VAN BUILD, TOUR and A UNIQUE SHOWER after 2 years living the vanlife ft puppy Gigi

Robert. I'm Charlotte. And this is our home and has been for the last two years. So what we wanted to do, I think it's been long enough, is about time we actually done a van build video and show you exactly how it's been built. Charlotte done, you know, a fair bit of the design work, certainly around the kitchen. Yeah, I designed the kitchen out. I didn't do much else. No, pretty much everything else was me. So this is going to be mainly me talking to you and talking about how I actually built the van, really from the design part right the way up to the end result that you see behind us. It's going to be a little bit of a different van build video. There's no sort of time lapses or anything like that because when I was building my van, I couldn't be asked to film anything. So I have some footage to show you, but not a lot. But I thought it would be, you know, quite interesting to take you through the build process and how I've done stuff rather than just showing you a 20 minute time lapse. So let's get on with that. One thing to bear in mind when you're watching the video, we have lived in it through winters, really hot summer. And so it's not quite as shiny as it once was. And we could do some paint work, but yeah, two years of full time living will do that to a van. The cupboards need to be repainted, the handles need to be. We need a new cooker. We need a new bridge. Yeah. Two years is hard on a van. It is indeed. Especially when you're as clumsy as me. I second that. Okay. Right. Well, let's talk van build then. So I think it's going to be really interesting for me to discuss with you the whole process about building a van out because there's so much to consider. And I'll talk about the things that were important to us, important to me when I was designing the van. So the first thing was the design stage. So design wise, always a bit of a tip. I found it very useful is that when you've actually got a design, a sort of idea of how the layout of your van is, get some masking tape, find a room and mask it out. Because sometimes, you know, you've got to think about walkthrough. If it's going to be wide enough to be able to walk through. Because the biggest thing for me was space. As you can see, there is no cubicles. There's no wardrobes. There's no anything in here. It's like open plan van life. That doesn't mean to say that you have to forgive anything like showers and toilets and things like that. So yeah, very, very important in the design stage. Is everything going to fit? Is everything going to be practical? And obviously finding the best solutions for everything. One of the key critical bits which Charlotte's already touched on is the kitchen. Now Charlotte, obviously, if you look back on our previous videos, she loves to cook and she's a great cook. I'm a very, very lucky man. Charlotte and I, we discussed how exactly what she wanted. She wanted a bit of kitchen workspace. She wanted a cooker and she wanted the sink to be usable and user friendly. So what I had to design was a way of creating an L-shaped kitchen in here. So really everything else is built around the kitchen. The kitchen was the first bit I designed and then everything else was subsequent after that. So how did I actually build the kitchen? Well, here you go. There's a few pictures and videos which I'll show you now. I had to actually put in a backboard between the cab and the living quarters, if you want to call it that. I mean, this is where it comes down to trying to use every single inch of the van. You're talking about a six meter squared space. So every single inch matters. So yeah, the fridge is actually set back and that is actually pushing right up against the back seats in the cab. My diesel heater, I didn't want it in the back. I didn't want it in the garage. It's actually in this tiny little void about, yay big. Just big enough to fit a diesel heater in. So that was utilising things. I don't like lots of gauges and all that sort of stuff that you see in modern vans. I wasn't interested in that. The only thing we have is the heater module there and two buttons here. One's for lights and the other one's for the pump in the back for the water. So the kitchen design, it's technical stuff. I'm not going to lie. You know, there's lots of different problems that come along the way and I've got to say I'm pretty good at problem solving. It's something I'm actually very, very good at. I'm not good at much, but I'm good at problem solving because this floor that I'm standing on now is not straight. And the biggest thing is when you get your van, just put a piece of wood that's straight or a piece of aluminium or metal and just see if your floor is actually level. This isn't, it dips in a bit. So that can really screw up your plan if you're trying to actually put something in. And the work surface was actually given to me by a good Samaritan. So