Van build countdown: the final days of our van conversion! | Van Build Series

We only have 10 days left to work on the van. But we have like 20 days worth of work to do. We're a little, a lot stressed out. It's been a pretty chaotic few days since we got back from Italy. Just hustling and working as hard as we can. I don't even really know where to start. I feel like so much has happened since we filmed our last van vlog. Yeah, I mean, one big thing that happened is yesterday we went and got our Texas driver's licenses. So we are now Texas residents again. I miss Washington. You're not very excited about that. I miss Washington a lot, but it's okay. I miss Washington a ton too. It's okay. I'll be honest. But we need the licenses because we need an actual physical address for mail, to register the van, for insurance, things like that. Yeah, just because we don't live in a house doesn't mean we can't have like, we don't have to have a permanent address for like legal reasons. So we're using my parents' address to be our legal home while we're on the road. But we've done so much, like I said, since the last time that we filmed a van update. My parents worked on some stuff while we were in Italy. So let's show you what we've gotten done. The biggest thing that got done while we were gone, thanks to Catherine's parents, is the shower. It is the thing that is like closest to like the finished product being done. So before we left, we had these walls put in, but there was the seams that were exposed here. So they added the caulking here. So it should be watertight now. Also, there's a light here at the top. So we're not having to shower in the dark. Here is the shower head so we can sing in the shower. And here's the mixer for the shower here. Now here we have the toilet. This is where you do all of your business. Another cool feature is this wood flooring we have here. So we'll stand on that. That'll be in there 99% of the time. And then to take it out, you will undo the toilet and then you can take this out if you need to get to the drain. So we added that wood flooring there so that the toilet had somewhere flat to rest. It didn't really exactly fit very well inside the shower pan. It was kind of wobbly and it's something it can attach to. And then the last cool feature of the shower is the sliding door. Boom. And probably the most exciting part for me are the cushions. Adam just picked them up today. We had a local upholstery place make them for us. And I was kind of nervous about how they'd turn out. I was scared they wouldn't fit. I was afraid I measured wrong. And I was also afraid that I wouldn't like the fabric when I saw it in the cushions. But I love the cushions. They are so comfy. They are six inches of memory foam. They look so great. They fit perfect. I cannot wait to sleep on these, to work on these. They're my new best friend. So my big task yesterday was to build all the drawers for inside the kitchen and in the closet. So this here is our silverware drawer. Nice and big. Probably fit some other things besides the silverware. I built the laundry drawer, spice drawer, and then another kitchen odds and ends drawer. So I sanded it and then I applied a layer of polyurethane. Sanded it one more time. Gave it another layer of polyurethane. And then I'll sand it one more time. And then it'll be nice and smooth and protected and ready to go. And I'll put the tracks back on. And then we can slide them back in. So this has been my big job today. So we put this wood conditioner on here before we stained it. And that is preventing the stain from getting in the way it should be to the table. And so it's not turning out the way we want. So this is, what, our third time of doing this? Of totally re-sanding it here. So I don't know if you can tell on camera, but this is some stain here, which I've gotten most of the top layer off. But then this edge right here is the conditioner and it's not letting the stain get in. And so I'm having to re-sand it down to like its original look here. So that's what I've been doing for about four hours now. So here's a little bit more backstory on this table. So we arrived back from Italy and the table was 100% done. It was stained. It had like the coating on the top. It looked beautiful. Minus one spot where it was like a big smudge of stain. And I just knew that looking at that every day would bother me. So I sanded the whole thing down again. So basically what Adam's done today, I did two days ago or yesterday and it took forever. And then I put the wood conditioner on, but I forgot to wipe it off and then put the stain on and it was not really staining. So it's 100% my fault. And I feel really bad that Adam's been working on it all day because it was my mistake. But now we know not to do that in the future. It's kind of rare that something's gone right the first time. We've had a lot of things we've had to redo. So it's kind of just the theme of this whole van build. So we're almost done. And I made these window shades out of Reflectix. So I made some for the back door windows, the two back windows, the sliding door window. And then I ended up just buying kind of like the traditional like car