VAN TOUR - The Most Beautiful Camper Van Conversion Ever Made

Hello, I'm Claire. I'm 64 years old. I live full-time in my van which is a Fiat Ducato Maxi 2016 turbo diesel. I live fully off-grid with solar power and a lithium system. Come and have a look inside. This is my van and my van has a name and it's called the Mouse House and there's a couple of little mice in there. Would you like to come inside? Come on in. Well, this part of the van is probably the bit that makes this van a bit different to other vans. When the white door's shut, it's just a tradies van but when it's open, it's a beautiful little house complete with windows that open actually. This one opens one way and this one over here opens another way so I can get breezes in from, oh that's nice actually, from whichever direction it happens to be coming from. Behind that window is my office. I actually kept this because I had it in my house and I loved it and it's just a cabinet but it has a pull-out shelf which is excellent for a keyboard because I like to work on the iMac standing up quite a lot. So a lot of gear here. You could call this my office. You could call the first three drawers my office. You could call the bottom drawer the tool shed. I had a house and I had a mortgage and as you might know being an artist your income is not much so then I thought well if I have something small and beautiful that I own without a mortgage that's going to make me feel a lot better than having four empty bedrooms and a mortgage and then maintenance coming along so I sold the house, paid off the mortgage, bought an empty van and found people that would do what I wanted to do. I needed it to be beautiful. I needed it to be artful. I needed that every time I walked into it I liked it and I do. This little door if you knock takes you in to Narnia. No it doesn't really. It takes you into my cab. I can clamber through there if I want to or I can reach through in there for anything that I need and that's a heat proof curtain to just keep any heat from the cab from coming into here. It's really well insulated. I think I've got double insulation on the ceiling and the floor and the walls. It's all insulated well so it's good to keep any heat there might be out that way. This side here we've got the kitchen. I like to cook so I have lots of spices and knives. This is my pantry. This one here tea towel rack may stay on so it's quite a long drawer that I pull out. I have a lot. I have all the spices and there and I have all the sauces there and olive oils and various bits and pieces in there and the the one at the bottom here has a hot water system at the back but it also stores things like coffee beans, coffee grinder and a fire extinguisher. The hot water system I just flick a switch and the gas turns it on and it'll fire up until I have hot water. A three burner stove, an oven grill and one or two pots and pans. These are probably very messy but I do live in my van. I do live in it so this is this is what they look like when you live in them. A few pots and a few plates and things. Oh and there's a really big cupboard here. It goes the full width of the van up in here so you know many more things can be stored in there. So I spent about a year researching, reading, looking at tiny houses, looking at van builds and picking little bits out of them too until I came up with this design. I use these books and and drew a lot. Oh there you go there's the picture of my van. You see that? These well anyway they're not very clear because they're in pencil but this this is how it happened. I think maybe three or four of these books and I designed it down to the millimetre so every millimetre of this van is my design and I was fortunate enough to find I kept looking until I found somebody that would build it and I found a young couple called Roaming Wild Campers and they're based in a vineyard in Mudgie. Well the van itself I remember I paid $26,000 for. It had 160,000 kilometres on it. I'm pretty sure all the inside including you know the toilet, the fridge, the stove, the extra insulation, maybe 45,000. So maybe about 70,000 all up. This is my sink, was once a preserving bowl when I had a house, an old French copper preserving bowl. Taps that I found in the garden on an old enamel sink set set up and this I think it's cedar the whole bench live edge timbered cedar. The water comes from a 70 litre fresh water tank that's underneath and there's also a 70 litre grey water tank. Personally I use a bowl in my sink and if it's there's dry patches on the grass I'd rather throw my water out than hold it in a tank but I do have a tank. Underneath that we've got the usual dishwashing liquid type stuff cupboard then the atomic lives in there when I travel. Enough cutlery for an army even though I live by myself. I couldn't let everything go. Some of this cutlery is really lovely. Another drawer and another, another one at the bottom there, a few more bits and pieces. To work out what I needed in the van I wrote down what I did each