VAN TOUR _ Micro Sprinter Tiny Home on Wheels _ Low Budget DIY Conversion

We're Seth and Scarlett, and this is Louis the van, our 2004 self-converted Sprinter van. We purchased him back in February of 2019 with 140,000 miles. We've been full-time vanlifers for about three months now and are currently traveling cross-country. We're gonna start in the cabin area, so come this way. So, up here, one of the most fundamental parts of, I would say, living in a space this small is having this swivel seat. It totally opens up the space. The minute you turn it around, it's like you have a whole new area to just relax in and chill. Especially with two people, one person can be on the couch and one person can be up here, and it really doesn't feel crammed or tight, and we don't get in each other's way. Without this swivel seat, it's definitely a little bit more of a struggle. So, it's a simple system. We installed it, and there's a lever right here that you just pull, and it spins. We did find a need for a heater immediately. The heater is down beneath my feet. It's a diesel heater. Seth swears that it was the hardest thing to install. You just turn this lever on, light turns on, and then you can crank it to however fast you want the fan to blow. It's extremely effective. Even in the coldest night we had, which was maybe 30 degrees, we've only had it cranked to one bar. Definitely recommend it, and, of course, we'll have everything linked below. Beyond the heater, one of the other key features that we installed right away was this headliner shelf. So, socks and underwear are stored up here in these little pouches, and having this extra space here is crucial. We do have this very small smoke detector. These hooks we installed as well. If we have a wet towel, we'll just grab it, hang it up. They flip down just like so, and then close them when everything's dry, and they're very flush with the shiplap. We installed this AC unit, and it's actually been super awesome because we do have a cat who you'll meet very soon. We were able to kind of conceal her litter box underneath the AC unit. We were really worried about where we would be able to hide her litter box because you obviously don't want to see a litter box in a van. We painted it with Flex Seal, and, honestly, we've had no problems with smell whatsoever. So it's been super great. This is our precious baby Lula. Her full name is Tallulah, but we call her Lula. And she's basically our child while we're living on the road. We've noticed that it's super awesome just for us as a couple to really have something to care after and just look after while we're on the road. She gives us so much joy, and she really does have a large personality. So we're always laughing and just joking around with her. Up at the front of the living area, we have our wardrobe, if you want to be fancy, or our closet. Basically, we have installed magnetic strips on both the top and the bottom. So these really do lock in. We didn't want anything opening or drawers flapping as we were driving, so we actually installed those magnetic strips on every drawer and cabinet that you'll see, and they've been really great. So I do occupy about three-fourths of the closet. Seth occupies the last fourth, and this is just for our hanging clothes. So this is for clothes that we don't want to be in packing cubes. In total, I have about six pairs of shoes that I've been able to store in here, and Seth has about four. Other than our wardrobe, any clothes that we don't mind being folded or into packing cubes, we keep in this drawer that pulls out just like this. I have labeled everything in my packing cubes. So just a simple index card with what is contained in it helps you to know what you're looking for right away. So I'll keep my workout clothes in here, T-shirts. I have larger packing cubes like this one for my pants and sweatshirts, tanks, shorts, everything that you don't mind being folded is in this drawer. Underneath our wardrobe, we do have our storage unit for our fridge. We have a vent here and a vent behind the driver's seat, so there is a ton of airflow coming through and out of the fridge to make sure no overheating occurs. So it is a 45-quart fridge, and it easily holds all we need it to hold. On a large grocery shopping haul, our food will be to the top, but it never exceeds what this space can hold. These are our light switches. These two are our overhead lights. So we have overheads over the kitchen space. We'll typically turn these on when we're cooking for some extra light. These lights are overhead. If we wanna read or do something that involves sitting on the couch, we'll turn those on. The next option for lights are our LED light strips. So these are our bottom light strips. And then we also have top LED light strips. The last light that we do have in this space is our reading light. It is touch-controlled, so at night, if all you wanna do is read, you can flip that one on, grab a book, and there you go. So this is our sink. You flip it on using the switch right over here. It runs on a 12-volt pump, turns on like any other sink. And as you can see, there are two stream cycles, so you can have a rinse, which you could then pull out and have yourself a little nice shower, or you can do a single stream. But under here, we do have our water tank. It holds 12 gallons. With traveling to different states, we have experienced different tasting water. Thank you, Georgia. We do have a water filter, so all our