VAN TOUR Part 3: Innovative Bunk Bed System & Full Bathroom | 4x4 Sprinter Van Conversion.

[Music] so we thought we'd give you a background on a tour of our van and how we did we are gay and robert five years ago we quit our jobs sold our house and all of our possessions and began living the dream of traveling the world with only backpacks on our backs after flying over 300 000 miles and visiting 82 countries coveted brought us to a screeching halt true to our fashion we improvised and bought a brand new van and built it out in just six weeks to explore the united states until international travel opens up so now your question may be where do we sleep normally in van builds the bed is back here with the garage underneath sometimes they'll have it where it lifts up and then they'll have seating back in here i've we've seen a few that have the murphy bed but most of them do not have all these windows um so it's it's a little different we wanted that living room feel so we did something a little different we'll take off these pillows first we pull this out lift this up we wrap these these are uh these are spine board belts so they hold probably about uh you know 700 pounds each we have three of them easy to install easy to take down so then gail sleep up here and i'll sleep down here these are supported with this l track which is also wrapped around the supports that go across the roof this is an l track here these l tracks hold a ton of weight so there's no problem it's quickly to to install and quick to take down so i'll have gay show you how she gets up on top one thing to note this is about uh six four or so i'm six foot plenty of room uh sleep great at night we actually bought a mattress i think it's a five inch mattress on amazon the one that's all rolled up and came out and cut it up and then gabe did the fabric over the top but here i'll have her show you how she gets up it's super easy never concerned about it falling down i have plenty of room plenty of space to roll thankfully she weighs about 75 pounds so we don't have to worry about it but uh these will hold plenty especially with three of them so so no worries it works out awesome i love it it is really a good system so this allows us then to continue to um for me to sit at night if gabe uh goes to bed early i can sit and watch tv so the tv's up here um on those chairs we can use the bathroom we can get into the refrigerator we can do everything we did before so it's fantastic i mean this is one of the best things that we came up with is the bunk bed it's really quick to go down we'll show you that so we do this in the morning right away obviously and it takes minutes yeah minutes for sure to put this back into square and we have a system down so we know exactly what we're doing except for there and then we're back we put the pillows on we're good [Music] so one thing when we built out the van we did not think about it all on purpose was storage because we are minimalists we have very little stuff we live most of time out of a backpack which mine is a 18 liter and i think gaze with a 22 liter backpack and we travel the world in that and no problem so anyway we didn't think about that but with the addition of this wall that has all the electronics and our battery in there that freed up so much more space so under here underneath the uh the couch then we have this much area so we have our tools and such here we have our bedding here which if you don't realize the bedding takes up a lot of space in a small thing so we actually use the heater almost almost every night even during the summer months when we were up in the pacific northwest because we have light blankets but the heater works great and then we have all our pack rafting stuff in here so um everything goes in here uh all the pack the pack rafts are in here our dry suits as you can see it fills it up but it works along with the one wheels it's perfect we have a fan in the back that's blowing air this way through and then a fan on the side that blows air out so it keeps everything dry if you don't dry correctly the pack wraps they'll smell like cat urine over time so everything is dry very quickly because of the fan pulling in and out and their computer fans super quiet take very little energy they run 24 7 and that's worked out pretty well [Music] so the cost of the van i'll give you a breakdown of what we spent on it and you may think oh no people do vans because they're cheap and you know it's much less expensive than going with a class a or some big motorhome that's not true if you bought this brand new you're looking at 180 000 so they had the van on the lot so we ended up getting four thousand dollars off sticker because during the pandemic the early phases of it they had marked it down because they weren't selling so anyway we lucked out we drove it home two days later and started the build out the build out cost us about thirty five thousand dollars the van was about fifty four thousand dollars after taxes um and again that's with the four-wheel drive with the diesel engine um and the the build up like i said was about 35 000 the you know stainless steel countertop alone was 2500 the batteries and all the the components in there which you could do much cheaper than what we did or or somewhat cheaper maybe not as much power though was probably around eight to ten thousand dollars so there was a few pieces we originally had aluminum water tanks on the top and those turned out not to like the chlorine in water and so that didn't work out so we took those out but that was like a thousand dollars that we had in there um but overall um like i said about 35 000 i think you could have spent about maybe 25 000 on a brand new chassis brand new van and the the 80 20 also is a little bit more expensive than going with wood but it's super easy to work with the only way it would build i think it looks good you can actually do a better fit and finish if you wanted with 80 20 they have corners and stuff but we're totally happy we love the 80 20. it's lightweight and easy to work with but so we're about uh 54 000 for the van 35 000 for the build out so about 89 about 90 000 is what we have into it very happy with it pleased love everything of it and we'll see what the the future brings when international travel opens up we'll do much more that i you know i don't anticipate we'll ever get i shouldn't say ever we anticipate we'll get rid of the van anytime soon um but but you never know and we like to change our minds so in the future who knows maybe we'll go to a little bigger unit doubtful but so that gives you a breakdown of our cause [Music] so overall our idea on the build was to use the painted surfaces that are in here already i mean they're nicely painted um so instead of having the wood that most van builds have all the way through we decided one thing we have all these windows so that that helps a little bit too but we wanted to use this as part of that build and make it simpler the weight of the van is about we just went to a weigh station uh 7 800 pounds full water us in here pack rafts one wheels everything the van can hold about 9 100 pounds is the weight limit so we're well entered that so it's perfect but we wanted to simplify everything all the electrical then comes to the wall and then runs with the proper 15 amp cords that are coming off of the electrical outlets and such no switches as i said before no outlets um you know wiring through there so if you see a lot of van builds they'll have a ton of wiring through there and again that's all great but we didn't wanted that we wanted simplicity we ended up with that many people might look in this and not like this they want a garage they want to put bikes underneath we understand that they may not like all these windows many times they don't have windows like this and so they want to stealth we understand that we need windows we would not like a van that had all the boards on the uh covering up the windows so for us this works out great not for everybody we get all this area here with these swivels and uh the bunk bed makes it good one thing i forgot to mention that is a stainless steel countertop that we had specially ordered um that one also took us a while to get but even though it looks simple it's all stainless steel we freaking love it it makes it so easy to clean up no worries so that that turned out awesome other than that uh that's our van build um hope you enjoyed the video and again it's not for everybody but we fanta we love it now would we want to live on here full-time or any van or any motorhome or any rv or any house or anything no we love variety we love change um so this is just part of our life and it's it's one piece of it so we'll do airbnbs we'll do international travel we'll stay near our boys we'll you know so many different options that we have this just fits in and this fits in perfect with kobid and even after cobia [Music] instead we use alexa so come on alexa sorry i'm having trouble understanding right now please try a little later [Music] you

Channel: Gaye N Robert

Views: 2,880

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: NJTzYVq_Zhc

Length: 11min 32sec (692 seconds)

Published: Sun May 30 2021