VAN TOUR _ Cosy Cottage on Wheels _ Rustic Conversion for Full-Time Van Life

Hi, I'm Jessica. I'm Rissy. And this is Heidi. And this is our travelling home on wheels, Bilbo. A couple of years ago we got fed up with spending our young years working 9-5 and never seeing the outdoors. Then the cost of living crisis hit in the UK and we decided to give van life a try. We worked really hard for an entire year while sharing a tiny little apartment until we were able to afford our second hand van and then we spent 5 months converting it using reclaimed and natural materials with no experience whatsoever. Bilbo is a 2016 Citroen Relay. He's an extra long wheelbase, high top van so he's about the biggest van that I'm legally allowed to drive with a basic UK driving licence. Van life is actually the reason I got my driving licence and this was the first vehicle I drove after passing my test so it was a little bit scary but we've done quite a lot of miles and we haven't had any problems. No accidents. We wanted to spend as much time as possible off-grid so we built the entire conversion to accommodate that. We're also both massive fans of Lord of the Rings so we wanted our van to feel a little bit like stepping into Middle Earth and I think we've been fairly successful with that. Baggins would be proud. Yes. So let's go in and have a look. Before we step into the van the first thing you'll notice is the exterior paint which is inspired by vintage VW vans and we also love the idea of having natural colours on the outside because Bilbo feels a little bit like a treehouse on the inside. So I think one of the first things you notice when you come into this van, especially if you've been in a few other vans, is how tall it is and that was a really important thing to me because I've been in some of my friends' vans and I couldn't stand up super comfortably so we wanted to get a high top van. I'm about six foot two and being able to not just stand up comfortably but like when I'm getting dressed or something I can like lift my arms up it makes the whole place feel really spacious as well. We built almost every element of our van conversion with reclaimed or foraged wood from the archway in the entrance to our furniture all the way to the cladding on the back doors. For the cladding we used sanded down pallet wood to save on weight and we used wood from fallen branches which we found on our travels. At the heart of the conversion is the kitchen which we're super proud of so let's start there. Welcome to our little kitchen on wheels. It's quite compact but it has everything we need for cooking on the road and in a one year living in the van we never really felt like we were lacking space. So we built all of the furniture from scratch to make sure that it fit exactly how we wanted to in the dimensions of the van which was a real learning experience because neither me nor Jess had any carpentry experience before. But because we were building it so much with reclaimed wood or scrap wood that we had managed to get hold of they are a little bit wonky. I think the style that we went for makes the wonkiness kind of fit. It looks kind of cool and a bit hobbity. We actually don't have gas. Obviously with electric you could still have it built into the furniture but we decided to save ourselves some space by not doing that. The reason we don't have gas it's a little bit scary if something goes wrong with gas. I feel a lot less safe with it than I do with electric and I've heard that it's actually really inconvenient if you're going from the UK to Europe. We went for the electric option which is by far the easiest. Other than the fact that sometimes electricity generation can be a bit tight we have no problems with it and I think we would definitely make the same decision again. This corner is probably our highlight in the entire van conversion. We wanted the kitchen to feel very nature inspired and hobbity so you'll see lots of little earthy details here. We have a pretty big bathroom which means we had lots of space to play with on this wall. So we decided to store our cooking pans here just to free up space in the furniture and we hung them here against some log slices that were taken from fallen trees. And we also have this beautiful preserved bark with mushrooms and moss which is made by an artist in Canada. So this display is actually from a sort of pre-made electrical set called EcoFlow because we were building our van in quite a short time frame. We really didn't know anything about electrics and we didn't want to spend the time figuring it out but we came across these sort of pre-made sets where you basically just plug them into the system that they send you and away you go. Like it took me like an hour and I had no experience with it at all, it was great. So this has our battery on it, tells us what we're using and we can individually control different 12 volt and 240 volt devices independently from the screen which is super handy because for example all of our lights are operated individually. If we just want to turn them all off at once we can just do it from this display. We have a big 5 kilowatt lithium-ion phosphate battery and at 5 kilowatts it's pretty juicy which is what we need because we cook on electric as well. We generate electricity in two different ways, currently we're actually not getting any although the sun is out the angle of it is a bit too indirect. But we