I managed to cut that in, get the work surface in, cut the holes in for the sink, cut the hole in for the cooker and it, got to be honest, it all worked out very, very well. So my biggest piece of advice is measure once, no, measure twice, cut once. In fact, I used to sometimes measure three, four, even five times to make sure I got things absolutely spot on. It's because you will screw things up. I did. The next point I got to was this part here, which is the single seat. So we've got the bed and I wanted a gap here for a single seat, which is also going to be our toilet. OK, so this is my toilet. You have a little door here, which just comes off and we have a couple of little storage areas here. My solar panel screen is in here, as is my, cut off my electrics. OK, it's my circuit breaker is just there, so it's easily accessible from the inside of the van. And then we've got this section that just comes off like that. And there you go, there's the toilet. Now you notice there's a little switch here. That there, you can probably hear it, is the computer fan that I put in, just in case there's any nasty niffs, you know. So we prefer to give that to the neighbours than to keep it in our own van. But it works a treat, works really well. And I'll show you a little bit about how I constructed that, because I even had to make the box behind that myself as well. And I think I've got a bit of footage of that, so I'll show you that now. Once you're done, next will be the bed. The bed I constructed out of 4x2 on the edges here. I'm not a very light person. I didn't want there to be any problems in the future. And there's a similar sort of thing at the back. Now this leads me to another problem I had in regards to space saving. Now the handle on the inside back door stuck out. I'm not even joking. It sticks out about that far into the van, just where I wanted to put my 2x4. So I had two options. Either I just leave a big gap this big, or I take that out and do something else. I decided to do something else. I thought that was quite an important thing, because this seat here would have had to be smaller in order to accommodate a handle, and that just didn't make sense. So I took a jigsaw to a piece of old shaped aluminium and cut my own handle. It works fantastically. I just have to put my hand down the back of the mattress, pull it across, and the door opens. It really does work well. Actually thinking about possibly 3D printing them and selling them, because if you're thinking about doing a van build, it's actually a pretty good idea. The other things are the shelves and the cupboards. And naturally there's two of us living in here, so we needed plenty of space. We needed space to put our stuff. So this cupboard here is mine. That's got my clothes in it. These two are Charlotte's clothes, and this one is toiletries, towels. You've then got these two here, which are combined with the kitchen, for spices and other bits and bobs. And then you've got the tea room at the end there. It's also very important for us to have ease of use of stuff. There's a bloody train. Can you hear that? We're actually in a campsite. So yes, we needed all of that, and then we've got a little cubby hole up here for bits and bobs. Other storage, which is underneath the seat here, which is a big storage area. And we've got the drawers as well. So let me show you the drawers, because this was another part, the very important part of the build, is that I didn't want to have to keep on going outside, going round to the garage, to go and get stuff that we needed in the garage. So why not just build a big ass drawer to come in here from the back, which is exactly what I've done. Now you notice that I've actually put a piece of string on these. The reason is that when you open it, the string is actually attached to the lock for the drawer. If you don't have locking ones, then the drawers are just going to open all the time when you're driving. So you have to have it so it shuts flush, so that my shower unit can come across it. And then the table, I've got the two locks underneath here, and then the table just pulls out. Electrics. Electrics are very, very important in your van. So I've actually got three 100-amp lithium-ion batteries in the back of the van. Why did I go for lithium? Well, it's pretty simple. They last longer and you can drain them to zero before you have to recharge them. Unlike gel and lead acid, they're also lighter as well. So the other thing you'll notice on the video I'm going to show you now is that the batteries are actually on the edge, on their side, which yet again is really useful on the space-saving side of things, because I've managed to fit that over the top of the wheel arch, which has saved a load of space, a shitload of space. Got to talk to you about inverters as well. Because we've lived in the van for two years, I know what uses the power. And do not get an inverter-charger combined. I have one. It's a 3,000 