Most people planning a van build treat the fridge like a checkbox. Pick something that fits the cabinet, order it, move on to the exciting stuff like the bed platform or the shower. That’s backwards. The fridge is one of the few appliances running every single hour of every single day, and the decision you …
A forty-foot sailboat with two people aboard and no watermaker has, on average, less freshwater storage than a mid-size camper van. That’s the detail that got me looking into offshore water rationing in the first place. Sailors have been solving the exact problem van dwellers face, how to make a fixed amount of water last …
Skip a build step and you save money today. Skip the wrong one and you pay for it every single night for the next two years. Insulation is one of those steps people love to argue about, mostly because the people arguing live in different climates and never say so. Here’s the short version before …
I gutted my first van in a gravel lot behind a hardware store because I didn’t want my neighbors watching me mess it up. That’s not a joke, that’s just what happened. I had a Sawzall, a stack of YouTube tabs open on my phone, and absolutely no plan for where the electrical was going …
The first thing I ripped out of my $2,000 build was the thing I was proudest of. A plywood bed platform I’d measured twice, cut once, and screwed down like it was going into a house that needed to last fifty years. Six weeks on the road and it had already started squeaking over every …
A guy at a van meetup in Moab once showed me his electrical bay like he was unveiling a car engine. Four 100Ah lithium batteries, a 3000-watt inverter, 600 watts of solar, a shunt-based monitoring system with an app, and a sub panel with more breakers than his actual house. He ran a mini fridge, …
I get asked about composting toilets more than almost anything else on this site, usually right after someone has just watched a van tour video where the bathroom looks spotless and smells like nothing at all. Real life is a little messier than that. Not bad, just messier. So let’s talk about whether one actually …
Most people start their van build with the wrong question. They ask “what do I want in my van,” when the real question is “what will I actually use every single day, in the first two weeks, before the money runs low.” Those are two different lists, and mixing them up is how a $9,000 …
The first van build I ever watched go wrong wasn’t because of a bad electrical setup or a leaky roof vent. It was a guy who spent nearly $3,000 on a fold-out dinette, a butcher block counter, and reclaimed barn wood paneling, then insulated the whole rig with a single roll of the cheapest foam …
I spent my first six weeks of van life running an extension cord into coffee shop bathrooms to charge a laptop. That’s not an exaggeration, and it’s not a story I’m proud of. It’s just what happens when you convert a van in a hurry and tell yourself you’ll “figure out power later.” Later showed …