water will run through the filter before it is filtered out of our sink. We're always sure to get potable water, but just in case our water does run through the filter. So in this drawer, we keep utensils, spices. We'll keep pizza cutters, our measuring cups, a cutting board, knives. And like I said, usually this is a lot fuller, but we did just have pancakes for breakfast. I was able to keep my Crock-Pot. We are able to run it, just plug it into the wall and run it off our inverter and use the solar with it. It is super low draw, which we weren't expecting. So sometimes we'll throw a meal in, go explore, come back and have dinner waiting. Under here, we'll keep our balls, our plates, pots, pans, extra little food storage containers. And we did line it with this rubber backing. It does kind of keep things just in place as we're driving. So this drawer is our catch-all drawer. We have change for laundry. We have surf wax, our computer, our essential oils, pens, pencils, that kind of stuff. In this cabinet, we keep all of the solar, the batteries. This is our charge controller inverter. So all our power is stored and housed here. These are our table cloths. So when we do want to have a meal in the van, we'll pull these bad boys out. These drawers come out like so. And there you go. There's your table. You can have your food resting here and your table like so. So really nothing gets in the way. Just fold up your placemats, push your table in, and that's it. The backsplash is from Home Depot and it does have a self-adhesive backing. So basically we were able to stick it on. So we're pretty happy with how that came out. We did install these little latches on every single one of the cabinets in the van. These two cabinets are where we keep all our dry foods. So pastas, peanut butter, lentils. We have some quinoa. We have our salt, olive oil. It's a generous amount of space. Again, we've never gone grocery shopping and felt like we couldn't buy what we wanted to because of the space that we're limited to. On the walls and the roof, you will notice that we went with a white shiplap. This was super fundamental to the design just because it does give you straight lines that lead your eyes right through the van. With the white, it does feel super open and airy, which was a feel we definitely wanted to capture being in a smaller space. These are extra bookshelves that we installed. They hold various books that we have. Our devotionals, our journals for traveling. Our roof vent is a two-way roof vent, so it can suck air in as well as suck air out. It does keep us very cool on warm nights. When we're cooking, we will turn on the vent to vent the air out just to get any steam or leftover smells out of the van. We were able to find this super small carbon monoxide detector. It's very sensitive, so it will alarm at the slightest amount of carbon monoxide in the air. This drawer also serves a double function. So when we do convert from couch to bed mode, we pull out this handy-dandy little guy. He goes under the drawer like so, and then we're able to have this drawer give extra support to our bed, which will come to here. Our couch does convert to a bed. We are able to pull the couch out to where the cabinet ends. The bed itself is made from a slatted design. What looks like two cushions actually once was a six-inch memory foam mattress. Once we had the mattress cut, we were able to send the dimensions of the mattress to Seth's mom, who is super awesome and super helpful. She's been very supportive through this whole van build, and she was able to create custom cushions for us that would fit the exact dimensions of our bed. She also made the placemats that you may have noticed match our couch cushion, so it just keeps everything flowing nice and seamlessly. We were sure to install some storage in the back of our couch. It's super concealed. You don't see it when the couch is up. These pull down like this, and I actually have more clothes stored back here, so I keep bathing suits and things that I wouldn't necessarily need on an everyday basis. Seth will keep his raincoat and some extra workout clothes. In this compartment, we do keep all the bedding, so here we have our comforter, our sheets, our pillowcases, and any extra blankets that we might need should it get a little chilly at night. This is what the bed looks like fully extended. It is a bit larger than a full-size bed, so a lot of people usually ask us how large of an area you have to sleep, so about a full size, and it works well for us. You just gotta like to cuddle, but that's all. It's not a bad thing. Once you close that, you just tuck your couch cushion back in, and you would never even know that we have all that storage back there. So you will notice that the last drawer we have is this one at the back. It does run the entire length of the bed up until that drawer that I showed you that pulls out with our packing cubes in it. Usually, we'll just keep camping stuff in here, but because we are camping, it is empty right now, and you can see the generous amount of space it does allow in the van, and again, walking into the space, you would never see it. All right, we're gonna close up shop for the night. Everything we discussed and used in the build will be linked down below. If you would like to see a more in-depth video on any part of the build, please let us know, and we would be more than happy to make that happen. Thanks so much for watching. See you again soon.