shades you can get for any kind of car for the front of the van, including like the driver and the passenger window. It was just gonna be much easier than trying to make those. So what I'm gonna do with this is I'm gonna put blackout fabric on one side and then there'll be Reflectix on the other side. So basically anytime we're sitting in the van and it's really hot out and really sunny, we'll have the Reflectix side facing out and then we'll have the blackout side facing us on the inside. And then whenever we're at night, we're sleeping at night and we wanna have privacy, we'll flip it over to the blackout side. That way, when you're looking at the van, it just looks totally black. We're also gonna have a blackout curtain between like the driving area and the back area. That way we have some privacy too. So I've spent a lot of time researching how to like make these and what's the right way. And a lot of people do kinds of have like fabric on both sides, which look much nicer, but I've read that doesn't work and you need to have like the Reflectix actually exposed and not covered. So I don't know, I'm hoping it's right. I guess we'll find out. Thankfully, it'd be an easier fix if it's not right. So most of these are actually gonna slide in between the gaps we have here. And then I'm also gonna add magnets to it just for like an extra way to keep it up so it doesn't fall down. So now I have to go learn how to sew. So that's what I'm gonna spend the rest of the day doing is figuring out how to use a sewing machine. It only took us about three hours to figure out how to do this. And I'm gonna say it took Catherine about two and a half of that and me about 30 of it. We are now eight days away from the day we want to leave. Keyword emphasis on the want because it's been tough. So it's not. Not looking as likely. We have a plan B, which is to extend it by a couple of days. We have a plan C, which involves just driving a car to where we need to be on a specific date and then coming back. So we'll see what happens. So you may notice last time we heard from you was day 10 or 10 days. It's because day nine, aka yesterday, not a good day. It was a rough one. We were both just, me especially, feeling frustrated, defeated, overwhelmed. There may have been some crying. May have been a breakdown. Yeah. It's tough. Not many things are going like, oh, we'll build this thing and pop it in. It's like, oh, we built it. Oh, but it's too big or it's too small. And then like, oh, it doesn't fit in that spot. Oh, well, we didn't know that thing was gonna stick out. So yeah, it doesn't fit. Yeah, or like yesterday we redid the table and then we did it wrong again. So like- Three times on this table. Yeah, I think we're making a whole new table now. So it's just, instead of going forward, we're going backwards. Yeah, it's like one step forward. You think you're doing something right and then you're like, crap, I did it wrong. And now it's two steps back. So it's okay. We're eight days away now. We're in better moods today. We've laughed today. We've sang songs today. So today is a better day. You may notice I look a little gray. It's because I've been sanding. That's all I've done today. I know Adam's gotten a few other things done though. One of the big things I got done today was this is our battery bank. And so I built a little platform for them to live in. And this platform will go in one of the benches. So it'll sit in between one of the walls of the benches and the wheel will, and it'll fit perfectly in there. And so when we're driving around, they're not moving around or anything dangerous like that. Seven days left, the countdown continues. Woo, I'm nervous, but excited. Me too. So today's big task is to prime everything inside the van that has yet to be primed. So big task ahead of us. We'll see. It's prime time. We'll see how our painting skills are, but we're gonna do like prime, sand, prime, sand. Probably. And then paint. So hopefully by the end of Sunday, we will have our first coat of paint. It's gonna look nice. It's definitely gonna make the van feel more finished. Yeah. Real quick before we start priming, wanna show you what Catherine and Zab has been working on today. These are the upper cabinets that will go over. One goes over the dresser area and one goes over the kitchen area. And these are a little bit shallower than the ones that will go over the benches. Those will be a little wider so we can fit more stuff like the bedding and things like that. Wow, wow, wow, check it out. It looks awesome. This has made a huge difference in the van. Like just seeing it. Looks like the pictures. Yeah, it finally looks like more like a almost done van. Not a really far away from being done van. It's so beautiful. And it made it just so much brighter. We are doing some like darker wood accents and some gray to kind of like tone down all the white, but. It'll make everything pop. This looks so good. So we're gonna sand it first thing in the morning. Determine if we need to do another like layer of prime, I guess is the word. And then we're gonna start painting it. That's exciting. That's gonna, oh, that's when I'm gonna start getting really