hey there welcome to my channel where i take you
on tours of unique homes and showcase stories of people living alternatively we've toured
a lot of van conversions on this channel but today's van dwelling is a real head turner
this guy comes walking up and he goes that's a terrible idea for a car and it is a terrible
idea for a car a terrible idea for a car but it's an awesome idea for a house but it's a great
idea for a house john and carly are going to take us on a tour of their woodsy van and explain
how living nomadically doesn't mean you have to skimp on some big home comforts and if you
like these kind of stories make sure that you subscribe and hit that notification bell so that
you know every single time we publish a new tour make this house wooden walls in an air so cold pleasure's
not enough when you're on a roll hi my name is john and i'm carly and
welcome to our funky little van what this journey with the van started almost
exactly two years ago that's through about five interior rebuilds about three exterior
rebuilds a new member moving in right yeah we joke all the time about what it looked like
before carly moved in well it's very obvious that a girl moved in right and he was like the first
van lifer i ever met lucky for me because they're all pretty cool so that was a close call i could
get rid of everything i own and be totally happy before i used to have my own car and i would
follow the van behind and we would just kind of caravan and i would get to see all the people
looking and turning and talking slack jaw faces of just what is yeah so this one day i
was sitting in the front seat of the van and this guy comes walking up and he goes that's a
terrible idea for a car and then his wife is like honey honey there's a person
in there and i was just like hi and he was like i like your voice your van
scrambles away and it is a terrible idea for a car a terrible idea for a car but it's an awesome
idea for a house but it's a great idea for a house welcome to the outside of woody woody is
a 1996 gmc savannah 1500 it was originally very classic 90s family
conversion van for road tripping we took a lot of time to really modify it and
make it look nothing like a family road tripper obviously got his name from the very custom wooden
raise up here added 16 inches of height making the interior 6'4 certainly wanted to be able to stand
when i was traveling around and just got sick of hunching over i actually did that alone in the
desert which i don't know if i would recommend i was pretty dangerous but quality of
life has been dramatically improved the colors are definitely eye-catching and i
just picked a couple of colors that i thought would work pretty well for wood stain when i was
bringing it out and doing the work and immediately after putting it all together i realized
it perfectly matches harry one of our dogs the van has a 5.7 liter v8 engine we get
about 15 16 miles to the gallon right now which is excellent in our latest round of
renovations one thing that we wanted for a long time was a roof deck we knew we wanted
it to be the full length of the vehicle so it's an 11 foot roof deck up there with 400
watts of solar on top that we actually built into these wooden frames that pull out on wooden puzzle
slides so now we have all four panels extended out winning back a good amount of space
about 12 inches in width on each side when we built our roof deck obviously we
needed a way up there and we found a great deal on these flipped down ladder steps four easy
steps with the bumper and you're on the roof deck carly decided to do a couple little paintings on
the inside from here we have phases of the moon and when we're in bed we can see those perfectly
in this most recent round of renovations we added the skylight here we got the part for less
than 100 and it has increased quality of life dramatically for sure we get a ton of
natural light when we're hanging out when we're cooking when we're hosting and it really
really fills up the space so our latest addition here starlink from spacex is high speed internet
pretty much anywhere we've been very dependent working full-time from the road i work remotely as
an adventure coordinator and i also do full-time photography i do a lot of digital marketing i
do a lot of social media stuff i do a lot of graphic design branding web development it
has been a major form of sustenance for us one nice feature that we did add to the van is
our water fill so this feeds a 30 gallon water tank that with two people three dogs it lasts
us about a week all of our exterior lights are independently solar powered so none of the power
comes from our house batteries so at night time when it gets dark they automatically turn on just
like that all right let's check out the inside welcome into woody this is
one of my favorite walls in the whole van for christmas
because carly's a photographer i bought her a polaroid camera and now
actually all of these all recent memories my guitar of course which i have set up here in
kind of an interesting way i think or at least a simple way these little wall hangers are made to
hang a guitar perfectly vertically but i built a very small wooden box down here that just holds
the body of the guitar too and this doesn't move at all when we're driving next to me here this
comfy little stool looking thing is actually our toilet it's a really simple cassette toilet
