Our First Thoughts On Van Conversions

I think I mentioned in a previous post that my boyfriend, Carson, was thinking about purchasing a van that we can live in. Well, it finally happened and now Carson is the owner of a small bus home. This is the first post of us documenting the process of renovating the bus into a fully functioning van.

Carson first found, contacted, and purchased the bus from it's previous owners all within the span of about three hours for a grand total of $3000 which was actually really reasonable for what it came with. The bus is one of the small ones, about 100 square feet, and came already converted with a shower, toilet and kitchen equipment. Carson ended up gutting the whole thing, keeping only the shower from the previous model. He tore out the floor which was a weird rubber tile and is replacing it with vinyl flooring.

The van baby from the outside.

This is what the floor looked like after he completely removed the previous plastic flooring, underlay, and plywood. In the photo you can see the entire buss is surrounded by the classic buss windows as well as the big emergency door at the back and the large swing doors you can see on the left. The plan for the bus as of right now is as follows:

The plan is to make an L shaped couch out of pallets that has an extension (outlined in green) that pulls out at night to convert it into a full queen sized bed. That way our many friends can hang out in the van during the day. The bed is located infant of the big swing doors so we can watch outside while we're in bed. The kitchen will be pretty basic with a stove and microwave and a sink with a pull out counter top. The desk will house Carson's computer monitor as well as provide more space for us to work. There will be lots of cabinets along the walls as well for storage.

Since that day Carson cleaned out the entire floor and we headed over to Home Depot to pick up some more underlay, plywood and the vinyl flooring that we chose. In the first few days we only got to laying the underlay since the process ended up taking a lot longer than we anticipated. After a few trips to the dump to discard all the garbage he tore out of the original bus we had made the first step towards actually converting it and I left him with the underlay completely laid down, just waiting for the plywood and flooring to be put in.

The next step after the flooring is laid out is to start working on the walls which need to be deep cleaned. My job is also to fix the windows by touching up the paint and replacing the screens. Part of what Carson tore out was the actual siding to the van on the inside, which will be easy to replace given the van is already insulated by the previous owners so that saved us a very long, expensive and painful step. He wants to put stick and peel tiles on the sides of the van which will really tie the whole thing together and be a quick fix for the gross holes that were some reason cut into the walls.

Once the interior is completely finished as a based (floors, walls, ceilings, cleaned ect.) we can begin on the cabinets and the pallet bed which will be very very easy hopefully. We're hoping that the timeline will still be that we can be finished by the end of July and take it out for a spin in August but we'll see if that actually pans out. To finish off, I thought I'd leave you with a few things we've learned from this process in case you were interested in converting a type of vehicle. This will be a really cool addition to these posts and hopefully I'll keep building on them and updating them and we can learn from all our mistakes.

Tips from the first week:

1. Flooring takes a lot longer than you'd think

2. There's a lot of weird hidden costs to construction like dump fees

3. Dismantling and removing the garbage was the most painful part so far

4. Each step takes about four times longer than you would expect and you can't rush anything

5. Water and electrical sound complicated and I don't think that's something we have properly prepared for