VAN LIFE BUILD_ It’s All Starting to Come Together Now

So we are now installing our exhaust fan for our water heater. You can just see why van build takes so long. We spent the last couple of days just planning, measuring, cutting, painting and we've just popped it and we've realized it's a little bit too small. Hi we're Stephen and Jess and this is baby Hunter. In 2020 we took the massive leap to follow our dreams and buy a van to travel around our home country of Australia in. Trouble was it's completely empty which means work began on turning this cargo van into a new home on duty. On last week's episode things really started to take shape with our walls and ceilings put in plus all our furniture getting installed. Just as we were ready to head back into the shed to resume work, Perk got their very first case of COVID in over 10 months as a hotel worker contracted it from an international traveler in hotel quarantine. Our city instantly went into a five-day lockdown from this one case which kept us housebound for the week as we waited to hear the news. At the same time a massive fire struck Perth with over 80 homes being lost over the week. We even had ash falling into our backyard. Our hearts go out for all those families who lost their homes. Not all was lost for the week as each new day rolled by no new cases appeared which meant lockdown was lifted and work could resume the following week. But a special surprise appeared on our doorstep. Our good friends that are in series all the way in small town Kinnamat, Canada had been trying for over six months to get their daughter over to Australia for her gap year. After multiple flight cancellations we didn't think she would make it until we had a little knock on our door come Sunday morning. Before this video begins we just wanted to say a massive thank you to our good friends over at on this video to give one of you your very own Mercedes Sprinter van plus $80,000 to kit it out how you want. Stay tuned for more details. Now I don't know if we've ever told you this guys but it takes us about an hour and 20 minutes to get down to Rockingham to go to RV Solutions who are the guys that are helping us with the bill. Instead of lunch Jess has packed me a little safety kit, hand sanitizer, some gloves and a mask. Now usually I catch public transport I can get some work done while I'm on the trains but with the extra kind of precautions going on at the moment in Perth I thought it's probably best if I just drive in. Awesome thank you so much have a good day. I know it's Macca's coffee please don't judge me guys it's a Monday we all need our caffeine fix. Alrighty everybody and welcome back to Monday which means it's the beginning of our van build week. Super exciting stuff because so much has happened in the van over just the last kind of seven to ten days and I'm excited to show you what kind of updates we've done. Also our city is putting some more precautions on at the moment so I'll also try and subtitle as much as possible to help you guys understand what I am saying if it's a little bit hard to hear me through the mask. So as Hunter gets a little bit older we wanted to make sure that we had a bed for Hunter so we put in a bunk bed which would be so much fun if you're a kid traveling around and you have your own bunk bed. As you can see pretty much built the bed up here and now we're just doing some finishing touches so Hunter doesn't roll out and falls onto our bed. What we're doing at the moment is making a bit of a lip so of course the lip is just going to be placed right on here so there's a little bit there so she does murmur or move in the night she's not going to fall out of her bed. Also do you know what Monday means? We have gotten a delivery in. We have our countertops, our acacia wood that we picked out from Bunnings as well as our sink and our taps. This is so exciting seeing everything slowly come in. If you've ever done a van build you know probably the thing that holds you up the most is just waiting for things to come. When this is in it is going to look so nice in the van as you can see it's very white at the moment and these type of things we're going to use to pop some color back into the van. So this big bad boy is actually our water heater and we always knew when this was going to come in that it was going to take up so much space in the back of our van underneath the bed. I mean Andy warned me it would be big but I didn't expect it to be this big. A lot of you might be asking and a lot of you did ask what's the water heater for? We have yet to see your bathroom it was literally one of our most asked questions in the last video. We're going to be having an outdoor shower and of course hot water for our sink so when we come to that we're definitely going to break it down and answer all you guys questions about what our plan is for a bathroom or lack thereof a bath. It's actually crazy how many gizmos and gadgets just one piece of equipment need. Like what is this? What is this? This is when things start getting fun and super technical. I mean seriously there is just it comes with two booklets of instructions on how to actually get this in and we've gone for a bigger unit so it's not going to take too much away from the power from the solar so we can still do things like run hot water and also like use our laptop. I think now we're going to work out where we can actually put it so we raise it above the wheel so it gives us more storage underneath. Not only is it going to heat our water but it can also work as a heater itself to warm up the van as we move into July and the cooler months in Australia it's going to come in handy. So with our water heater and our general heater which is all in one here we thought to actually lift it up above the wheel base so that at least we can get a little bit more storage in here even if we just put like our beach umbrellas through there there will be a pipe that needs to go to the water tank which we're going to have to install underneath the van but hey rather than putting it here and then being