Tulum Inspired Concrete Oasis DREAM Van Tour

What is up, everybody? It is Kyle. I know I'm not the typical like Bostonian handsome man that you're used to, but we had a van that we had to come check out in the West Coast. And since I'm here, Jared is out doing his thing in the East Coast with his tiny house. I'm sent to tour this van. So this is Ed and Nicole. This is their van that they're going to show us today. So let's go. All right. What's up, y'all? How's it going? Pretty good. Pretty good. So this is actually very surprising to me. This is your first build. This is the first build. This is the concrete oasis. One of the things that you first notice is that wrap. It is gorgeous. I want to know more about it. Like, do you know the color? What is it? Is it khaki green? It's an Avery Denison wrap. We weren't sure how the wraps are going to come out because they always have those like colors on the Internet and you never really know how it's going to look. Probably going on my next one. It is good. So let's talk about some exterior options that you have here. I see the roof rack. What brand is that? This is the Backwoods Drifter. It's super modular, so you can kind of set it up however you want on top to do whatever kind of setup you want on your roof. You have solar. Is that what I see up there? Yeah, we have 480 watts of walkable solar by Merlin. So it's like a like a big deck up there. You can walk on top. It's also solar. But also you can do whatever the hell you want. Very nice. There's also AC I see up there. Yes, that is an RTX 2000. That's a good one. How do you feel about that? We love it. I mean, it's 12 volt. It pumps cold air. And we've been in some really, really hot places and been pretty comfortable. So even for the 170, like it actually works well. Yeah, it works well. Is this two wheel drive, four wheel drive? This is a two wheel drive. On your next build, if you guys do anything in four wheel? We are debating it. I mean, it's this kind of like craze in the van world that you like, you got to go four wheel drive. But to be honest, we took this thing like everywhere, everywhere. And this the way we built it, too. It's not meant to be this like aggressive off roader, like grappler. Like it's not that style of van. This is much more of like a cruiser. We just felt like the two wheel drive works really well. And we've been on tons of dirt roads and some pretty like rocky roads. And everything's been totally fine. So we're not really sure about the four wheel drive, to be honest. No, I agree. Like the interior that we're going to be getting into here in a second. It reminds me of a spa. Off road and aggressive is not what we're going for. I see that. Let's talk about what we already have out here. So you just pulled this little drawer out. What is this? So this is like our outdoor picnic table, coffee, cocktail table. The cool thing about this table is it doubles as a huge storage. So you just lift in here. Yeah. Tons of storage in here. Very nice. And it just tucks right underneath the bench seat. Yep. You just click it in. Cool. It just locks into place there. What's a drawer slides are those like? How much weight? Those are 500 pounds. So you can sit on top of that. So you can sit and actually if you want to, it's kind of almost like a sunbed, like you can pull this. OK, yeah, you can pull this out and kind of just lay out under the sun and like tan on this thing. I love that. I also like the fact that you have like benches out here. You could eat like breakfast out here, have your coffee, do whatever you want to. Exactly. A big thing for us. Like when we did house life, we always like ate our meals in our garden. So we wanted a way where we can like really like sit outside. So this was kind of like an extension of our living room into wherever we just park. You said house life. Are you guys in the van or out of the van right now? Right now, we're just moving out. We've been in this thing for a couple of months now, road testing it and just enjoying it. It seems to be going to a buyer now. OK. For now, we've kind of moved our stuff out and getting it ready to be passed on to its new family. That's exciting. All right. Let's go ahead and step inside. Jared likes to start at the front of the van, and I'm very unsure as to where the front of the van is right now because there's a bed on the ceiling as you enter in the sliding door. Yes. So this is the front of the van. And we, as you can tell, decided to go to with a front layout here for the living room, mostly because we just liked this big view from the side door. And we were inspired by Sheed and Valentine, who we built the van with, actually, while living with him. And we took took a lot of inspiration from his layout. So a lot of credit goes to him. We took his layout and kind of fixed it up a little bit and changed some things and went with this L-shaped living space. You can host like eight people here at a time if you want. Having the bed on top, I mean, it just frees up all this space. It can always just we just let it