there's a little release on one part and the top water tank and seat actually come off and the
bottom were able to walk into safe dump areas this front area up here behind me we reduced our shelving up here really tucked it back and
now it's things that bring us joy more or less the shelving up here and trim throughout really a
lot of the interior wood is just found pallet wood so being able to find wood and rehab it and really
bring character into each piece and use different stains the wood is very homey it's very natural to
us it makes us feel connected to nature it keeps things really bright it's obviously also very
durable and pretty practical and a lot of this being pallet wood that's often cheaper wood
so it's lighter wood it's not very dense this is our kitchen where i made the first meal
i ever made for carly where i made the first meal for a lot of new friends that i've met out there
i'd love to cook love to share things when i met carly i didn't have a countertop in here at all uh
it was just the frame of the top of it and i lived that way for a long time i like a lot of stuff
in here when a girl moves in you gotta step it up a little bit you know you gotta up your game
you gotta get the butcher block our pantry that's really massive tons of spices and little smoothie
additives carly wanted a full-size mirror because i was totally living bachelor life really
before that and i think this might have been my mirror before she moved in but now we have
a big mirror that i intentionally tilted down our sink faucet was 30 bucks online it's usb
rechargeable it doesn't go down to a pump an actuator a foot pump anything like that it's
plumbed into our 30 gallon fresh water tank and it just turns on with the click of a button
relatively quiet in the grand scheme of things definitely quieter than most sink pumps we use
this middle space for most of our cooking we have this little tiny stove just runs off of
one butane canister here no other moving parts we swap out a single can of butane maybe every
week or so and that's cooking every single meal getting up making tea in the morning it certainly
gets plenty of use and we don't really blow through fuel for that as we come down the counter
top here we have this handle and these hinges the countertop actually lifts up and we have our
top loading fridge nested underneath there it's a 54 quart aspinora fridge half the cost
of your average dometic when we're not using the fridge we don't need access to it we
have all of this additional counter space all right let's check out the
back the bed area the lounge area we built this table out of this is a terrible
start come here this table functions as our office our dining room table it's also part
of our bed that fills in the gap here it sits on one leaf that comes out on hinges and actually
slides in between two pieces of wood that act as a sort of counter weight when we're done working or
hanging out in lounge mode we switch into bed mode we take our table and that slots down our pillows
that act as backing here actually fill in the gap it's a full size mattress you can use a
bread knife to cut your tempur-pedic mattress the lines came out really really clean and
we actually upholstered the whole thing with velvet curtains that we found we just thought
it would be comfy maybe durable they were pretty cheap and affordable we absolutely love watching
movies watching tv it's something i avoided for a long time on the road feeling like like it
lessened my connection to nature or something but being a couple and wanting to just hang
out we prioritized in this rebuild a nice big tv that we would be excited to watch here we're
up above the bed in the lounge area and this is our clothing storage also built out of pallet
wood here this is basically all of the clothing that carly owns and then this little one
basically all of the clothing that i own some of this was the first pieces that we built
in this whole rebuild we did the back pallet wall here that we loved and really set the tone for
the rest of the build so as we're looking around there's inspiration coming from that everywhere
for sure we use the same wood stains we used a lot of the same patterning uh to keep things kind
of cohesive related to clothes storage uh one really cool kind of diy hack we saw on instagram
was to take your pillowcases and stuff them with your extra clothes so we keep our winter layers
in the decorative pillows on the bedding here so this area down below the bed here is where we
have the majority of our storage that's where we keep our bedding during the day where we keep a
lot of our tools extra things that aren't quite daily grab things and everything under here flips
up on a hinge and we can get into our storage one other thing we keep down here below the bed
is our power system we actually have a portable power station it's 1 260 watt hours it's really
really more than enough to keep us powered here approaching 30 at the same time as my lease
ending and my career changing dramatically i sort of took a good hard look at
my time on earth and realized that i want to travel and i want to be in nature
and i don't want to be up all night bartending i definitely knew like one day
i will live on the road one day in an air so cold pleasure's
not enough when you're on a roll can bear the weight of where i've
been of where i'll go of where i'll gold but i'm here with you you're here
with me so much world we've yet to see you