completely lost with space at least it gives us a little bit a little bit more space and when we're working with you know this area a little bit goes a long way. Just got in this morning and the boys straight away started working on putting the air con in hopefully we can get that connected up soon because it is so hot in the house that was fun to see see them getting that air con on there that thing looked heavy we cut that hole months ago and it's cool to finally see it clogged up with the air con i mean i feel like over the next couple of weeks there's going to be some big tech big pieces of equipment that we're putting into the van which is just so fun to see. Alrighty so the work continues we are working on the cabin tree or kind of like the doors for all our different cubby holes or for our kitchen as well so what we're going to be doing is actually framing it out first and then building it together painting it and then popping it into the van but what we've pretty much been working on for the last few hours is we have our hardwood here and we worked out we needed about 30 meters worth of this stuff to actually get all the different sides for all the multiple doors and drawers that we have but as you can see with hardwood it kind of just comes in like quite square quite blocky and we really wanted it to be finished off nice so we got out this pretty fancy looking machine that was attached to the workbench get to go through and choose your finishings this is the example piece so when we kind of have all the different sides of the drawers and the doors we then needed to make some slits through here so of course when we go to build out the rest of the because this is kind of just the framing you can shove a white piece in both sides so that when we open the door and of course the front of the door and the back of the door will have this nice white finish and of course we're going to paint these as well so that it matches the rest of our van so yesterday we finished painting up all of our different wood to make our cabin tree for our cupboards and it's now being cut down to size and you guys can probably visualize a little bit better on what we're actually planning to do staple them together see how it all fits in test it out and then we should have some nice cupboards feels like so long since i've seen this sign they popped this up to show which one was our van when we started to build but the minute the walls went on just sitting here we've got this whole separate machine to join all our pieces of wood together so we kind of just put it in here use a bit of a foot to send it off and it staples it on the back so then we can fill this in sand it down and then give it like a nice final paint over but let's make some doors you can just see why van builds like we were watching so many before we did our own we're like oh yeah they take so long why did they take so long and you can just see why we spent the last couple of days just planning measuring cutting painting just to get to this moment we have one draft still got to repaint it sand it down but one draft with you guys of a cupboard door so just to give you guys an idea it still needs a bit more work but pop it in here we're gonna have some nice matte black handles for it but so accomplished when you've been working on something for the last few days and then you get like a little a little bit of hope that you're gonna get this done so omaze are one of our favorite partners because they take the time to give you guys incredible opportunities just like last year when they gave away a trip on the orient express that sharina recently won so when they saw that we were doing our very own camper van conversion they thought it'd be the best idea to give you guys one of the opportunity to turn a sprinter van into your own tiny home on wheels so one of you will win your very own mercedes-benz 4x4 sprinter van so you can get lost on the open road and explore your own backyard like we'll be doing very soon on top of that with van smith you'll get eighty thousand dollars to upgrade it to suit your style want your own bike rack consider it done each donation supports a great cause access fund which is a national advocacy organization that protects america's outdoor climbing areas and conserves the climbing environment so if you're interested in doing exactly what we're doing converting your very own sprinter van make sure you head to omaze.com slash ftn for your chance to win your very own custom sprinter van guess what we've installed in our kitchen we officially have still learning how to open it a fridge so we've got our fridge right here and we've been building out so above the fridge is going to be a huge drawer we've just put in the little what would you call these sliders to put a big drawer here so this is where we're going to keep all our cutlery and all our utensils and then we've also installed right next to the fridge a pantry so here's where we're going to fit a bunch of our food so i'm guessing what like our spices and all our cans and stuff like that it's going to pull out pantry right here really see the kitchen's coming along so we are now installing our exhaust fan for our water heater bye all right so the boys have now finished the cupboard doors and they've given me the fun job of painting so today we're painting these all a nice fresh coat of white while flowers playing on the radio it takes you back to singing in your bedroom all right while we're waiting for the first coat to dry we've decided to of course head to bunnings because now we need to choose what we want to do for handles for the cabinet drawers why has this been the hardest decision yet i know i want that black cupboard handles but there are so many different types like do we want like a squared off type or do we want these ones that like round off or there's these type what's like what do you like steve i think i like these you like the rounded off that's funny because i think i like you like this yeah it's funny because we actually came here for two things the handles and a