A Powerful New Chapter Begins

So right now we are headed into town. We're taking the the van to the mechanic and dropping it off and I think it'll be done today but we'll see. So we just dropped the van off and if you guys have been around a while you know that when Isaac does builds and in the peach I used um pre-finished three-quarter inch plywood and it's usually the pre-finish looks just like the wood grain. Well they make the pre-finished plywood with a white finish and a black finish and so I would love to do one with a white finish but it's really hard to find that type of material. So Isaac actually found a place here that's right by our mechanic shop that probably has it so we're gonna go check and see it. My camera died um but if they have it and if I can swing it like if I can afford to make it happen I really really want to but the difference is the plywood that I was originally planning on using is like one of the cheapest that you can get in three-quarter inch and it was seventy dollars at Home Depot. So it's gonna be quite a significant difference in price. I would want to build a bus right now. But if I can make it happen this is the route I would like to go but like I've said many times I'm trying to save money on this build but I am splurging here and there where I feel like it means most to me like the window for example. I didn't have to put that in there and it was a bigger purchase but I'm so so so glad that I did. It makes such a huge difference. So I thought I would take you guys along for the ride. Here we go. See how much this is gonna cost. So that was a bust. This is just the corporate office they don't they just distribute it to people who sell it so I don't know we're gonna do a little more a little bit more research and then we'll see. So we found another place and we actually called them and asked and they said they do have the product. We're still six minutes away. Anyways we're trying to find the place we're gonna go look at the materials but he basically said what if you start A. So we're gonna look into that we're gonna look at the sheets but right now with the price I might be able to do it. It's cheaper than I was thinking it would be. But it's still more expensive. I mean actually it's only like $20 $25 more expensive per sheet which is the time you save in painting and in paint. So I don't know we'll see. Update. We stopped at this other place and they had exactly what we were looking for and I did the math and to do my cabinet my kitchen cabinet how I was planning on doing it versus doing it with this material even though it's slightly more expensive it's only a $50 difference. So I think I'm gonna go with the pre-finished plywood and I'm really happy with that thought so we'll we'll see if it happens. We are starting electrical. What'd you say? Someone out there trying to fight. Think I could take him? So basically I don't think I have like everything that I need for electrical but we are also working on getting the walls up in the van so at this point we're gonna stop the build as far as the wall's going up and figure out wiring so that we can make sure that anything that is going to be wired behind the wall is done and we don't have to worry about that. So again I know some people don't understand why some things are done in one video and throughout another video they're not done and then in that end of that video they are done so the thing is is I'm doing so many different things at one time and basically like we started putting the walls up and then we realized that we didn't want to put the walls up without running the wire behind it for anything that we wanted to run behind it. So that's where we're at so you'll probably see this before you see the wall going up but we do have one panel up on the bottom half of the van so this is what I have for electrical right now. We have a 1500 watt inverter, the battery charger, our shore power, our solar power port cover, our fuse block, solar mounts, wiring, this is the battery that I'm going to be using it's a 200 amp hour Dakota lithium battery and then we also have our DC to DC charger and some wiring and so let me show you what the inside of the van looks like. So on the inside of the van the things that are going to be behind the wall panel here are going to be our wiring for our diesel heater, our two air fans, and I'm going to wind up doing the strip lighting and anyways the wiring comes over here into this back corner and it comes down through here so what we're going to do is take the hole saw drill a hole here, here, and somewhere on here for it all to come out through the actual wall itself before we continue putting the walls up so that is the plan so I think we're going to take this seat out and get to our mission for the day. Remember this the mission plans we're back baby so basically I'm asking Jaylina what's going on because I don't know this ain't my van this ain't my build right and I think she talked about it we just need to figure out what's going behind these walls and get them in there. It's the plan. If you've watched any of my build videos on my channel you know that I don't necessarily like putting wires behind the walls because if you ever have a problem if your walls don't come down easy you don't get to your wires that easy so so we're just trying to figure out what wires 100% need to go behind the walls and get them in there because she needs to get paint on these walls too dry time that's the plan that's the mission let's see we're gonna need this drill you're gonna get some gloves all right it's happening sketchy Filipinos on the job huh so look it's gonna have to come down through this oh there's a hole right here wow so I would just put it like right here so it's easy to get to right here yeah these are my building hack right here right this is called a bug connector right but do you see that little metal thing in there right that's called solder so a lot of these crazy people on the internet will be soldering all this wire blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah right when all I gotta do is stick this little butt connector on here like so make sure we're positive positive which we are stick these two wires together like so give it a little twistaroo right place my connector over the two wires I didn't get the heat gun well I'm getting the heat gun I just wanted to say I wanted Isaac to kind of talk about that