down at night, hop in, sleep. And then when we're done, we just lift it back up. Don't need to make the bed, anything. And we're done. That was my next question. So is it difficult to raise it with all of your pillows and all that on there? You don't need to do anything. So it just raises up and down. You don't have to worry about making the bed or doing anything. The button comes down. You can bring it down if you want. Like we usually just bring it down to this height, like about the height of the table and just kind of hop in and sleep there. But if you wanted to, you could lower the table, pop these down, and then it would just come all the way down. OK, and it's a happy jack system. It is a happy jack. Very nice. That's a good one. Yeah. And when you bring it down, these are just detachable lights. So I feel like people are like, what happens to the light? Yeah, I just come off. And so, yeah, are they battery powered? How do they battery power? Are they rechargeable or? OK, yeah, very nice. We were going to go with the vibe. It matches like wood tones and all that. Yeah, I mean, as you can tell, like one of the main things we were trying to do here is make it seem as homey as possible. Like we were really just trying to feel like we're not in a van, which is one of the main reasons why we did, for example, the partition wall, you know, separating the driver's cab, putting in this beautiful partition door that Nicole put her own custom wood burning in. Did you do that by hand? I did. I was going to ask if it was a laser engraver because I have one and it'd be much easier if you did that. She did. How long did it take? Like upwards of like 30 hours. OK, it's like dot by dot. That's incredible. Wood burning and like tattooing. So like that type of patience I have. I mean, it's incredible. I like that special. Yeah, it's a beautiful pocket door. So the wall, something I see here is I don't see very many seams in this. Like even along the like partition wall in that area, usually you would see a seam or something like that. What did you guys do for this? We wanted it to be like seamless. We wanted like the floors to go to the benches. We wanted all of the cracks to be just completely filled. So we found this product, which is called micro concrete. It was from SmartCrete. This is like like kind of like the main feature of the van. Like one of the main things that this van is known for is this cement look, you know, and everyone's like, what the hell? Like, why did you guys put cement? Aren't you afraid it's going to crack? Isn't it heavy? Isn't all that? And technically they're all right. But we found this this material that's called micro cement, which actually isn't really cement. It's just meant to look like cement. And it's just almost like a plaster that you put over wood. But it's completely flexible, fully waterproof and very lightweight because it's only about three millimeters thick in total. It doesn't crack. The only places that it would crack is if you had like horizontal seams where there are two pieces of wood moving separately. So for those we had to like seriously bondo them together and get them to become one piece. And then you don't have that cracking problem. That was actually the next question is seams in like the roof and the walls when you have to like put an extra piece of wood, basically. How did you do that? The bondo is how you do it. Yeah. So only if we like some of the places we left seams in the places that are less visible. Like these two wall panels. There was just no way that we wouldn't be we would be able to avoid a crack because exactly it's two really big horizontal panels. So we just decided in those spots to just add a little trim piece over it. And it doesn't catch your eye. And it still gives that whole look of like everything being connected. Definitely. And the inset pocket in there. I love that. That's a good touch. So instead of having like upper cabinets or anything, you just had like inset storage almost. Well, yeah, I mean, this is, I would say, much more of like a design thing than it is a functionality. It's functionality is to hold the candle in the plant. Yeah, exactly. But we just have so much storage in this van, which we'll show you guys in a sec, that we would we allowed ourselves to be able to do these kind of things that would add to the design without taking away from the functionality. How do we make something as functional as possible, but also as beautiful as possible? Yeah. And this is a good example of this happy jack. Like this bed doesn't come with the frame. We built this frame itself. Most people do it with like the slats of bamboo. Yeah. But we we in general took a lot of our inspiration for this van from home design and not necessarily from other vans. One of the things we did, for example, is we love these like exposed wooden beam looks. So instead of having this like big ugly happy jack on the top, we're like, OK, how do we make this look more like a home and more beautiful? Something that like Jared and I are both big on, which