excited. Cause that'll feel like a huge like check off the list. Yeah, for sure. It's a big part of it. This weekend's gonna be a good one. If we really work hard, we should make some like some big, big moves. Yeah, we've got like even more exciting stuff on the horizon. Like once we get some of this stuff in, like we have those upper cabinets that are getting ready to go in. And then like we can start messing around with the electrical stuff and. Then it'll be close. Start seeing if the solar panels work and the heater works and stuff. So, cool. So we're done for the day. We're gonna actually try to relax a little bit tonight and we're gonna hit it first thing in the morning. We have six days left to get this van done. It is Saturday. We're gonna knock out a bunch of good stuff today. So we lied when we said that we were gonna paint today. We're actually gonna save that until we get a few other things done. So today our goal is to sand down the stuff that we primed. Certain areas need to be sanded, maybe reprimed. We're also gonna work on the upper cabinets and we're also gonna work on making all of like the doors for all of the like cabinets and stuff. So hopefully we can get that done. I'm also gonna try to retackle the window covers, but I had a mental breakdown working on those the other day. So I'm feeling more positive today. So maybe that'll work out a little bit better. All right, now we have the rough draft of the small upper cabinets in and now I'm working on the big ones here. Check it out. Upper cabinets. These are the small ones, obviously. This one's a big one. And then there's another one, same size, exact same thing on the driver side. It's an exciting day at the van building HQ. I made my first window cover and don't look closely. It does not look very good, but it'll do its job. And hopefully the other four I have to make will look better. So as I said the other day, we have Reflectix on one side, blackout fabric on the other. That way like day or night, we can flip them around depending on what our needs are and our goals for having the window covered. It was an experience learning how to make these and learning how to use a sewing machine. And our sewing machine is probably from the eighties and it's not very good. And it kept getting messed up. So the stitching's kind of bad, but hopefully the next ones will be better. But I learned a lot about how to make these along the way. So here are my steps to make window covers like this for yourself. So after cutting out the Reflectix to fit in the window, I laid it on the blackout fabric with the blackout part facing down. I left a good amount of space around it because we'll need that to fold the edges over. And the next step is to put spray adhesive on one side of the Reflectix and then flip it over and put it onto the fabric. When you're sewing it, it's kind of secure already and you don't have to worry about it shifting around or anything. And then I use the spray adhesive to do all my folds. So I folded it over once, had it spray adhesive so it stayed. And then I folded it over one more time, which will kind of be like the final fold and the kind of like the outline you'll see when you actually look at the Reflectix. And I use spray adhesive to kind of put that down that way it doesn't shift around when I'm sewing it and it's already folded. And then the sewing's kind of just to like make sure it's secure and then add a little bit of like nice stitching to it or in my case, not so nice stitching. I don't have the numbers in front of me right now but between the blackout fabric and the Reflectix, I probably spent, I definitely spent under a hundred dollars for all the supplies, probably less than that to make all my window covers. I would have loved the nice ones that you can buy online but they're over a thousand dollars. So yeah, that's just not in the budget right now. So we're doing the cheap homemade way instead. Sunday fun day. We got quite a bit of stuff done on the van today. Look at all of these wires. To be a hundred percent honest, I couldn't tell you much about the electrical setup. My dad's been the one that's been working on it because he has a lot more knowledge on it. And it's not something that you should tackle if you don't have a ton of experience. So thank you dad for handling this part. It's the part that kind of scared me the most but he keeps saying it's easy. So hopefully everything works when we turn it on. So yesterday my big job was to make these upper cabinets. And today I'm working on putting on the facing here. So I cut the boards to the right length and then I put in biscuits here and then glued it in and clamped it down. Kind of something like that one there. Adam's been crushing the upper cabinets all day long. So I think they're all done now, right? Yeah, I'm just sanding them up. After Adam's been finishing the upper cabinets, we've been sanding them. We've been applying polyurethane to the interior part and then we've been priming the framing of them. That way they look nice and beautiful and we can paint them soon. I also finished sewing all of the window covers. The only next step we have for those is some of them will be