because I've seen my fair share of the in building videos where people aren't using these and I feel like it's just vital information that should be shared because it makes life easier all about making life easy cool thing about this it's basically heat shrink solder all in one right so I usually start by kind of heating up the edges a little bit this might be kind of old so they might not work that awesome kind of on the edges ends here and that's just protecting the wire and then I'll start in the middle over that solder you'll see it melt and kind of weld the wires together it's starting to melt now so that solders the wires together and it heat shrinks it all in one shot okay first fan is wired and he's running the wire now I'm gonna get a marker and some painter's tape so that we can label everything so that when we go to actually wire it we know what we're wiring although I have built and helped build quite a few different rigs I will say that electrical still scares me and I'm not super confident in myself when it comes to doing electrical by myself so I'm really grateful to have Isaac to help me in this department because I just feel a lot better knowing that someone who knows what they're doing is here helping me and guiding me along the way I hope that in time Isaac and I can show people what it looks like to have a healthy and loving co-parenting relationship I know there's a lot of naysayers out there who are upset about the fact that we're no longer in a romantic relationship but we are still very close and we still care deeply about each other and we are in each other's lives for the long haul so this is really cool to test out this stuff and make sure it works we are using this Dakota lithium power box it's just a little tiny little power basically a power station but we can hook the cords directly up to it to see if our fans work and anything that we're just testing out oh I heard it cool that works so if you missed it I installed rec pro fans as a cheaper alternative to like the max air fan which is like almost $400 for the good one I don't know how much the the one that's a little cheaper than that but these are only I think they're less than 200 bucks they're only like $107 so definitely a big money saver if you are trying to budget and you want a fan okay so that fan works we're going to move on and test this rear fan same way and if you do want to check out the fans I'll link them in the description and if you'd like to check out any of the Dakota lithium stuff I'll also leave a link in the description for that and I even have a little bit of discount code for you guys look he's got both of them connected what's up Filipinos wanna play it's gonna be nice to have over the bed they don't want Filipinos in this game they don't want us in this game Jayleon okay so before I put all of the wire in the corrugated tunnel or whatever you want to call that um I we are going to put a light switch here so that when I walk in I can just turn on the light and this will be in like it'll be in this wall that's going up here so what I'm doing is making a run for the wiring and we use these little um things for zip ties they're 3m you just take the sticker off the back and press it down and then you put your zip ties through once you're all your wires in there you just tighten them up that way it's secure and not going anywhere so that's what I'm gonna do what are you going to be doing thinking this is probably going to be the hardest wire run the light switch yes because it's a dimmer switch which means the switch needs power and then it needs to send the power to two separate lights so basically you got to create a y connection back here so these two lights connect and then this run will have to come to the switch and then from the switch back and uh yeah it's just a pain in the butt and it's gonna suck once your walls are up I can definitely see the value of the van builders that are putting up walls that can just be unbolted at this point you know what I'm saying because doing walls like we do in uh buses you don't really take them down so yeah luckily I've just done this a few times I kind of know how it goes but if you didn't know that you had to figure this out later you'd be in trouble at this point we started pre-gaming all of the runs for the wire we took those little square 3m thingies with the zip ties and got them all ready for wiring and then you just tighten them once you're done I think today might be the day I get my tiva tan it's that hot and sunny okay now that we have all the wire settled that's going to be behind any walls we are going to take a look at what we're working with as far as solar goes so we're gonna get the ladder out we're gonna put the solar panel up there see what we're working with get an entry location for the wires get wires out and possibly have the solar go up today so tasks like this always take a little bit longer than you're anticipating just because there's so much that goes into it that you don't initially think about so we had to figure out where the solar panel was going to sit and where the entry port would be best place to come into the van and connect to our electrical and how it's going to run behind the ceiling and behind the walls okay so I think we're gonna just do the solar entry port and get all the wires done that's going behind that wall so we can put that wall up and get paint on it is that how you're putting it I don't know that's what we're deciding wouldn't it make sense to go the other way nope because you're driving this way and water is going against your seams if you go this way the water is going see what I'm saying yeah how often are you driving backwards I drive backwards only yeah so this is just better water sealing so our question is do we go here or here does it matter I don't think it matters I think that's fine right there I think this gives us a little bit more I think that's fine right there yeah that way we can get around it with a caulk gun yeah that sounds good to me so I'm gonna take you guys inside and we are going to just make sure all goes planned from inside the van ready we're about to pop a hole man yeah so I went ahead and took the insulation down right here yeah go for it we have been having nothing but trouble with this stupid hole saw all day today your drill sucks um will you give me a little dust broom here here so Isaac's cleaning the top of the roof with