboard box and so this is our closet space so this is our custom shelf it is one of my favorite things about the van because in order to make it we had to cut the back of the shelf to fit the side of the van wall which i love but right up here is where we keep our battery we built this area specifically for the battery and we have this space so that we're able to slide it out if we ever need to there's a flip down table we will show you what's inside later and then down here we built this shelf specifically for cans and for propane and we keep everything in from falling out with these bungees and more hooks and then down here we built this area specifically for our two burner camp stove or coleman stove as well as we can fit different things there so this flip out table doubles as a studio workspace as well as a kitchen and so with these little hooks we can unlatch it comes right on down and one of my favorite things is this isn't just it there's actually more space we can pull these guys out and just creates more area for you to put any extra items that you might need and so this is definitely a pretty full desk like we both can work here at the same time be very comfortable and then right in here my prized area the kitchen i love it so i requested that i must have a spice rack that fits 24 spices and chad definitely built that out for me we've got all the spices i could possibly need for cooking on the road and making some pretty legit meals and then down here we've got all my kitchenware things like plates bowls tupperware pots pans and then we've got three hooks specifically made for a rubber scraper a wooden spoon and a spatula and so that is my entire kitchen space oh and i also want to add one little thing we've got a light over here that we keep in the living room but you can simply move it put it in here and illuminate this area as well so it's great anytime i'm cooking if the stove is up i can't really see the light i can move it right over here angle it this way and i can see all right and now we are going to move on to the back so the shelf does not end with just that area there's a back side to it we've got two hooks one for a hand towel when we wash our hands one that holds our vitamins and our scissors and then down here we've got some more hand sanitizer our toothpaste all the things that we need to wash our dishes or wash our hair and down here we've got an extra stack of towels and then of course a tent just in case we need it even though we spend most of our night sleeping in the van it's always good to have a backup solution and so now we are on to the back patio area so we've got two flip up tables back here that we use actually quite often all the food prep is done back here and actually these tables can hold up to 100 pounds which means it's great for holding our really heavy water container which is right over here and so this guy we usually just set on the table and we love this water container because it has a spigot and this allows us to wash our hair wash our hands wash our dishes all from right here and then also this water container has a nice wide mouth which allows us to easily refill it and so we love this chad loves doing the dishes back here nice and easy and another plus about these tables is we put a polyurethane topping on it and so you can get it wet and there's no problem at all and whenever you're done simply just flip it down and patio space is not done here we can actually open it up and get way more space and so the 2013 ford transit connect allows you to open the back doors all the way to back here and if you come around you can see there's a magnet right down there and the door will attach here and hold it in place and so now you can even do dishes far far away from the living space if you desire and of course it's the same thing on this side as well you can push this yellow button and it'll open right up so as you've probably noticed we have the silvery bubble wrap looking thing and that's actually some insulation it's called reflectix we've cut those out to match the windows and that blocks out light has more privacy for the van and you can also just take them down if you wanted to look through and have a nice view now before we get to the bedroom we want to talk about the garage which is basically any space that we haven't listed already and so that stuff like this tiny little box right here that we put miscellaneous items in things like the rain tarp so the rain tarp is great it's basically just this sheet of water resistant cloth and we put it over the back doors and it'll give us a little bit of shelter when it's raining and so chad can still wash dishes outside and we'll now show you how we put it up [Music] so this is obviously really budget but we love it because we get sun protection and rain protection and it's held up with just two magnets so for our bed whenever we were planning on what kind of bed we wanted we decided not to go with one of the slap bed designs because we like more support like on our backs especially with the thin foam so we actually have a piece of plywood for support we have this piece that nests around our main base which we can kind of show you maybe whenever we pull it out you'll understand a little bit better and i did say this earlier but we do not have a legit mattress this is actually a mattress pad that's completely foam and it's three inches thick before we put the bed into bed mode i wanted to take a second and tell you about our couch so in order to have support for the back of this couch back here we have this metal and we attach this metal to our bed frame and what it does is it gives the wood support so we're