attached with magnets. So we still need to attach the magnets to the covers. So Adam's gonna hopefully tackle that later today or tomorrow because for some reason, the sewing machine breaks every time I use it. And literally with him changing nothing, it works every time he uses it. So he's a sewing machine whisperer. So Adam's now in charge of getting all the magnets in them. And then once we get that done, we'll show you guys kind of how we made those once we know that they work for sure. The countdown's over, yes! But we're not done, we're closer. We're getting closer day by day, of course, getting stuff done. But some things have changed and we just don't think we're gonna be completely done by the end of the week. The big wrench in the machine is that we need to, we'll have everything built, but we won't have it painted. It takes time for the paint to dry, the prime, all that. So that's the big waiting game. Yeah, we can't work in the van when the paint's drying because we'll risk knocking the paint and then messing things up. So, well, I think we could get everything we have left to do done before the end of the weekend. I don't think with the paint drying, we're able to. All the final touches and the trim and everything. So we've canceled the countdown because things have changed now and we're not leaving in like, I guess it would have been like five days or so, four days. Saturday or Friday or Saturday. I was bummed about it at first, but I think this is truly for the best. So the only reason we had like such a tight deadline is because we need to be in Colorado on August 6th to drop off Kona, our dog, at this training program that we have been planning to send her to for months. There's a big waiting list and we're gonna, we'll go more into detail of why that's happening later on, but long story short, we had to be there on the 6th. So we were like, oh, perfect. We'll just take the van then keep on going. So now the plan is to basically drive the unfinished van there on the 5th, drop her off the 6th, drive back like the 6th and the 7th, and we'll sleep in the van because we'll have enough done to be able to sleep in it. Yeah, it kind of works out because we wanted to take it like on a test drive, right? You know what I mean? Try to tweak all the things and try to understand all the electronics and all that thing, make sure everything's working. So this is kind of like two birds, one stone kind of thing. Taking it on a test drive and still doing what we need to do. Saving money, not having to get like an Airbnb and a rental car and stuff. So I'm really excited for it, actually. To be honest, the only reason I was sad is because we are probably gonna have to eliminate a stop we wanted to make this summer because we do have some commitments this summer that we have to be certain places for. So we do have to kind of squeeze some stuff in. So we're probably gonna have to cancel a place we wanted to go to, but that's okay because we get to see our friends now and get to show our friends our van. We don't have to like be so stressed moving into the van. It's not gonna be like we finish at 10 p.m., we're leaving the next morning. Yeah, that would have been rough because we still gotta like move all the stuff in and just get everything right and all that. So when we come back, we'll have time to kind of ease into it a little bit more and it won't be just like bing, bing, bing, you know? Yeah, so the goal is to get as much done before we leave, have it basically finished. So we're just kind of tying up some stuff when we get back and hopefully leave August 11th. That is the new date we're shooting for and I feel like 90% confident that'll happen. Yeah, I feel pretty good about it. So that's a little update for you. Sorry that this vlog's been kind of all over the place. To be honest, every day it's a surprise here. Our life has been all over the place. Every day, like we're working on something different than I thought we would, like things change. Like it's just everything's been changing so we can't even like come up with like a storyline even for this vlog because we don't know what tomorrow will bring. But we feel pretty confident in this new plan. Some stuff like takes a lot longer than you think it does. Some stuff goes a little bit faster. Most of the time it's a lot longer. Sometimes you run out of wood. Yeah, I run out of stuff. But I don't know, that's the way it goes. But Adam, you did some fun stuff today. Yeah, we did. Let's show them. So this is what I worked on today. This is, I don't know which ones these are, but this is for, these are like the doors for the cabinets. Like I said, I don't remember which ones are which, but it doesn't really matter. So this is what we worked on all day today. So we had to set up this, it's called a router and it cuts these rails and stiles is what they're called. And then you cut the middle piece. And so there's like a groove in between here all the way around and this quarter inch plywood fits right in there. And then you just kind of throw some glue in there, clamp it up together. And so these are for all of the cabinets for the kitchen and the closet and everything. And then the