do have a 400 watt solar panel on our roof which covers pretty much all of our day to day needs like all of our appliances, laptops etc. The other thing that kind of helps stay us a bit more topped off if you like is our alternator so when we're driving our battery charges at just under 1 kilowatt an hour which is great. We've got a 5 kilowatt battery so that means if we needed to do a longer journey of three or four hours the chances are we're going to be full by the end of it. And now back to the kitchen. This is probably my favourite corner in the entire van, we've got these beautiful botanical tiles which were hand pressed by an artist in Poland and we've got a large Belfast sink so we were not really sure about this because it's quite heavy and whenever you add something heavy to a van conversion you have to save space somewhere else but we're really happy that we got this one because having a large sink makes van life so so much easier and we're really happy that we bought it. And we've also got this vintage style tap which swings from side to side, we only have cold water but we're happy with that, we used to have a boiler but we got rid of it. So here we have our washing up brushes and dish soap, hand soap. We also have a little bowl here for food scraps which used to be my grandma's I think. So we always make sure that we buy as locally and seasonally as possible so we can get rid of our food scraps in a responsible way without upsetting local ecosystems. In this corner we also have a hidden spice rack. So basically our van has curved walls which means there is a lot of space behind the shower which we wanted to utilise as much as possible. So what we did is we built a little platform and it's now home to a little spice rack. This was a bit of a side quest but it's actually surprisingly functional and it's really cool that it doesn't use up any extra space. All of our countertops are also reclaimed so we really wanted waney edge countertops for a more natural feel and we found this company that do house clearances and they salvage the wood and custom make these countertops and we also use them for our table which we'll show you later. Underneath here I have my cosmetics drawer where I store all of my self care, face oils, supplements, all that kind of stuff and honestly it's the perfect size. I mean look at how big it is. Literally couldn't ask for a better drawer. So we got all of the cabinet and drawer handles for this van second hand. For example this beautiful black one we got from Rissi's mum and the one for the captainry drawer as well and the rest we just bought from eBay and Etsy. Both have a lot of choice when it comes to vintage handles. So let's talk about our water system. We have a full running water system with a huge 96 litre water tank which is secured underneath the van on the outside. So our water tank lasts us about a week, sometimes longer, which is crazy because the average Brit is going through about 150 litres in a day so I mean that's what like more than 10 times our combined usage. It's crazy and it does make you more conscious of your water consumption living in a van because it's a hassle to get more but it does just boggle the old noggin doesn't it? So this is where the magic happens. This has all of our plumbing in there as well as a bunch of like cleaning products and we have our bin which is just like a single bin we don't bother to like sort recycling or anything like that. Even regionally there's so many differences between what can and can't be recycled it just doesn't make sense to split it all up ahead of time so we just make sure it's nice and clean, chuck it in here, then when we get to a recycling facility of some kind we just by hand pick it out and put it in the right box. So in here we keep our vacuum, we have a window vac which basically it lets you suck moisture off windows which is super handy when you're in the UK or other more humid-y damp-y kind of places. It just means that when you wake up in the morning and there's loads of condensation on the windows you can get all of that away. It's also really useful for the shower. After we've had a shower it lets us get the shower nice and dry. We also have vinegar which we use for our toilet, the liquids compartment, it helps neutralise the smell and it's just useful for general cleaning as well. Whilst we have laundry detergent which is obviously for when we are doing laundry days in towns. In here, which is the water system, the first thing you see here is the particle filter which is the bit that gets rid of any kind of like larger chunks that come in from our water system I guess. And then behind it you can just about make out the silvery thing which is our pump and behind that which you can't see because it's hidden underneath this shelf is the accumulator. The accumulator flows up here to our second water filter which is like a bacterial filter which just makes sure if anything nasty gets into our water system, any bugs or bacteria or anything like that. And then from here it just flows up to the tap just above the sink or through here which is the wall of our shower. We also have the wastewater pipe here which comes down from the sink and there's another one just over sort of to the side here which flows out from the shower and both of them flow back out under the van. And we have this pipe here which is the smelly air pipe from the toilet and that just