you guys have is like diffused indirect lighting. Oh, yeah. So where did that like come from? It's just because I don't like it in my eyes. Like direct lighting just sucks. So where was that thought process? I'm a little bit of a lighting freak. I love lighting. In our house, too, like all the smart bulbs, everything. Yeah, it's a game changer. And a lot of vans are starting to switch over to that because there's so much that you can do with lighting, especially with like the LED ropes and all those, which I see that you guys have some in here. Do you have any other color than like the warm? No, no, no. We kept it all warm. We didn't want to mess with like the color palette. But what we did do is we separated into three different zones. And I'll show you right here. We actually gave it the option to control just the bedroom, just the kitchen and bathroom, and then one that is just the ambient lights. So this one, we usually at night just turn on just the ambient lights and don't have any of the other lights on. And then it just gives this like really nice, mellow, dark vibe. Speaking of electric cool, what's the system in here? 800 amp hours lithium. It all sits under here. What brand? It is the EG4 signature solar batteries, 400 amp hours. So we got two of those. What's your electrical system, Victron Renogy? It's Renogy for the most part, except for the battery monitor, which went with Victron because it's just a much better battery monitor, in our opinion, and the Lynx, which we used as well from Victron. All the rest is Renogy. We have a 3000 watt inverter. So you're not running out of power. We try. We try. And we literally cannot get below like 70 percent power in like a day of like, you know, I'm in the same boat with mine. We have very similar like builds with that. And I have never seen it go below 70. Yeah, it's nuts. DC, a DC charger and solar and shore power. So like there's just no way it's going low. You know, it's just always always staying juiced up. So we have a skylight you guys were talking about, which you all are going to see in some B-roll. But the window behind you, massive window. It looks like it has a shade that pulls down as well, possibly does. So we put in AMA windows that have the opening with the like the built in mosquito nets. And we also built in blackout shades on both sides. It's on both sides that made it this arched shape, which we kept kind of as a theme throughout the whole van with the pocket door. And in the back, you'll see some more archway on the passenger doors. Yes, it's in there as well. We'll show you. We'll show that. Yeah, that's very cool. Any other windows in the back or anything? There's a window in the back as well. Yeah. So kind of when you're in showering or anything, you can kind of look out the window. But we usually just open the doors. And so natural lighting is is good in here. Yeah. We also made this lagoon table also out of the same veneer that really just kind of like services pretty much any configuration of sitting that you want, like anywhere, anywhere you're sitting, like you can find a way to make this thing work. It's also not as thick as it seems like we did this thing also with the benches where we wanted to make everything look like fixed slabs of wood, but without the weight of it. So it's actually just a half inch piece of wood and it has these Fox lips around it. And then we veneered it together to make it look like a singular slab. But it's actually lightweight because it's only half inch. And we did that the same here in these benches. And it also just makes the perfect little handle to lift up. Oh, yeah. Speaking of, we're sitting on some benches. Yes. Electrical. This is our plumbing or not. This is the water. Yeah, this is the 34 gallon water tank in here. We have AC and DC plugs both here and here. Both of them have USB-C and fast charge, all that stuff. And then down here, we also have our heater, Webasto, that we put in that comes out of there. And this is also a another plug for the short power, short power. So you'd power that with the doors open. Yeah, we usually run like an extension cable through one of the windows or something like that. We didn't really see the need to put like an external an external short power thing on the outside of the van. Don't really ever need to use it because we have so much power. Yeah. Every time we drive and just from the car sitting out in the sun, like it gets charged so much. So if we really need it, we just plug in an extension cable. It's smart. Yeah. Cutting into a vehicle is scary, especially when it's a Mercedes. Yes. A lot of money. Yes, absolutely. Another thing is that this van can actually sleep for if you want. So this is the bedroom, the bed that comes up and down. But we also made an option where under this bed, there's another piece of wood that you can slide out and place here. And then this bottom bed becomes a full bed where you can technically sleep two people. And you can layer it kind of like a bunk bed where you have the queen bed up top. Two people sleep