ones on the table here, these are for the upper cabinets, the longer upper cabinets. And then tomorrow, hopefully, we kind of ran out of some wood today. So hopefully tomorrow we can get the shorter upper cabinets done. And then tonight we're going to sand all these down and then we're going to prime them up and have them ready for painting. Hopefully, I don't know, tomorrow, next day, and then we'll throw hinges on and handles and things like that. It'll be ready to go. So we haven't felt much progress the last couple of days because honestly, we've just been sanding things, priming things, painting things, repeat. It's a very tedious process. We're not loving it. It's just a lot of like the same work over and over again. It gets a little old after a while. I think we're kind of getting a little, we're definitely getting burnt out on this whole van. It's time consuming. But anyways, last night, something exciting happened. So we got the roof up, looked great. We wanted to get a coat of stain on it, make it all dark wood and all that. And so we did. We hate it. Yeah, it doesn't look very good. It's very, very blotchy. So we wanted to do a darker ceiling and we have like these gaps between it that we were gonna paint even darker, but it's just way too dark and it's just really splotchy. And we're using a softer wood because we were trying to be conscious of the weight at the top of the van. And yeah, it just does not look good at all. And we've just spent way too much money on this van and time for us to just settle, just to get it over with. So now we're gonna sand it all off and basically start over. So that's probably gonna take, I don't know, four or five hours probably. And it's hard because it's gonna be above the head. Like regular sanding is hard enough, so. Yeah, if anyone watched one of our Italy vlogs, we referenced how Michelangelo painted like the Sistine Chapel like this and how we would never complain about working on the van again. Well, we've complained a lot since. And we now kind of know what it feels like because we're gonna have to sand like that and we were staining like that and it hurts your neck really bad. So it's like 5.30ish right now. We will update you when we're done and we'll see how long it took because I think it might take more than four hours. Wish us luck. Oh boy. All right, so we got the stain off the ceiling. It only took probably like six hours of work total. Oh man, like our shoulders are like shot just from like holding this thing up. We haven't gone to the gym in a month, which is like unheard of for us. So at least we're getting a little bit of a workout. But yeah, we did a couple hours last night and then it was getting too late and we didn't wanna make the neighbors mad by being loud. So we just decided to get some decent sleep and start early this morning. And it came off. It was very hard. Very, very hard. And we look super great right now. Yeah, now I'm just terrified that we don't mess it up again. It went from this to this. They look so much better and we love them so much more. It was definitely worth the six hours of sanding like this. I feel very sore and strong today. What a day. What a weekend. What a week. What a few months, a month. What a six, what a six months. A 2019. Yeah, so today, did we stain the ceiling today? Was that today? No. So we put polyurethane on the ceiling today. We got the upper cabinets put in. We got the countertops in. We got the bench tops in. What else? I don't know what else, but it looks beautiful. We got two coats of paint on the van. Yeah. And it looks really, really awesome. We are headed to Colorado very early tomorrow morning. We're gonna drive the van as is. We're gonna sleep in it as is. It's gonna kind of be like camping, but like a little bit more luxurious because we won't be in a tent on the ground. We'll have some nice memory foam, but we won't have electrical and plumbing yet. Yeah, it'll be like heavy duty glamping, like a very heavy mobile tent. Yeah, it should be really fun. I'm excited. Oh, I'm so excited, yeah. So this is the end of this very long, like two week long vlog. We've tried to film as much as we can. There's some things we didn't get to. We didn't end up finishing the magnetic window cover. So that was one thing we promised, but we just haven't found the best solution for that yet. When we get back from Colorado in a few days, we're gonna hopefully finish the van. Really have no idea at this point, but the van will be finished soon. So the next vlog you see from us will be the van tour. So get ready. I'm excited. We don't wanna show you much more than this because we want a little bit of it to be a surprise. It's gonna be awesome though. It looks beautiful and I can't even wait to see it done. As is, it's so awesome. I'm so pumped. Yay, it's almost done. Brisket's almost fully cooked. You can almost see it. It's the final count down. The van built, what we did. It's the final, I can't. Shallower ones and then the ones in the back. You have gray hair. It's me, Meemaw. It's like the real life age app or whatever. Oh my God, face app or whatever. It's me in 50 years. Still working on this van. It's been a long process.