Van Conversion: Introduction

Welcome to the first of a series of posts about our crazy van conversion journey. We built our camper in London mid-way through last year and we have been travelling around Europe ever since.

Before I get into the nitty-gritty of our conversion, I have a bit of a back-story for you. In 2017, Cam and I spent six months travelling and working in the US. I had a wine making stint lined up in Sonoma, California for six weeks and so we thought we would travel for a few months either side. Cam had already traveled around Australia for a year in a camper van in 2011 (way before I met him) and loved it, so persuaded me easily enough that we should do the same around the West Coast of the States for two months before I started work.

We had a VERY low budget, we didn’t want to spend more than USD$3000 and it just so happened that through a wine making friend of a friend, we bought a 2005 Toyota Previa that had been roughly converted already for USD$2500. When I say roughly converted, I mean it was absolutely basic; there was a ‘double’ bed in the back (Cam slept diagonally the whole time) and a pretty crude excuse for a kitchen in the boot, a few shelves full of plates, pots, pans, a cooker and some washing up buckets. We bought this the day after we landed in LA and had to drive with the previous owner all the way back up to Napa Valley, in a 2 seater car, in 45 degree heat, with no air con. I spent the whole 14 hour trip terrified of getting arrested lying on the bed in the back, wet with sweat (and fear). Dramatic but true, I swear. Having made it to Napa in one piece that night, we spent the night in a motel and officially bought the camper (if you could even call it that) the next day.

The next two months were some of the best and worst of my entire life (here I go being dramatic again, but honestly I was either loving life or almost in tears the whole time). The scenery and places we visited in America were just absolutely breathtaking. It is the most geographically diverse country I have ever visited and I would go back in a heart beat. We drove through National Parks, along incredible stretches of the Pacific Coast Highway, through deserts & mountains & snow, around huge lakes and reservoirs and literally THROUGH the trunks of huge, ancient Redwoods in Oregon. I was in awe of the landscape there and I still am when I go through the photos from our trip. We met some epic people, some of whom I am still in contact with now, drank way too much American diner coffee & beers, ate way too many burgers, gorged ourselves silly on Southern BBQ, surfed along the whole Californian coast, hiked in some seriously beautiful National Parks and covered thousands of miles in the old Previa. It was a blast. But there were some really, really hard parts too. When I look back on it now, I think we just made certain things extra hard for ourselves at the time. We didn’t have a toilet option, which I seriously just found so hard & thinking back on the many dubious places I had to go pee (etc.) in the States still gives me nightmares. I struggled without a sink (look, I am not a princess I swear, but basics do help) and some nights Cam just couldn’t deal with the fact that he couldn’t stretch out properly in bed.

So basically, these struggles and the two months we spent figuring out the whole van life thing, meant we had a really solid idea of what we wanted to build for ourselves one day. When you see me write that we had no plan for our conversion, we didn’t, but I guess we had a really good idea in our heads of the kind of van we were going to end up with at the end of the conversion.

Fast forward two and a half years and we were in London dreaming up our European road trip, whilst working and saving up money for our van conversion. In the end, we took such a long time actually finding a van that was within our budget & had low miles, wasn’t completely ancient and had no rust on the outer body work, that by the time we made our purchase we had seven weeks to gut, re-build and finish our conversion before the date we wanted to leave the UK… ouch. We chose a 2011 Ford Transit van that had a high-top (so we can stand up inside) and a long wheel-base (so Cam can stretch out in bed, luxe life). It had really low miles (under 90k) & it had been a Rail Network van so it had had regular services in it’s time.

If you aren’t already thinking it then let me tell you that yes, that is actual madness on our part to attempt our conversion in this time period. Even just thinking about some of the nights we spent on the build still makes me feel anxious… but, as that old chestnut goes, you get out what you put in.

We took over a week to pull out all of the old service van interior & deep clean the hideous mess they had left behind. That wall in the middle of the van that you can see in photo two below was, and always will be, the bain of my existence. I hate it. More on that in a future post though.

Living in London was the biggest budget killer for our build - we had to source so many building materials in such an expensive city. It also meant that we were building our van on the side of the road, sometimes doing things in the car parks of the hardware stores we visited too. I would categorically not recommend this to anyone. We had so many sleepless nights once our build started to get to the final stages where we would panic that someone was breaking into our van… We had some pretty dodgy characters walk past while we were building and have a really good nosy around asking questions. Usually they were harmless but Cam did get threatened once by a scary dude who said he would get his mates to come and steal our tools because he thought Cam didn’t take his advice seriously (which of course he didn’t). Thank god I was at work or I would have absolutely freaked out. We also belatedly discovered, whilst at the local council office, that there is a height limit in our London borough for vehicle parking permits of 2.3 meters… and ours is approximately 2.7m - awesome. That was a real low blow as it meant we couldn’t park the van outside our flat, unless we paid for hourly parking during working hours. I want to be completely honest about this conversion process and say that we both almost gave up on the whole thing then and there - and we hadn’t even started yet. We calculated that it would cost us way over one hundred quid a week for parking, ouch… Walking home seriously dejected I saw someone who lived around the corner from us and just happened to ask if they knew of anyone who would be interested in ‘renting out’ their driveway during working hours. Little did we know but we were talking to the liaison of this gem of a London community & he offered us a private parking space off the road for free. I am still not quite sure what led me to talking to a complete random on the streets of London, but I sort of believe it was meant to be. We are so grateful to the people who lived on that street, they were almost as invested in our conversion as we were and we got to know so many of them.