watt. Now it does work well. I'm not going to take that away. But it uses a lot of power in idle. It just being on uses so much power that I've actually gone to a 2,000 watt normal inverter, which was actually Amy's old one. And that is much better. Much, much better. It uses far less power. Electrics-wise, it's not that difficult. It's not that difficult to do your electrics in a van. It really isn't. The only thing I would advise is once you've done it, make sure you get an electrician to come and sort it out and check everything, which is what I did. I've got a friend who's an electrician. And he came around and checked my van and also Amy's van just to make sure the electrics were safe. And got the tick in the box. So happy days. The solar, we have 360 watts of solar panels on the roof. That's two panels. And they go either side of the Maxair fan because I wanted it at the front of the van. The water system. Water in your van, very important. Now, we have two 75-litre tanks. You may be thinking, well, Rob, why have you gone for two? Why don't you just get one big 150-litre storage container? Well, the fact is is that I wanted these drawers and my table down here. So I had to split them so that I could fit the drawer in between. So they're connected underneath. I'll show you that. I've taken some footage of it. So as you can see, I've got this drawer in here, which comes from this tank and connects it to the other one over here through these pipes. It then comes out through this pipe up into the main system. Because I didn't want all the weight on one side of the van, it needs to be level to make sure the van's looking good, you know, and there's no problems with weight distribution. Okay, so how do I fill up our water tanks? Well, you can do it one of two ways. I've got a hose pipe with one of these at the end, which you can just connect to an external water tap and it fills up the tanks from there. The other route is to take the top off of the actual water containers and fill it up directly. The only problem with that is you've got to take everything out. That's a bit of a nightmare. So it tends to be this. It's slower, but it does the job. I've got a SureFlow pump with an expansion vessel. I would always recommend getting an expansion vessel just in case you get any freezing issues if your van's left for a little while. And it's all piped around using household pipes, plastic push fit pipes. So yeah, it's all piped around to the tap and also to the shower, which is here. But my system works really well. The power of it is good. And... Oh, excuse me. Oh, too much. That's electrics, water, everything that I needed in the back to save some money, I actually made it with the contraption I made to hold my batteries in place and the water storage. What I've used is a piece of old aluminium that I've found and decided to use this, cut it up, drill some holes in to go through the floor and screw in a 12mm piece of plywood, cut to size, that goes up and over the top. You've got the other part here, corner angle. And yeah, that corner angle just supports the other bar, which goes back to the main beam at the back here. And that then gives this a really solid fixing to the van. Stop it from moving around. The last thing you ever want is your water tank to be moving around. So you don't need to go buying stuff. You can make it yourself and it works. It works for me anyway. So let's talk about insulation. Insulation, very, very important. Certainly this time of year we're going into winter. We've spent two winters in this van already and the reason why we haven't froze to death is because this is really well insulated. So I have 25mm Sellotex or Kingspan, that sort of thing. Insulation in the roof and in the floor. But in the walls I could actually get away with 60mm. It takes a bit of time to cut it in, but it really, really works really well in the winter and in the summer for keeping heat out as well as keeping the heat in in winter. So I would highly recommend you use the same in your van and really pay attention to the insulation side of things. It is, in my opinion, very, very important that you get it right because otherwise you'll cook in the summer and you'll freeze in winter. What do I use on the sides? Well this here is an old pallet, quite a nice pallet that I used here on this side. Built myself some nice little shelves around there as well which is quite nice. Around the windows, installed the windows myself. As most people who do self-builds do, it is a little scary to be honest because you're cutting holes in your van so you can get it wrong. Which I did, I actually did. I didn't cut the hole quite big enough so I had to do some last minute adaptions to make the window fit. Silly me. Talking about windows, something that I'm absolutely oh my god I'm so happy that I done was the windows with the fly nets, with the fly screens built in. Honest, such, so good. Don't get anything else. Just don't bother