up there and then two people can sleep down here for those extra two passengers seatbelts that are just hidden right behind. Yeah. And here there's seatbelts. If you have more passengers, they can be safe back here. That is very smart. Very well thought out. So let's go ahead and jump in the back. I'll have you guys jump over there. I'll sit up here and we'll talk a little bit about what we have going on. So we just stepped into the kitchen, which something that I think is really cool is that this is like a living room during the day. It's actually four rooms, honestly. It's like living room, kitchen, bathroom in the back. And then at nighttime, this is the bedroom. So this is four rooms in one van, a 170. So let's hear something about the kitchen. It is beautiful. And it looks like you have everything. You've got the stove. You have a refrigerator, a microwave. What do you not have? I think we might have checked all the boxes for the kitchen. Oh, we didn't do an oven. That was a decision we made. But yeah, microwave versus oven. But that's a whole debate for the kitchen. It was really important for us because we like cooking for it to be like a super comfortable kitchen. So we wanted like one big working space. That's why we separated like all of our appliances to one side and then one big working space right next to the sink on the other side. We also made sure that there was like tons of storage because we like all the snacks. These drawers are super, super deep. They're also soft close and they have the locks. Locks are actually incredible. They just like, you know, they go in so easily. The last they never come out like they're they never had a drawer open, but they're really open and easy to open and they just close. So it's like that is nice. What type of materials did we use? Like what type of wood? I see there's some of the concrete possibly as well. For the whole van, we decided to keep it like super similar with the walnut veneer and the concrete finish. It's a small space. So we kind of just kept it on theme throughout the whole van. These cabinets actually are the only thing that we outsourced for the van. We have an amazing, talented friend, Ike Baker, who built these cabinets. They're just perfect. Like nothing is off centered. Everything just works perfectly, slides perfectly. Like he built them. They're five, five ace birch. And then we got them back and we did all the finishing. So we did the veneering and the concrete and everything. We decided to do a big pantry, nice, tall storage space for like all of the awkward shape things like wine bottles and amazing wine. And then here we have overhead cabinets. They're on gas struts. And they also just lock into place here. We actually did something interesting. And this is like going back to the lighting thing. We put a light in the back of these overheads and also in the closet so that at night when these are shut and you just turn on that light and it's dark in here, it actually like shines through these, which is like a really nice. So are those on separate switches for the cabinets? No, they're the ambient light switch. Oh, yeah. They go with like part of the nook light. It's not really dark enough in here, but kind of really good. So what material did you use for like the cabinet faces there? This is return. And then it was actually to see through when it was just this. So it's actually return. And then layered right behind it is burlap fabric. OK, it's nice. I've never seen that. Yeah, it's really nice. Well, we just had to find a way to make it not so see through. So it's not like you don't see what's in the storage cabinets, but also the light shines through. So we just found that mix in it. The color of the fabric like matches everything in here. It just gives it a good pop. We actually, we got this and we didn't like the color of it. So I spent like just a few days figuring out how to like layer it, how to like stain it perfectly. And we finally got to something that looks like this. So that wasn't what it looked like when you got it? No, no, no, no. Do you have like a secret? Did you have to dye it? It was wood stain, but it was like kind of like layering it and dabbing it in like certain ways. It's kind of like I don't know if you can tell it's like darker in some spots. It looks like washed almost a lot of time trying to figure out like trial and error. Get in there. That's the first fan build. You'll figure it out. Yeah. It's cool. Is there anything else about the kitchen that's just like super unique that you would like to talk about? Espresso machine is a must. Always. Obviously, you have to have an espresso machine. And then we have our other nook here. So spices and whatnot. Yeah, this is an induction stovetop, a dual burner induction. We have AC outlets on both sides to run appliances, filtered water system and our closet, which we were talking about storage before. Show them how deep these are. These are like insanely huge and deep drawers. Top to bottom. Yeah. So is that considered like chest of drawers? Clothes