Van Tour | ProMaster | Radiant Flooring | Hydronic Heating | Full Time Home On Wheels

Hey guys, hey, I'm Courtney, I'm Nate, and we have a van tour for you guys today. This project we've been working on for the last four months, we finally finished. We're really excited. We're about to deliver this van to Portland, but first we wanted to show you guys the ins and outs. And this van is pretty similar to ours in the layout, but we really wanted to go with a different vibe as far as the color scheme goes. So we did some kind of like foresty green, natural wood, and we really wanted it to feel tranquil and peaceful and nice and open. What do you think, Nate? This was your third van, right? How'd it go? Yeah, it went pretty well. Put some new systems here, which kind of took a little bit of my learning power and time, but learned a lot and it's really cool actually. So yeah, this van has some cool upgraded systems. It actually has heated floors, which we'll go over a little bit later in the video. Definitely a bit of a learning curve to figure it all out, but let's take a little tour, shall we? All right, so welcome into the kitchen area. Always my personal favorite part of the van build. So on this one, we decided to go with a white subway tile just to keep it clean and classy and bright. And then we did the farmhouse sink. This is actually a bathroom sink, so it's a little smaller. Regular farmhouse sinks are a little large and really heavy. So we went with this one. We also have the Krause faucet. This thing's really awesome. You can remove it and it also has a sprayer, which makes it super convenient. And then our water pump switch is over on the side here. And then this whole lower section is basically just storage. So he's got a ton of storage. Under the sink here is where the gray water tank lives. So this is a 10-gallon gray water tank. There's also some storage under there. And then this top drawer right here is where the induction cooktop lives. He didn't want propane in his van, and he wanted to keep a lot of open counter space. So this was our solution. So basically whenever he wants to use it, he can bring it out, plug it in, and use it, and then stow it away when he's not using it. And then he'll also have a camper stove if he wants to use it outside as well. So yeah, everything down here is storage. And then same thing with up above, this will all be kind of like kitchen storage. We use the Southco latches and knobs. So you basically just push it, pops out, and then you can open it. And then the latch to keep it closed is attached, so it's really easy. And then we also use the gas arms to keep them open. So as for lighting, we have a couple different zones in here. We have the under cabinet LEDs. These are controlled separately front to back. So we have the back and then the front. So if he's cooking and someone's over here sleeping, you can kind of control the lights like that. And then we have puck lights overhead, and the switch to that is right here. And then we have the same thing going on the other side. We have the under cabinet LEDs, and the switch for that is right here. And these are on sliders, so you can dim them. They just add a nice little ambiance. Okay, show you the outside of the van here. We've got a lot of windows, and they're all sliding windows, so you can open all of them. They're from Van Windows Direct, and they're all installed with urethane. There's no clamps or screws or anything. And we got 300 watts of solar on the roof. They're Eclipse Renogy panels, 100 watts each, all tied in series, and made a rack out of aluminum square tubing, and used the factory mounting points to attach them. And then our client had an existing rack, we just shortened it up a bit to fit the solar panels in the back. And there's a Max Center fan on the roof as well. So welcome to the back section. We've got a couple features back here to show you guys. First we have our little outdoor shower hookup, so you just plug in your faucet and you can have an outdoor shower. You can just string a curtain, or however you want to do it. And then we put a vent here, there's a vent in the front as well. Basically we just wanted the warm air from the heater to be able to circulate toward these back doors. So this is all open in the center here. And then this right here, we decided to do a little table that pulls out. It could be a table, or you could use it as storage. So we put some lids on it, and you can open both of these separately, or you can take both of these out, remove this, and then you have a big long storage area. And this is on some pretty heavy-duty drawer slides. And then we just have the latches here that hold it in place nice and securely. And then we also did an AC outlet on the back here, just in case he wants to hang out outside, charge his laptop, anything like that. Alright, so in this van we have a queen-size bed. It's just a bit short of a queen-size bed from side to side. We decided to go with the convertible layout, so we can change this into a little dinette setup, which we'll show you in a little bit. But we actually have eight inches of memory foam here, so the bed is actually super comfortable. We wanted to have kind of an open walkway in the center, similar to what we have in ours, so we'll show you what it looks like when