gets sent out again underneath the van. Let's talk about our food storage. So throughout the van we integrated as much hanging storage as possible for ingredients that don't go off so quickly just to free up as much space as possible in our cabinets. So we've got these two bags on our little mushroom hook. One is for bread and one is for veggies that don't go off quickly like cabbage and carrots and all that kind of stuff. We have a fruit hammock over there and also hanging storage for onion and garlic. We do need to take them off when we're driving because the onion and garlic shed a lot otherwise but they're still quite useful. We also have these hanging jars that are screwed into the cabinets in our kitchen. Initially that was a purely aesthetic decision but turns out they're actually really, really useful for keeping track of what we're running low on so they've been really, really good. Down here we have our tiny fridge and freezer. I gave it a wooden front to make it blend in better with the rest of the kitchen and it's about 50 litres which is plenty of space for us. So we're both mostly plant-based and it was really important to us to have lots of space for fresh ingredients and with this fridge we can store about 10 days worth of food if we really try but usually we go shopping once a week. So we have six of these overhead cabinets which I think one of the perks of having a high top van is the fact that they're a lot more out of the way than they would be if we had a lower, lower down van. It means that, especially for me, I still do whack my head on it sometimes but I can imagine I would be whacking my head far more often if they were more at head height. I framed each cabinet front with pieces of reclaimed cladding and the fabric in the middle is from a small business in Devon. We have these little hooks on all of our cabinets which we put on before we drive just to make sure they don't fly open and we also have these mechanical click mechanisms on all of our cabinets which is basically just for peace of mind. Most of the time the hooks are enough but we do drive on some pretty bad roads sometimes because we're often in the middle of nowhere so it's just good to play it safe. So this cabinet we don't use that much to be honest because in our year living in the we've been decluttering a lot so I have some more self-care stuff in here. We've got an iron and I've got some of my makeup here for convenience. This cabinet however has a lot of our food ingredients, our bowls and our cups and we keep a lot of our food ingredients in these baskets just so they don't fly all over the place. So this is our tea and coffee cabinet where we store all of our teas and coffees. So we have a little branch here to stop things from falling out which we just found in the woods and we have our coffee powder, we store our mocha pot here which we use with our induction hob every morning, we have a little bit of sugar in a cute little vintage tin I found in Scotland. What else do we have? We have another tin with lots of different herbal teas, a little teapot for loose teas and Rosie is storing, hoarding, stockpiling a lot of Earl Grey in here. Rosie was losing it a little bit in Italy because there was no Earl Grey anywhere and then as soon as we got back to France he went to the nearest supermarket and bought a year's worth of Earl Grey just to make sure he won't run out. On this other side of the kitchen we have a lot more storage. It was also the trickiest to build because building drawers, my goodness, it was just so difficult and it took us such a long time but it was all worth it in the end. So here we have a big cutlery drawer with all of our kitchen utensils and here we have what we call the chaos drawer because it has a little bit of everything in it. Some charging cables, pegs for hanging up our laundry, Heidi's treats, lots of random stuff. And in this drawer we have more of our cooking stuff and this bottom drawer is essentially our pantry where we store refills for the hanging jars and some of our bigger jars like this huge pasta jar and all of the stuff that's essentially too bulky for the hanging jars or the cabinets. And this is a large kitchen cabinet where we store our cooker, we have a basket here with lots of kitchen stuff. I have my pestle and mortar here and spare towels. We also have an emergency gas camping cooker and chopping boards and all that sort of stuff. We store our electric kettle in here and also an entire air fryer, let me show you. We actually built this cabinet around the air fryer because we really wanted to have an air fryer in the van because we don't have an oven and we can't use it every day but whenever we've driven a little bit or it's a particularly sunny day we do treat ourselves to some air fryer food or roasted veggies. So we have a single induction hob which is what we do all of our cooking on and it works really really well. It means that it's stored underneath so it's not taking up any kind of counter space or anything like that. We just plug it in here when we need to use it and it is the reason that we have quite a big battery and it does draw a lot of power. It draws up to two kilowatts at a time. That's one of the reasons that EcoFlow was a really good purchase is because they have an inverter that supports up to three kilowatts so we're fine to use this with other electricals on at the same time as well. Does burn