Amazon became my best friend and I ordered at least four different types of insulation material for our build. We took over ten trips back and forth to a multitude of London hardware stores and watched our bank accounts get lower and lower. After a ton of research I had decided on an insulation plan which involved mainly Thermo Fleece, floor insulation and a bunch of moisture barrier material to keep our insulation dry and separated from the air inside the van. Once we finished this we slowly put up our walls and ceiling, plastered, primed & painted our bebe! We also used real hardwood flooring at the front of the van & this is one of my favourite parts about our build.

After um-ing and ah-ing over what to do for our kitchen, we drove past an awesome cabinet on the side of the road in our London borough one morning. After a super quick look at each other we decided to do an illegal U-turn and check it out - five minutes later we had lifted it into the back of our van & this became our kitchen bench!

After we had finished painting the van, I had to visit my family in New Zealand for two weeks and so I left Cam to do the majority of the build work for our bed base, couch and back drawers. He is a champion and I am so lucky that he took everything I wanted the van to look like & literally built it himself. I love that guy. Before I left we went to IKEA (how bloody good?!) and got quite a few bits that we wanted for the build, like shelves, cubes, crates etc. After I left Cam built the bed frame using timber and the IKEA cubes we had bought, which formed the end of the bed. He then custom-built two large drawers that pull out from the back of the van and installed them onto heavy-duty slide runners. He also built the couch frame with enough space for two cupboards below for extra storage and then primed & painted all the new wood he had cut and used. Cam is an electrician which meant that the van electrics were like a walk in the park for him. He wired up our two leisure batteries via a relay (switch), separate from the main van battery so that they charge when the engine is running and disconnect when the engine is switched off. This means they will never drain the main engine battery once the car is turned off (which would mean our van wouldn’t start). He then installed an inverter so that we could have 230V power for charging our phones & laptops (even for my hair dryer hehe) and our lights, sink pump & fridge all run off a 12V DC system. By the time I got back from NZ, the inside of the van was starting to look like a tiny home, we had light and power & I was so, so happy.

When I got back, Cam still had a lot of small things to finish off which he was happy to tinker away at, so I got stuck into building a lot of the IKEA shelves and crates that we had bought. We had ordered a campervan sink kit of Ebay (which came with a 12V water pump so we could have running water) and so I measured & cut a very large hole in the top of the kitchen bench for the sink to fit into (I was so nervous). The plan was then to fit our fridge in under the sink, but with all the plumbing underneath it, the fridge could only just fit. Mares. We bought another part for the sink which Cam was certain would work… but it didn’t, so we then had to call on our mate Rob (who is a plumber) to come and give us a hand. Luckily he had exactly what we needed & he helped us properly install all the sink parts.

With our shelving up, our sink connected and almost all of the build finished, we headed back to IKEA to buy cushions, kitchenware, curtains, linen, baskets & other things we thought we would need, plus a few house plants to keep me happy! This was so fun - I was like a kid in a candy shop and Cam got swept up in my excitement too. We had to do a cull at the check out because we had gone slightly (a lot) overboard but we came out with some lovely things to finish the interior of the van off. Our plan was to buy a foam mattress from IKEA and cut it to size but the store we went to didn’t have any and they couldn’t deliver one to us before we had booked the car ferry to Europe. A week out before we were due to leave the UK I ordered a custom built memory foam mattress from an online shop - cue panic. They lost our shipping code and we thought we would have to leave without it. Thank goodness it arrived - 12 hours before we were due to check into the car ferry!

Whilst we were waiting for the mattress, I cut and hemmed the curtains which were going to be hung in between the drivers cabin and the living area, and we also installed the black-out blinds onto both windows. We slowly moved in all our stuff the day before we were leaving (as we didn’t want to leave anything in the van overnight in case of break ins) and then we slept in the van for the first time in a car park outside our flat in London - living the #vanlife dream!

So. That was a brief summary of what our van conversion involved in the seven weeks we had to complete it. We were running around like headless chickens the whole time (except for me when I was in NZ - sorry Cam) working until 11pm at night, got barely any sleep, drank too many beers whilst discussing our many next steps, ate way too many Co-op salt & vinegar chips and basically ran ourselves into the ground. Sound fun? It wasn’t. But it was all worth it to have had the insane adventure we have been having for the past eight months - and it’s not over yet.

If I can recommend anything to first time van-lifers intending to travel during European summer, invest in a compressor fridge. Dometic is the biggest and best company in the world for compressor fridges but in more recent years there have been other companies coming out with slightly less expensive, similar models. We chose Dometic because they have such a long-standing reputation for high quality products. We found out during our US road trip that a chilly bin (NZ slang for a cooler) with ice in it just does not work during summer, plus you spend a fortune on buying bags of ice - never again! Also - insulate your van, but more on that in a future post. Our diesel heater has been a life-saver while we have been travelling Europe in winter too, it keeps us warm and helps keep the van dry inside. As we have learnt what systems work best for us living in such a small space there have been a few things things that we have changed and improved on whilst we have been on the road - I will write more about that in a future post though!

Stay tuned for some more detailed posts about our conversion coming up & thanks for reading. Feel free to send me a message if you want to ask me any conversion-related questions.

G x

A brief snapshot of our build process…