Building Our Home

My wife and I bought our van in June of 2015. We had been planning to purchase one and looking into it for about 6 months before we found ours. All of a sudden we were in a situation where we had money for the van, and there on the side of the road with a for sale sign was our home.

She was a mess when we found her. In previous incarnations of her life she had been a work truck, an ice cream truck, and who knows what she was before that. But my wife and I saw it, and we knew right away it was the van for us.

We set out on the conversion right away ripping out most of the wood pieces, quite a few lighting pieces we didn't want, and the shelves that the previous owner had put in. And then we laid down on the empty floor of our new home and drempt of what it could become.




The van had a lot of different layouts in the time of our conversion. Especially after we moved into it, it was easy to see what layouts would work and what ones wouldn't, and we tried them all. Our first trip out our home was just a simple blow up mattress stuffed into the back.

And our home only grew and changed from there. We added furniture in, took furniture out, built a bed, removed the bed, built a new bed, built in a kitchen section. Every step of the way we would add and change, live in it for a week, notice everything wrong with it and change it again. Our home was our baby, the project that was always growing.




We spent many weekends and spare moments outside in the van working on making it a home.







The "final" version of our DIY conversion van consists of a bed in the back that can convert into a table with storage underneath the bench seats. It has a kitchen cabinet across from the double doors and a set of shelves built into one of the windows. It will probably still change again and again over time, but this is the home we have and love. It is the home we built ourselves.



Stay tuned for further updates and changes to our home to come.