through probably about 10% of our battery when I cook a meal and it does take a little bit of practice cooking everything on a single hob. We have a double socket here which also has some USB ports which I really like. We have a fan here which we mostly use if it's raining or something like that outside. We don't want to have the door open. It gives us another way of letting any kind of I guess moisture or like cooking fumes or whatever you want to call them sort of get sucked out of there. It also helps us regulate the temperature a bit so if it's a little bit too warm it just helps give us a little bit more airflow. We also have this shelf here which I really like. Basically because of the way the van is shaped it kind of means that you have a big indent here. You just put a piece of wood running along and then put a front on it here so that things stay in place and now we have a huge storage area for all of our tins and jars and things like that and when I want to sort of import dozens of baked bean tins into Europe it gives me a space to do that without clogging up all of our cupboards and drawers. We have some additional storage up here above the cab which we use for mostly things we don't use too often so hiking and camping gear for example and coats which I guess are used more often when it's cold but not right now. And down here we also have some additional storage for our shoes. We have this eco laminate flooring which is made from recycled materials and it's recyclable at the end of its lifespan as well. Not only is it super durable it's actually waterproof as well so if we spill something or if our dog knocks over his bowl or something like that we don't have to worry about it seeping through. We also have this extendable bit here which we use when we're cooking if it's a bigger meal and we just need a little bit more counter space or if we want to make sure that the cooking fume's getting straight out the door and it just lifts up and comes right down like this. This has been our kitchen on wheels and now onto the bed and sitting area. Welcome to our bed where we spend most of our time in the van. It converts to a u-shaped sofa in the day which we're going to show you in a minute but for now yeah this is where we sleep. As you can see it's massive. We have slept three people on it relatively comfortably actually when one of Jess's friends came to visit. This bed is made up of four natural mattresses which were custom made for us in Devon which is also the area where we converted the van which is pretty cool. And they're made from organic cotton wool natural latex and coconut fiber. And honestly they're the best mattresses I've ever slept on. They're quite firm but really comfortable. I think it's been really good for my posture as well. And we also have this beautiful hemp bedding and a wool duvet from natural mat as well which complements the other mattresses really nicely and it's really nice and breathable. Plus the wool duvet is really thin but also really warm so it saves us lots of space. It was really important to us and to me in particular to have a bed by the back doors and be able to open the back doors because for me one of my favourite things is to open them in the morning and just feel completely surrounded by nature and have a lovely view. We've parked with ocean views in the woods in snowy landscapes in the desert and yeah for us it's just one of the best things about van life to just open the doors and be outside. Our windowsills are another highlight of our conversion because they give us a lot of space for books, coffee cups and we also have our little pet owl Theodore who lives here. I built these windowsills with some of the reclaimed cladding we used throughout the conversion and it was a really difficult job because I had to cut them down to the millimeter to make them fit because our walls are so curved and we also have these wooden curtain rods with linen curtains and we used rope as curtain ties and behind these walls we have a thick layer of hemp insulation. So our walls are insulated with hemp it was primarily an environmental decision also I think hemp has really really good thermal properties from what I read when we were first looking at it the heat sort of retention to weight ratio it's really really good but it was a bit of a pain to install I think that's probably the the main downside. It took us like three weeks in total to do the insulation. It's really good isn't it like the actual performance of it even though we've got a lot of windows in our van it really holds in the the heat well. It's really good at keeping the heat out as well when it's warm outside a single fan is enough to keep the at a comfortable temperature in the summer which is really nice and on the side of the bed we also have our bedside storage and we use this to store stuff like our laptops so we can easily access them if we're working some of our camera gear and I also keep some of my socks and underwear in my bedside storage just so it's easier to access and here on the side we have another double socket with USB outlets which we use when we have a little bit of laptop work to do but we can't be bothered to put up the table so it's really helpful to have these readily available. So here we have the diesel heater control and it comes out just sort of where our feet sit when we've got the table made. We also have a kill switch here which