are going in there or anything? Anything you want. Yeah. We mostly clothes and the bottoms like shoes and like hiking stuff and that kind of stuff. And then this whole top area is hanging room. So, yeah. So we have a hanging closet. Yeah. With lighting. So you can actually see what you're doing. Yes. Yep. And our favorite part is that we see this here. We have and you have something dirty. Laundry shoe. Laundry shoe. That is genius. That's a good segue to go to the back and show where that goes. Yep. All right. This is like a beautiful shot. Like there's there's little paragliders. We made it to the back. Yes. We have more micro cement. Yes. Which you did mention earlier that it is waterproof. So this is perfect opportunity for a shower. Is the entire thing coated in that? Even the floor? Yeah. The floor also. Yeah. The floor. We also added in a fiberglass bottom just to make it a little bit stronger and to make sure that there'd be no yeah, possibility of any water going through. So we just want it's also behind. Everything here is also Kirti triple layer waterproof. There's like absolutely no way anything will leak in this thing. And did you custom make this right here? So this is a sink. Most vans have one sink. You have two. So you literally have a full bathroom inside of the back of the van, and it's a completely separate room. So it closes off with this door here. Yep. Is I can't remember the name of it. Nautilus. That's what I have in my van as well. And yours looks taller than mine. I'm not sure why it might be. Is there really? Yeah, there's definitely you choose exactly the height you want. So I can see over my head. Yeah. So you went with like black features in here, which I absolutely love because of the contrast. You got the black shower. You've got the sink handles and it's throughout the entire build as well. Yeah. Also, you can see here we have another inset. Yeah. We tried to keep it like super clean, like micro cement, wood and black mat. And like, that's pretty much it. Just because because it's a small space, like the more colors and textures you add, like the busier it gets very quickly. This is just a full luxury bathroom. It really like it's just like a house. You have a vanity here for all of your toiletries, a second sink to brush your teeth. Get ready. That was a huge thing for me to have, like a separate space to get ready. I personally didn't want to brush my teeth in the kitchen. I don't know if that makes me a bad van lifer. Mirror here. Same concept. Like we kept arcs throughout wherever we could kind of throughout the van. Now, is that a medicine cabinet as well? No, it's not. It looks like one. Yeah, it was like over the top to even get it to be like flat just like this. But to make it open, that would have been a whole nother. We just ran out of time to engineer that. Yeah. Speaking of time, how long did this take to build? This took four months of both of us working full time. Overtime. Overtime. Yeah, we were like we set ourselves a deadline and we just did not allow ourselves to go past it. So we just worked a ton and powered through it and got it done in four months. So it also helps the fact that you guys were basically living in a van builder's oasis, so to speak. Tell us a little bit about that really quick. We met Shaden at right after Burning Man last year. He told us we kept saying, like, we want to build a van. He was like, I have the perfect solution for you. You can come live in my house, build a van in my house with a bunch of other people who are building their vans. And it just was the perfect opportunity. And we just were like, yes. And then a few months later, we moved in and we got started. It was honestly the best thing we ever could have asked for for our first build, like being around a community of builders and being able to just anytime you have a question, be able to ask and not go through like forums on the Internet and like whatever it may be. Nothing here would have been anywhere near what it is if it wasn't for Shaden and all and all the people that were in the house that we that we just got our knowledge from. Yeah, it was an incredible community. It doesn't look like a first time builder. Like if you look at my van, that was my first build. I can build a lot better. You're like on the third, fourth build is what it looks like here. But the experience helps. So let's hear more about like you said something about your AC a little bit ago. Oh, yeah. So we just missed it before. We have a Dometic RTX 2000 up there. 