part of the day from when I woke up so that I made sure I had those things. I had the place to brush my teeth, I had somewhere to stand up to work on the computer because I like standing up. So I just thought about what it was that I did and what I really liked doing and what I would miss if I didn't have. This part of the bench is where I can cook things and I've got plenty of room but underneath it this one lifts up and you see there's a couple of hinges and this is actually my bathroom. So this will hold up here, I can put a shower curtain on here and inside I have a, well it's a composting tool, it has no chemicals whatsoever and I also have a shower that I can just kind of hang up here. It's got a trigger on it so I'm not using too much water. I can, would you like to see some water? Let's see the water flow. There is a drain hole in there of course. I turn on the tap, quite groovy taps and we have water. And the pump for all this is under my bed so it's under about that area and the pump comes through for this and for the taps here. So that's a two-in-one thing, I've got extra bench space and I've got a bathroom and I've got storage. Definitely living intentionally is a big part of it, that's right. You know how much water you have on board so you're water conscious. You know how much sunlight's been on your solar panels so you know how much energy you've got. So sometimes, like if I was parked here for a long time and a lot of shade, I probably wouldn't use the coffee grinder. I might do it by hand, I might just drink tea that day. And over here is a sitting area, I'll just shut this door and show you. So I'll close the door here, open the window, get some air in, there we go. So this is kind of my all-purpose sitting area, I suppose. These things just hang here, towels, a jacket. I have a little library and this, so I can sit on here and I can pull this table out here and eat a meal in quite a civil way. I can also invite a friend and put a fold-out chair there. So that's that part. I'm sitting on the fridge which is, I think it's about 50, oh there you go, it's 52 litre Bushman. At the moment it's running at three degrees. At the end of this part is a, well this is all the solar stuff which I honestly, apart from telling you that there's a 200 ampere lithium battery and there's other stuff. There's other stuff and it all works. Oh, now you're facing straight into the bedroom. So without moving very far at all we've come to the bedroom. Overhead there are my clothes cupboards. Right now we've got a disco happening from the crystal which is quite nice. My bed, would you believe even though it looks big, is a single bed because behind this bed I've got more storage. So there's more storage cupboards behind there. This is a big skylight. I think at the time it was the biggest I could get and I can wind this up so high that if I want to I can stand on the bed and do night photography through there. I'll just show you how the cover of the two things, take the disco away, this pulls back and this one stops the full moon keeping you awake all night. The only downside is when it rains a lot and I think other people in vans will say the same thing. I'm fortunate in as much as I do like to do a lot of work with photography and sometimes more film so I'm occupied. Solo women living in a van, that is the first question. Is it safe? Will I be safe? And a good idea is to have the way to get from the cab, from the back into the camp and drive away. That's a good idea. If you park somewhere that you're not sure of, don't put your awning out, just be ready to drive away. I'll show you what's under my bed from the back of the van. If we start on one side I have LP gas storage and I have two big cylinders, one behind the other. When the first one runs out I just turn the tap over and run on the back one until I change it over again. That's just really handy, you don't want to run out of gas halfway through cooking. And on this side, this is another solar panel here, so I can put chairs, tables in these spaces. Even the back doors are insulated as well underneath these panels. And I personally, even if they're not the most artful things, they work really well. This van is only six metres long and it has a bathroom, a kitchen, a lounge room, a bedroom, a storage shed. It has a lot for six metres. Buy a van, get a van, do it. Plan it though, plan it. Spend some time, draw it, work out what you want in it because I think it's a bit difficult to keep buying and selling vans because you've made a mistake. Do it, life's too short to, you know, somewhere along the track saying I wish I'd have done. Have a go at it. Thanks for watching episode two of Home on the Road. If you enjoyed this episode be sure to check out the others in the series and if you want to help me keep making episodes please consider supporting me on Patreon. Some pretty cool rewards there and you can chip in for as little as a dollar a month. So thanks again for watching and I'll see you all in the next video.