just lets us completely turn any power off. We think Heidi has figured out how to turn it on because she often comes and like rubs her body against it and I think she knows if she does that it makes warm so we have to make sure that we do flick the switch off or cover it with a pillow or something like that so that she doesn't cause mischief. So we have two more cabinets above the bed this one is where I keep all of my clothes I don't have very many of them and it does the job. And I have another cabinet here on the other side which used to be an extension of my wardrobe but I decluttered a lot of stuff so now it's just a cabinet for random stuff like my switch which I mostly use to play Animal Crossing, some notebooks, my tripods and just some pieces of clothing that are quick to grab if I don't want to get dressed properly in the morning. So here we have our skylight which we actually made ourselves because we wanted very specific dimensions for it. It's kind of sandwiched between a fan because we thought we needed two fans which is currently boarded over here and our solar panel which is the other side of the skylight. We ended up getting some help from a professional who did a beautiful job of it. It's so lovely to be able to just lie in bed and watch the stars and the moon kind of float over you as you're falling asleep it really does make you feel like you're sleeping outside under the stars. We also have this big bookshelf above the bed which was a non-negotiable for me because I read a lot of books and I can't bear the idea of going on a long road trip without taking at least 20 books with me. So this is a little library on wheels and I used a 4-inch branch to keep the books from falling out when we're driving. Shall we show everyone how we turn the bed into a table? We shall. Once we've stripped the bed we open this up and it has hinges which holds it open by itself. In here we also have a few bits of hiking clothes that we just don't need to use that often so it's a nice place to tuck them out of the way. Jess has even more books stashed away in here as well and we also have a safe just in case we are leaving the van. We want to make sure that our valuables, our laptops, any camera equipment have somewhere safe that we can put them just on the off chance that something bad would happen. Before Rosie finishes making the bed I also want to show you my wardrobe which I mostly store here in the vent. I used to have a massive wardrobe because I love thrifting and I had to get rid of about 80% of it before we moved into the van. I spent about a year selling or donating, passing on all of my items of clothing but it's been a really liberating process and I store all of it in categories in these little boxes with separators. I have one box for tops and skirts, I have one for long sleeve dresses, short sleeve dresses. I don't really have many trousers to be honest and I only have a couple of jumpers because we tend to be in warmer areas and I tend to have seasonal clothing at the top so at the moment I have more airy clothing at the top and my winter stuff at the bottom and if we go to a cold area I will swap and have the winter stuff at the top and my summer stuff at the bottom. Every van lifer has a different system for theirs but this is the one that works best for me in this van. We have these green linen mattress covers. We were able to just buy the fabric and a family friend made them for us. What we do when we finish making the bed is we basically lift this mattress up and then it just slides down the back here and out of the way. So this bit of wood here is actually our table which we just lower down at night and it forms the base of our bed. This gets stored at the back with the mattress to keep out of the way during the day. So this is Heidi's lair. She actually sort of scurried in here immediately when we got her. You may have noticed that this is also raised up. Our table is on a higher platform. We decided to put a shoe drawer underneath here which actually holds most of our shoes. It goes a really long way back. It's probably got eight pairs of shoes in or something like that. So here we have another hidden compartment. It's a nice way to give us a little bit more storage. We also have two plug sockets, one here and one here, and it means that when we've got the table up and we're working on our laptops we don't have to have cables running halfway along the van. They can just be tucked in by our feet and we're not tripping over them all the time. Believe it or not we can actually sit up to seven people comfortably around this table and it spins as well which is quite helpful. So we don't put the table up every day because we both work very part-time, about two days a week. But Monday and Tuesday are our main work days where I do all of my meetings so we just make sure that we have good internet on those days. But the rest of the week the bed usually stays down because it's not really worth for us putting the table up. So we used to have Starlink because we thought that would be necessary for us to have good enough internet in order for us to be able to do our jobs both working remotely. But it is quite expensive and it uses quite a lot of electricity compared to a 4G router which is what we have now. So essentially what we do is we make sure we have really good signal for two days a week and then the rest of the week we're pretty much fine with