we convert it. So the new owner of this van is a journalist. He works from home. He wanted a nice space to be able to work, so we kind of have this open lounge, nice table, desk, but that's on a Lagoon swivel mount. And the one thing we don't do in our conversions is the cushions, so he had a friend of his actually make these for him. So the table comes apart pretty easily. You store this table in front there, and then these arms come off. Just a couple turns here. And then we actually have some extra storage in the floor here. We have some out the back, but this one's accessible from the inside, and it's a good place to keep these guys, too, so they fit nicely right in there. All right. Did something a little different for this van. Our client wanted a chest fridge and freezer. We have the ARB Zero Dual Zone Fridge Freezer, and it's 69 liters. We were going to put it in the cabinet there on sliders, but it took up a lot of storage space, so I had the idea to keep it outside like this, and it could kind of double as a bench. Kind of wanted to conceal it somewhat. He's going to have a cushion made for the top of this thing, but we wanted to keep the top open and available for easy access. A lot of room in here, too. This is all removable. There's a deep freezer in there as well. Basically built shaker doors and then connected them all around. In order to get access to the tie downs and the controls on the fridge, we left the shaker doors open on the top rail with the panel attached, so that's removable, and this holds it down to the floor with their tie down system with some steel brackets on the bottom there. Functional, and makes it look nice, too. So the doors on these ProMasters, or maybe all vans, but specifically this door is super heavy and hard to close, and you kind of have to go like this to really get it fully closed. So we did this in our van, and we thought it would be a good idea to add it in this one, too, to add a little handle right here, so when you're closing it, you can just kind of grab onto it and yank it closed. So if you have a ProMaster, I would highly recommend putting a handle right here. Makes it a lot easier to close. All right, show you some of the controls we have over here. This is a battery monitor. A couple outlets here as well. These are for 12 volt. You can plug little USB outlets in there. And then AC, 120 volt, like a household plug. And then we have some thermostats here. This is for the Rixon's heating system, pretty much the whole control center here. Thermostat for the floor system. So those run on two separate thermostats. And here's the 12 volt DC outlet, 120 volt AC outlet, main breaker for shore power, so if you're plugging in shore power to charge your batteries, as well as the controls for the inverter charger itself. And then this is just another dimmer for the overheads. So in this bench, we have our plumbing and our heating system. This is the Rixon's hydronic heating system. Runs on an Espar S3 furnace that sits under the van. And it also ties into the engine coolant. Basically, you've got to produce hot water, hot air, and it also heats the floor. In this bench, we have all of our electrical components. I'll show you what's in there. So there's 300 amp hours of lithium from Battle Born batteries. We also have solar coming in from the roof, running through this MPPT charge controller from Victron. And we also have Victron's MultiPlus inverter charger, able to charge off shore power pretty quickly and run some of the larger appliances, like the induction cooktop. And like in our van, we also have a Sterling battery-to-battery charger, so you can charge from your alternator while you're driving. But that's pretty much what we have in here. Let's move on. Okay, so in this cabinet right here, we have kind of our bathroom type situation. So this drawer is basically just a bunch of storage. So you could put maybe his toiletries and whatnot in here. And then in this little cabinet is where we have our toilet. So you just slide it out, and we have the Nature's Head composting toilet. This toilet's awesome. We love it. Highly recommend it. But we wanted to have it in a drawer that slides out, but also have a nice little door on it. So this is kind of what we came up with to make it nice and sturdy and tucked away. All right, guys, hope you like that. We sure do. Yeah. Thanks so much for watching. If you guys want to check out our van tour, you can click here. Otherwise... Can I put one there? Yeah. Cool. Click here. All right. We also documented a little bit of this build process, so you guys can check out those videos as well. Basically, we really want to empower people to learn how to do vans on their own. We had no experience when we got into building vans. Sure didn't. We did our very first van with no experience whatsoever, and we're really happy with how it turned out. We think that anyone is capable of building a beautiful home for themselves, and I think that doing a DIY van is very empowering, and it really makes you in touch with the whole experience, and it also makes it a lot easier to fix things when they break and just learn all the systems. So, yeah, if you guys want to check out our website, we have a bunch of resources on how to do your own DIY van build and more coming soon. Yeah. Thanks, guys.