able to lean back and it's not just going to hit the the side of the van so i really love how we created that design and we can actually unscrew the bolts at the bottom if we ever wanted to fold that up and just not have this metal there while we're sleeping we normally just keep it there because we've gotten very used to it but we'll show you bed mode now [Music] so as you can tell we are showing you what we have for the winter season so we've got a quilt on the top a sleeping bag that's really good for cold temperatures underneath and then we've got a nice flannel sheet and so in the summer times we replace this with a cooler sheet and then we just use the quilt that has been working really well for us we haven't really needed a legit comforter and we've been staying nice and toasty yes our bed is on the smaller side it is actually smaller than a full but bigger than a twin and we'll kind of show you what it looks like when we're both laying in there because i'm sure lots of you are wondering how we fit and then last thing for the bedroom of course we have a curtain that separates the back from the front so we don't have any creepy people looking at us sleep from the front windows and so we'll show you how we put that up so i love that the curtain gives us some privacy and i do like that it's not fixed and we can actually take it down every day and that way we can have even more light coming in rather than having two curtains blocking a little bit of sunlight from the front so a few important things that make it a lot more comfortable to sleep in a van at night obviously you need good lighting whenever you're in a van so we have several different options our first one is we have these fairy lights that are along the roof and that's like very dim lighting but it you can pretty much see anything you need to in the van we also have three of these magnetic lights and they're just little touch lights and those just are great you can move them around for whatever you need we also have our main light up here super bright you can point that at anything and you can see really well lastly we have two lights on our actual battery and that shines and they're super bright and you can see anything in the van that you need to with those as well so moving on i'm now going to talk about insulation so behind all of the wood here as well as on the roof we installed thinsulate which helps with sound as well as really good insulation and as for the roof itself it is reclaimed wood from the 20s which we really love claire sanded all of the wood and we stained it different stains and we really are happy with how that turned out and one little thing that's hidden behind the flags on my left is this giant umbrella so we have two hooks that are holding that up and we use that whenever we're on the beach or if there's just heavy rainfall we were able to use that walking around and it won't invert because it's a bigger umbrella as opposed to the smaller ones another thing i wanted to talk about was the decorations so up here we have four different national park postcards that claire and i both have been to and we really love as well as our us map it's a scratch-off map that we got from our friend seth bilkes thank you seth we really love it we put it right back here and as we go on the road we will be scratching off more and more states which we're excited to do and we also have these colorful prayer flags that i bought back in switzerland like a few years ago but we're really happy with the decorations this little pop of color just makes it feel a lot more homey so one of the biggest essentials in a van is definitely to have a roof vent fan we love this this is our max air fan if we turn this it'll pop open the top which allows air to come through from the side so you can actually have this on and running while it's raining and it's able to suck air in and out so whenever claire is cooking it can suck out all of the humidity from the things that she's cooking and whenever we're laying down at night you can have it run on a really low setting just to have a nice breeze throughout the van i now want to talk about our power bank so our power bank is a 300 watt rock pal portable power unit and what i love about it is you can actually plug a solar panel right into this small unit so we've saved a lot of space by not having like agm batteries or lithium batteries inside of the van as much and instead we just have the smaller unit and we're able to charge our phones we can charge our laptop for these videos as well as it powers our fan at night and that's just through this cord and we just really love it it's so small and it fits right there it's perfect for a tiny van and for everything that we would need and this officially concludes our van tour thank you so much for touring our little house and i'm so glad we could share it with you guys if you do want to follow our journey we are currently on a usa road trip hitting all 50 states 48 in this van and if you did enjoy this video please do like and subscribe we'd love to have you along on the journey and our next video will actually be our van budget and so that'll be really fun to break down everything that we did to make this a reality and to make it a reality on a budget and so with that we will see you guys next time bye [Music] is

Channel: Chad and Claire

Views: 218,373

Rating: 4.9117465 out of 5

Keywords: van life, ford transit connect, tiny van, van build, van life couple, van tour, tiny home, full time travel, usa road trip, van life usa, self built, custom van

Id: r-B8OLv2v98

Length: 20min 17sec (1217 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 05 2020