our 4G router wherever we are. Now this van actually has another sitting room so let's go have a look. So we wanted to convert the cab area to make it a bit nicer as well. Sometimes Jess is doing meetings or sometimes we just want a little bit of space from each other and it's nice to be able to come in here, have a nice space to be able to do some work. We use some blankets as seat covers to keep the area clean which is very useful when you're traveling with a dog and we painted the entire dashboard beige with brown and gold accents just to make it feel more earthy. We have more foraged wood in the passenger area and because Risi does all of the driving at the moment I use this space to collect little memories from the road and I also have another little bookshelf here. We use the overhead storage for things like jackets and scarves to free up space in the main living area and we use the space under our seats to store bulky items like my yoga mat and more camera gear. And now onto the bit I'm sure you've all been waiting for, the bathroom. We have a full bathroom with shower and toilet which was mostly my preference because I didn't want to spend time finding public toilets or a suitable place in nature to do my business. We also like to be in the middle of nowhere most of the time so we didn't want to rely on gyms to shower. We decided to use a bidet as a shower because they use very little water and the water flow is also really controlled so when you compare it to a more traditional shower they use about 11 litres a minute on average I believe and this one we use about 100 millilitres for a normal shower and even when I wash my hair I use less than a litre. We don't actually use our shower every day because we're just as happy washing in a river or in a lake but we didn't want to restrict ourselves in terms of where we're parked so having the space has been really nice. We also have this sliding door from Roll Door and it's been really amazing because it's completely waterproof and saves a lot of space which means we were able to have all of this kitchen space opposite the bathroom. They're all custom made as well so we were able to just send through our measurements for the bathroom and it's honestly been one of our favourite features in the space. So we have a nature's head compost toilet which is considered pretty much the best compost toilet you can get. It holds probably about two days of liquids depending on how much we've been drinking and up to a month of solids which is really really good it means we don't have to worry about emptying it very regularly at all. We use coconut fibre bricks as the compost which helps accelerate the composting process and it helps make sure it doesn't get smelly as well we've never had an issue with smell. We have started putting coffee in there as well our coffee grounds which seems to help even more. We make sure that we use recycled toilet paper or bamboo toilet paper because it breaks down very quickly and that just makes sure that once it's in there it'll be gone by the time we need to empty the toilet. We also have a fan here which sucks all of the moisture and the smell out it helps minimize the size of the compost which is why it's able to last for a month and it means that it doesn't smell flies can't get in because there's no root in and that just blows all of the air and the moisture out the bottom of the van. We also have this homemade spray which is basically just lemon scented vinegar and water. We basically just sort of spray it around the toilet we put it in the liquids compartment it helps make sure nothing gets smelly and it's just good for keeping it clean. We also have lightweight wall panels which are completely waterproof and we also integrated a full body mirror wall to make this space feel more spacious and it's also nice to be able to completely see yourself in the mirror sometimes. We also built this little box in the wall because we have curved walls as I mentioned earlier and it was just another way for us to maximize the storage space in here so we use it for our towels, we usually have a roll of toilet paper here and we also keep our toilet cleaning spray here. We have a bunch of storage on the wall here where we keep all of our bathroom products, our soaps, Heidi's grooming products, toilet paper storage here and our toothbrushes and toothpaste. We use pallet wood for the ceiling because the water stream of the bidet is so controlled water never really reaches the ceiling and we also have a little boat hatch which we use to ventilate the bathroom. So basically when we shower we lift the toilet out which we don't need to do because it's waterproof but it's just a personal preference to have a bit more space and then we shower and once we're done showering we use this little squeegee to draw the water into the drain and then we use our window vac to remove any remaining moisture and then we also wipe everything with a towel just to make sure everything is nice and dry and then that water goes directly into our great water tank. If you made it all the way till the end thank you so much for watching it truly means the world to us. If you enjoyed this video do get a thumbs up and if you haven't yet do subscribe for more van life adventures in Europe. We have some big plans for this year and we would love to have you join our journey. Have a lovely week ahead and we'll see you next time. Bye!