some alcohol and then I'm gonna spray it down here with some paint and he's gonna spray it up there with some paint obviously I don't need to clean it under here because it's just kill mat okay do you want it yep cool well so what I want you to do well we're gonna let that dry I want you to take a 3m and basically make a little that's how we're going to bond it instead of doing holes bond it with the 3m vhb and then caulk it in and we're also going to pull our solar panel out and just mock up our wires okay and then mount this get caulk on it get it dry today okay then our wires are done up here and then we'll get inside and wrap that up so one thing I think a lot of people don't talk about is dry times having to wait for stuff to dry whether it be paint or caulk lines or whatever the case may be um you know like for example when I was doing the subfloor and I had to wait for you know the liquid rubber to dry before I could do anything else and vice and whatever so basically we're our goal for today to end the day is to get this board here painted and then get our the rest of the wall done up here and paint it so that the paint can dry so that we can start mounting stuff to it as far as electrical goes because right now we can't mount anything as far as electrical because that needs to be painted so we have to take all that into consideration and I don't think anyone really ever talks about that so that's just something that adds time onto any project that you're doing is if you have to wait for anything to dry so I'm gonna go ahead and put the 3m stuff on this so we could get it up there that paint's probably gonna dry pretty quick though because it's so hot sun baby that's why we like building in the sun baby that's done Isaac wants to mount the solar today I don't know if it's such a good idea just because it's not going to be connected to anything so I don't know we'll see what happens so we moved everything off this table so that we could get the solar panel on there and get it opened and y'all I'm so excited we just opened up the uh it's solar rich mega siri solar panels this is the mega 250 watt solar panel and it already has some thick cardboard on it so if we do wind up setting it up on the roof to kind of seal it out it's not gonna be getting sun on it boom so putting the fuse on it bam bam cut the other ends because those are just going into a charge controller oh I see what you're saying now but it's like I didn't know what side to cut because of that fuse and now they'll pass through so we'll go set this up kind of wires and set this run the wires through so as you can see that is exactly what we did we got this big huge solar panel up there how far is it going to hang off on the sides it's probably about it right there dang extra we'll tie it up basically it's gonna go well actually no we need to come back come through like this you know what I'm saying yeah damn so what I think we're gonna do is set this boom and then we're gonna pass our wires through and then disconnect and get the panel off the roof okay do we have uh and then we don't want this wire chafing against this metal yeah so we're gonna have to have some corrugated from the inside up and basically pass through this penetration so instead of doing the corrugated on the inside like he was just saying I am going to take some extra kill mat and just put that up in there around the sides of that metal so if the wires rub against it it uh it's not gonna cut it there you go yep all right I got the kill mat on there so it's a ghetto what it's a ghetto garment ain't nobody gonna see that if it works who cares moment of truth though boom hit it with a little bit of juice little bit of juice no screws do you need the I'd say probably about right there would be perfect so I'm gonna bring you put the red in maybe pull it out we'll see how this goes you feel me yeah hold on wait wait wait pull it back a little bit now push it in okay you're going too far okay hold on let me pull it there there it goes right there would be pretty clean and I'll go get something to tighten that up I need there should be a wrench we're actually going to tighten all this up see that's putting pressure on the line making it waterproof uh-huh actually solar wrenches that I have somewhere but this is fine for now oh look how clean that is bam 3m 3m grab these down just like that it's installed so once all of that was done and completed and figured out we took the solar panel down and started on the next task that's an ugly cog line have you seen mine okay so the solar entry port is ran and as you can see we just tied the wires back into each other for now um because we're not putting the solar up just yet so it's not connected to anything but now we don't have to worry about cutting into the ceiling yeah all we gotta do is just panel up done yeah just put the panel up that's done and um I think we are done with all of the wiring that's going to be behind anything in the van so I just um zip tied all of the wiring up and over we're gonna put those in the corrugated and run them down but first I'm gonna put this insulation back up real quick this wasn't good that a second you act like I didn't put all this stuff up bro I don't understand what you don't understand what's going on what's going on what's happening I don't get it what does this mean wrap up the day I started putting all of the other wires into the corrugated tube and it took far longer than I thought it would um for whatever reason but uh it was a little tricky getting it through the bottom hole and out through the hole through the wood but in the end I got it done and we were ready for paint well I take that back we were ready to finish the walls and get paint on there so next week that is exactly what you guys are gonna see and I'm really excited to share the progress that we made because it looks completely different now oh my god okay wiring is done we have the fans both running the solar in running all the way down our light switch running and it's all coming down there and our electrical will all be mounted right there Isaac thinks we still have time to do this wall we have an hour we have less than an hour let's just make a cut so now that that's done we are going to jump back onto the walls you're probably going to see the walls go up before we finish electrical I'm not sure I'm not positive about that but I think so so I don't know we'll see