with anything else. Get the windows with the built in fly screens. Here you'll see you've got the little lock on so take the lock off and then you can open the window and you can see the fly screen here so no flies can get in but if you want the window open just pull the fly sheet back and boom, you're golden. Don't have to worry about mosquitos because where you're going to be parking there's always mosquitos. I don't care where you go, there's mosquitos. And if you need your window open and it's a hot day and you haven't got it then yeah, you're going to end up looking like Annie. Got the max air fan in the roof. Now, part of when I designed the van I wanted air flow through the van. We opened these two windows at the back here have the max air fan which is above the camera and it flows the air through the van and then up out of the fan. Works extremely well certainly in hot weather it's absolutely a must. So think about your air flow through the van very, very, very important. So the flooring is just 9mm ply this is 18mm ply the actual cupboards here is 9mm ply so most of it in here is just ply. So what else is there? There would be the shower. Now I know many of you have probably seen the shower on Ami's van tour video that she's done of our van but I kind of wanted to go into a little bit more detail about it. A lot of you seem to really, really love what I've done with the shower so let's get into it. Let's get into it. First of all, how I thought about it I thought it was very simple to do. Just use heavy duty drawer runners and just have it coming out. Well, in theory, yeah, that is true but, oh my god, did I come across a lot a lot of problems because when you actually open the shower it's got locks on and I couldn't reach the other lock because it was tucked right in this corner. So I had to use a pulley system to actually disengage the locks so I could actually enclose the shower. I wanted a cubicle shower but I didn't want a cubicle shower if you get my meaning. I want the space to be able to have a shower with nothing to worry about being in this tiny, tiny little box. It's not my cup of tea. So I'm going to try and show you as much as I can about this now. Now you've probably noticed I've got this little cubby hole at the top here which I wanted. All sorts of bits and bobs. She still hasn't eaten it. This was in last week's video. Because it's pretty, I don't think she wants to. But this area here is actually a cupboard on the other side and that's for shampoos, shower gels, that sort of stuff. So let's show you how it works. So, first of all, I have this piece of string. This actually disengages the locks. So if I pull that one it disengages the lock on the far side. And I'll take this front panel off and show you what it looks like behind it. So if we now take that off you can see in there. And I'll give you a closer inspection. Let's have a look. And then I'll just use my finger on the bottom one. And then out she pulls. OK, so this is the shower. As you can see, it's a full cubicle. And I can actually stand in here and have a full on shower. Not a problem. I'm a big guy, but I fit OK. What I've done here is obviously I've got my shower debriefing me. So I've also fit the mixer which is here, so I've got a hot and cold feed coming through to this. And that connects into the box at the top here. Now there are some very complicated issues with this because the ply is only so thick and you've got to make sure that with this bit it's just actually coming out the back to be able to screw everything else to it. So it took quite a while for me to hunt the right piece down. But I think I've got some footage and some bits and bobs to show you of how I've done that, so I'll play that now. And putting all this side in, it's all curved it's 9mm ply. It's had to be curved into shape to make sure that this side fits onto this. Yeah, I can't tell you how complicated it is. It sucked, to be honest. But I've done it. I've got it. I've done it. I've sorted it. So, as you can see here, these are the drawer runners that I used. And they are very heavy duty. They take 120 kilos of weight each. So we can happily sit on the seat and not worry about weight. It has me, Charlotte, sometimes even Ami on it, and it's not a problem. So you can see this is the side of the shower and this is the other side leading into the actual shower. OK, so that's the shower. I also used just a normal shower curtain at the back and on the walls was just white self-adhesive vinyl wrapping they use for cars, I think. It works. It's waterproof. Never had a problem with it. It takes a bit of time to put on, but it's worth it. OK, so that's the van build. I'm sure you have many questions. Hit us up in the comments if you have any, and we will do a possible follow-up question and answer session on the build if you want. For now, we're going to leave it at that, and we will see you again next week. See you next week. Bye for now. Bye.