safe and i realized right across from the handles are the safes but we decided we want to put a safe underneath the bed and then we're going to bolt it to the chassis of the van so then when we are leaving the van and we have like a camera or laptop still in the van we have a place that we can store it and know that it'll be kept safe we're thinking of getting this one because this will fit under the bed big enough to fit our laptops our cameras and stuff like that so uh yeah i'm gonna pick one of these up how heavy do you think this is gonna be do you want me to do it are you gonna give it a try oh it's not as bad as i thought it was gonna be but it is still after all that steven has decided to be bigger and making me lift another box it's not the cutest of unboxings 10 out of 10 for that unboxing and you guys saw everything here is our safe they said it was secure we can't even get oh there's keys what's the code try zero zero zero hey welcome to our safe sorry while steven has been busy getting little hunter to sleep i went and did a second coat on the cabinet doors and thought i'd show you what the handles look like on it so let's just pretend they're connected because they're still drying but i'll pop it here so these would be one of the cabinets at the top and i guess we'll do it their point of view so it'd be around here and then we'd lift up and then the door open hopefully they look good i think they're a good choice hey yeah i think that the round one's a good idea oh i see all right this guy's officially cooper the van so exciting news we almost have our bench seat finished which means we can finally go and order the upholstery like cushion for our bench so we found a place down in mandra rv solutions recommended them they're called mandra canvas and so today we're going to be choosing the material and the type of foam we want and then they're going to make the bench seat and then they're going to come in i think they might install it for us which one do you like madam so we've placed our order in we ended up choosing like this beautiful faux leather look and it's super soft as well but they told us that it'll be done in six weeks and i'm pretty sure that this fan is going to be done before then so that'll be the final thing that we put in here before we leave and hit the road but i thought i'd show you guys the bench now because it's actually finished so here it is so this is where the little cushion's going to go and then we're going to have a back cushion along the back so this is the area we're going to be using for when we eat and also for our study and we've actually made this little hinged door so it means that underneath the bench seat we can also use it as storage which will be so helpful and we're just going to velcro those cushions down so they can easily be pulled up if we want to go underneath anytime and then this final bit here which you guys probably realize isn't hinged while our inverter is going underneath there and we should really never need to access that but we're going to face it this way so that if we do need to get into any bits at least we can still slide our hand in there but that's pretty much just going to be locked off master only mandatory until sunday and lockdown's fully over but this is what happens when you have a spoiled baby that has never been in the biggest room a mascot can i have it back i need to wear it you broke it hunter are you ready to watch paint dry made it worth the time so we're going to be spending the rest of the afternoon working on our kitchen and installing our bench top and i'm so excited because i've been so interested to see what this is going to look like in the van because choosing it in the shops you know you choose the color you like but you're never sure how exactly it's going to look in the van and i love it it's called and we've just popped it in we've realized it's a little bit too small so what we've done is we've got an off cut from another piece of the exact same wood and we are going to install that just in the back here so then once it's done it should all fit up and you won't even notice i think it's going to look so good yeah it's going to look so we've also they haven't seen this yet oh i don't know if i'm going to open it yeah this is the thing we also installed this drawer here so we've put it right above the fridge because there's this little spot and i feel like when you're building a van you all know you need to use as much space as possible we have this little area here and this is going to be the drawer that we're going to put all our cutlery all our wooden spoons and spatulas and everything in that's in right now it's so exciting all righty it's friday last day working on the van for the week our kitchen renovation or kitchen build continues we have our sink out we've placed our bench into the van so now we're just kind of making out working out which is the best way to make a bit of a layout so when we put it on there cut it in there this is going to fit nice and snug this is always scary because you spend so much time making this bench top and then once you start cutting into it there's really no going back so we decided we want to do the splash back in our kitchen with some tiles and we're looking at the different colors because we want it to be kind of like that beachy kind of theme so we're thinking of a blue and after grubbing them i feel like you need to compare them to really tell what color they are because originally i thought this was a light blue there's way more of a gray what do you think what color tile do you like you like the gray all right i'm really thinking this one yeah i think this one as well so the shop is shutting for the weekend but still another episode so much more stuff has gotten done if you guys enjoy this video hope you hit subscribe because we still got a bunch more fan build video to do to get this nice and perfect thanks so much for watching guys and we will see you next time so make sure you head to omaze.com slash ftn for your chance to win your very own custom sprinter van