We’re now 7 months in to owning our soon to be camper van, and felt like maybe we should journal some of the building process. Not only for ourselves and being able to see the progression, but also for you and anyone else who may be interested in van life. So we figured, why not start at the beginning and explain why we bought a van in the first place. And ultimately decided to build a camper van from scratch.
THE BEGINNING
Before we can really explain why we bought this van and decided to build a camper van out of it, we need to go back a little bit further.
First, you must know that we have slowly been trying to consolidate and reduce the amount of STUFF that we have. And as part of that process, we decided to sell Katy’s car, and rely on only one vehicle. This actually was nowhere near as difficult as we thought it would be. We would carpool to and from work as often as possible and in worst case scenarios, Katy could take public transit to work. In the fall of 2018, I (Ryan) received a nice promotion and to celebrate, we decided to replace our only car for something a little fancier (FYI – I like fancy stuff, especially cars. Bit of a guilty pleasure of mine). We leased an Alfa Romeo and agreed that when the lease was up after 2 years, Katy could pick what our next vehicle would be.
HOW THINGS SPIRALED OUT OF CONTROL QUICKLY
Fast forward to the summer of 2020, it was time to start thinking about what our next vehicle would be. Katy has always loved SUVs, and so we began shopping around and checking out different SUVs. Nothing really jumped out as us, but we knew we wanted something we could take on slightly rougher terrains, should we decide to go on any weekend trips to places like Tahoe, Yosemite, Joshua Tree etc. This is where the spiraling began. We thought, maybe we’ll just buy a super cheap old SUV that we could run in to the ground for a few years and could sleep in if we wanted. Then we thought, maybe we could buy an RV and take Junior with us. Before you know it, Pinterest became our new home and it was filled with van life content.
Our eyes had been opened to a whole new world, and it was exciting! Within a matter of one single weekend, we went from unsure of what we wanted to get, to deciding we were DEFINITELY getting a van, to shopping around the entire US trying to find a van. Which leads us to the next subject.
HOW WE DECIDED ON WHAT VAN TO GET
Something you should probably know, is that this whole camper van, van life movement, is HUGE right now. It was already becoming a big thing amongst nomads who wanted to travel around the country/world, but the pandemic definitely expedited its popularity due to the fact that so many people were now able to work remotely. So cargo vans became IMPOSSIBLE to find, or you’d pay 3x the amount they should be. So this made things incredibly difficult for us. We had a budget, and would prefer to stick to it, but many of the vans we were finding were either 2-3x outside our budget, and that’s not even including the conversion costs, or they were SUPER old or super far away. So now began the researching on what type of van to get.
In the US, there are really only 4 common cargo van options:
Mercedes Sprinter 
Ford Transit 
Nissan NV 
Ram ProMaster
Each of these vans has its own pros and cons, which we of course put in to a spreadsheet to help us narrow down on which ones would fit our needs based on very scientific and mathematical equations.
In the spreadsheet above, you’ll notice a number of different factors which were important to us: price, size (particularly cargo space width), drive train, design and aesthetic, and maintenance and repairability. Now, we must tell you, if design and aesthetic is super important to you, van life is probably not for you, as none of these are particularly flashy or cool looking (some may debate us on that though). But of the four, one of them was basically written off immediately simply because of how it looked. Can you guess which one? Remember above when I said I like fancy cars?
THE WINNER!
At the end of the day, the ProMaster was the winner for us. It was a tie between it and the Sprinter, but it was almost entirely because of the cargo space width and price that we picked the ProMaster. One of the major pros of the ProMaster is that the width of the van at the back is just over 6ft. This means that even with walls built in, we could position our bed sideways, and both of us would be able to lay straight and not have to worry about bending our knees or laying awkwardly.
Why is this important? With the other van options you would either need to position the bed facing front to back, thus taking up WAY more space in the van, or in the case of the Sprinter you would have to cut out large holes on the sides of the van and install what are called body flares, widening the sides of the van. While I think we could have done that, not having to worry about it meant less stress, anxiety, cost and time.
So ProMaster it is!
SHOPPING FOR THE VAN
As we mentioned earlier, vans were and still are in high demand. Not only from those looking to live the nomad van life, but also because tech companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon have been snatching them up for their own uses. In fact, here in the Bay Area, Google employees have been known to buy these cargo vans and literally live in them in the parking lots of their offices so they can simply walk out of their van and utilize the on-site amenities like showers, kitchens and such.
So California as a whole was showing very limited availability. And the ones that were available, were outside our price range. So we decided to open up our search area to the rest of the US to see what we could find. And INSTANTLY we began finding used vans all over the place, Texas, Oklahoma, Montana, Georgia, Florida, New Jersey. So the question became: how far are we willing to travel for a van, and drive it back? The answer? Oklahoma.
OKLAHOMA HERE WE COME!
We found a used 2016 Ram Promaster for just under $15k which had around 150k miles on it. Now initially, the mileage scared us. But as we continued our searching, we were finding vans for sale with 200k-500k miles on them. If they can last up to 500k, we’d be just fine with 150k. So we hired a mechanic to inspect the van for us, we paid for the van over the phone, flew to Oklahoma City, picked up our van, and drove it home. WIN! Of course, we made some stops along the way, like visiting WHITE SANDS NATIONAL PARK in New Mexico.
Ok, so now the million dollar question. Why in the world did we do this?
WHY WE’RE BUILDING A CAMPER VAN
So we mentioned early on that we wanted something we could take on some rougher terrains and weekend trips. But really, what we’re most excited about, is simply hitting the road in the van for a long weekend trip along the coast, and on a Saturday morning, wake up, make ourselves some Nespresso coffee, open our rear doors, and see the coast. Dreamy right?!
Our goal for the inside of the van, is to completely build it out to basically be a self-sustaining small home. It’ll have roughly a full size bed, kitchen with sink and stovetop, shower, toilet, fridge and freezer, bench seat with swivel table, and cabinets for clothing, gear and more. If you’ve been following our journey on Instagram, then you know that we’ve already installed solar panels, fans in the roof, ceiling, flooring and insulation. With the exception of the motor of the van, everything will run off of solar power.
CURRENT STATUS
At the time of writing this, we’ve installed our insulation, ceiling and flooring. We’ve received our fridge/freezer, water tank, and we plan on beginning to build out the framing for all the furniture next.
We’ll continue to build off of this post and provide more updates as we go. Determining what materials to use, what types of solar panels, fans, electrical components, and everything else are projects all in themselves.
But let us know what you think below in the comments! Was this helpful? Did you find it interesting? Are you yourself interesting van life?