12 volt pumps out cold air. It's really, really great. We put in the middle of the van. So it kind of disperses throughout the whole van. And then we put our vent fan here in the bathroom. It's a Max Air 7500. And we put it here so that when you close the the Nautilus, the Nautilus door, all the fumes in the shower can just go straight out. But also they can suck all the air out from when you're cooking or anything like that. We usually don't even have to turn this on when we shower, though, because when you shower, you just shut this Nautilus door. Pull this curtain. I'm going to hide myself across to block the vanity. And then you have all of this space to shower and you just normally have the doors open to the view. The last part of this bathroom, you might be wondering like where the toilet is. Yes. So you just pop this door open. Unlock these. And here is our Laveo dry flush toilet on a 500 pound drawer slides. You can also go to the bathroom with the view. And this is whoever doesn't know, like hands down the best toilet you can put in a van. There is just absolutely no maintenance in this thing. It's like it sounds dry flush, like it just vacuum seals all your business over and over and over and over again. No smell whatsoever. And then when there's no more flushes left, there's already a garbage bag inside. You just close it up, throw it in a regular trash can. You don't also have to use flushes for when you pee. You just actually sprinkle this powder on it and it crystallizes it into a solid and like negates all of the smell. We have our toilet paper right here. It's always hanging there. Yeah. And I think one of the best things about this design of having the bathroom shower in the back is that it also serves as like a wet room for when you're coming in dirty. So, yeah, let's say you're surfing or you just came from a hike or whatever. And you're super dirty. You can just come into here, get all your stuff off, you know, your wetsuit or your dirty clothes or whatever it may be, wash off if you want and then go into the van clean. And that was like a huge thing for us on the road where we were like not needing to check in all our dirt and stuff with us. We also have an outdoor sprayer in case you don't want to wash things in there, but you want to wash outside. So we have this thing that's always stowed here. You just plug it in and you can just wash off your surfboard or whatever it may be. And so how much water do you have on your fresh? We have 34 gallons of fresh water gone for like six days with, you know, with like doing dishes, showering every day, showering. Yeah, pretty much every day. Two sinks, you know, all that. So more than enough water. And then we have a gray water tank that sits right under here in the spare tire that is 32 gallons, I believe. Very nice. And then our water heater actually sits in this cabinet. And what type of water heater do you have? It's a Bosch four gallon. Four gallon. OK, yeah. Yeah. It's a four gallon, which we've never gotten through. We've always like turn that thing on for like seven minutes. It gets like super hot. And then we have the Nebbia low flow like spa showerhead and 1.2 gallons per minute only uses 1.2 gallons a minute. And, you know, you only shower for like a minute tops. Yeah, that's your fairly fill line for the water is right here. Yeah, that's where we fill up our water. It's just a little push and play. Yep. Yep. I like it. So something over here on the left side, you got some like, yes, coin mat everywhere. Oh, my God. So much coin mat. We have something to say about the coin mat, too. If you're building a van, please don't use 3M with coin mat on wood. For some reason, there's a reaction and it turns into this gooey, sticky mess. Yes. Use some serious type of glue. We made that mistake and we had to fix. We had to like redo it. Because like a month later, it all just started like. This is our garage. We wanted just like a huge space that we'd be able to put any type of storage that we want. And it's also very customizable, so you can like add and subtract whatever you want from here. But we went with this kind of big vertical space that has our laundry hamper. This is what you saw from the laundry chute on the other side. Our toilet that actually sits back here. And then you just have a ton of space that with like hanging stuff. We have our vacuum here, yoga mat. You can kind of really put anything you want in here. There's also a big drawer here for like all sorts of supplies, tools, whatever you want. On top of that, we also have T-tracks here. If you want to hang like helmets, ropes. It's just super easy to wipe down if it gets like muddy and dirty because it's plasticky. So anything else that we need to talk about with the van? Final thing, I guess, would be this, which is our rear tire rack from Owl, which is very dirty right now. This is how we get up to our walkable solar panel where we usually sit and watch sunsets. That's pretty much the main reason we have for using it. I mean, I think that's pretty much it. I think we covered a lot. I think it's an incredible build. Unfortunately, it's probably already sold. But where can they find you guys on Instagram? You can find us on Instagram at Eden Ram. It's with two D's Eden. And we're on TikTok. We're on YouTube, Pinterest, Facebook, all that stuff. We'll just link it. Yeah, we'll link it in the description. All right, y'all. Well, thanks for showing us the van. And I hope to see another one coming out of you all. Thank you very much. We hope to make one. All right. We'll see you all later.