Sprinter van: #vanlife… Thoughts about converting our van and stuff

Besides two words becoming one, what is vanlife? The company VanCraft asked this question on Instagram. The answer they offered was pulled from The Lonely Planet’s The Vanlife Companion:

"The current rise of vanlife is arguably a result of contemporary global social, economic, and cultural trends in much the same way as the events that made the original movement so successful. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, it was first the hippie movement, and then the surfers (I'd toss in here dirtbag climbers, too, but maybe vans were too expensive for them) – both of whom gravitated to the VW campervan, which had a near-total monopoly on the market at that stage – that thrust both the vehicle itself and romantic notions of the accompanying lifestyle into mainstream consciousness.

“Fast-forward to today, with a younger generation increasingly eschewing home ownership and delaying parenthood, and large chunks of the middle-aged wanting to break free from the shackles of mortgages and the nine-to-five… But you don’t need to quit your job, sell your house and belongings. Vanlife is a state of mind, and all are welcome.”

Then there’s this post I caught on LinkedIn because a friend had commented. It was from the owner of a company in Seattle called Peace Vans.

“The Peace Vans Modern project continues to gain huge momentum. The official Mercedes-Benz SKU is slowly starting to show up in dealers and 2021 will be a crazy year. We'll easily sell every single van Mercedes can get us and we are begging for more. By the close of this year we should have a cumulative 200 of these vans out on the road. In many ways, we hold back on our marketing because we simply can't come close to meeting the demand that exists organically. But, it's too much fun to not market, so we do.”

Yeah, what is it with this vanlife thing? 

---

For our story, I think back a little. To the beginning, or at least our beginning, when we first thought about not always camping in a tent. It started with a trip to New Zealand, and then a birthday trip for K. On the first, we rented a campervan because we were cheap and didn’t want to pay for a bunch of hotels. It was awesome. For the second, we were legitimately testing out what it would be like to haul a trailer behind our little RAV4 versus our campervan experience on the other side of the world. That was fun, just ultimately not what we wanted, which was to be able to easily pull up to an espresso stand. Lugging a trailer would make that tough. Priorities. It sort of culminated last year when we were planning her sabbatical. Travel somewhere far away and rent a campervan again like we did in New Zealand, or… Buy our own van and convert it into a campervan we could keep.

We obviously bought a van.

After having spent the summer more or less full-time turning an old tile van into our RV and then taking it on the road for 4,858 miles, I’ve had some time to think about this whole vanlife thing. Ultimately, like the question VanCraft tried to answer, what’s the allure? Why is converting cargo vans so popular? Maybe, most importantly, what’s the reality of it all? Here then is my stab at those questions.

Before I continue, I should point out there’s really two things going on here. One, the allure of driving around in a little home on wheels to which the VanCraft post referred. Two, the DIY piece where regular folk are able to take an empty cargo van and build their own little home on wheels, exactly how they like it. At some point, the two things merge into one and the result is what the guy at Peace Vans said so matter-of-factly: the current supply of cargo vans has no chance of meeting the seemingly insatiable desire.

But why?

What’s the allure?

Social media certainly has played a huge part in popularizing #vanlife, through photos of sun streaming through an open van parked in the middle of the desert, half-naked women taking showers on top of their vans, and vans driving down deserted roads, always in the middle of nowhere. Honestly, except for the showering half-naked women, nothing really all that different from the answer Lonely Planet offered. Except a new-school Sprinter van with off-road tires, solar on the roof, and a contemporary paint job is a lot more sexy than grandma and grandpa’s lumbering, sixty-foot behemoth.

My point is, sexy or not, the allure is the same: it’s about freedom. The great open road. The classic American dream. That hasn’t changed since vehicles started being built with beds. Like I mentioned though, RVs are expensive. But, also as I mentioned, now we can do it ourselves. Which leads me to the next question…

Why is it so popular?

This one, I realized, was easy. In two words: it’s empowering. How ordinary folks, Katie and myself for instance, can find a cargo van and turn it into an RV with readily-available materials. Essentially, it’s like doing a remodel project on a house, which a lot of people do all of the time. If we don’t want to sleep in a tent, no longer do we have to look at either new, really expensive pre-built RVs or really old and crappy pre-built RVs. We can have one for a fraction of the cost. Bonus: we can design it and build it exactly how we want, right down to the colors, options, and materials.

Yep, that’s cool. And awfully empowering.

Just like the do-it-yourself movements that have spawned around (obviously) home remodeling and (maybe less-obviously) car audio or even computers, the do-it-yourself van conversion movement is huge for all of those same reasons. Which, yep, leads me to the most interesting question of the three…

What’s the reality?

I’m afraid this is where things get less rosy. Or, should I say, less sun-streaming-through-an-open-van-parked-in-the-middle-of-the-desert. Well, there’s some good news and some bad news. Let’s start with the good news.

1) Cargo vans aren’t really fancy so, compared to other vehicles, they aren’t much more expensive.



The bad news, unfortunately, is twofold.

Because vanlife is so popular, supply is low and demand is high, in both the new and used markets. A friend of mine had to scour the country for the new 4x4 Sprinter he was after until he found one in Montana. So his story goes, he got a call from the dealer when one became available. He gave his credit card info over the phone right then and there and said he’d be up from where he lived in Santa Cruz to grab it in a couple of days. The crazy thing is that his story isn’t unique. Stories of people traveling across the country to get a van (again, used or new) and drive it back home are common. Heck, we were one of those people, though our drive home was only a few hours vs. a few days.

The second piece of the bad news is about buying used. Because these are cargo vans they’re often originally bought to be work trucks. Which means they often have high mileage, are beat to crap, or a combo of the two. Ours was mostly the former. Thankfully, not much of the latter. 



But wait… this is supposed to be good news. Let me get back to that.

2) The materials needed to convert an empty cargo van to a full-blown RV, from electrical components to plumbing and everything in between, are readily available. In fact, there are so many options in every price-point it’s actually a little overwhelming.

3) Like I said in answering the first question, converting a van into an RV is totally doable. If needed, there are outfitters who can take on part of a conversion (like our friends, who outsourced the electrical portion of their build).

Okay, now to the bad news. None of this should be much of a surprise.

1) Doable, yes. But to fully convert a van takes an awful lot of skills and all of the tools that go along with those skills. 



We’ve done a fair amount of home remodeling, which is to say we’ve basically gutted a house and rebuilt it. So we have experience with electrical, plumbing, and carpentry. We’ve done kitchens, bathrooms,  basements, and everything in between. We have a garage full of hand and power tools to show for it.



Still, we had to learn an incredible amount about working with metal along with, most notably, designing a 12V DC power system that wouldn’t burn down our van. Oh, and nothing in a van is square. During our build, we still ended up having to get a bunch of extra tools, most notably a grinder and some electrical tools.


2) Converting a van takes an awful lot of hours.



I have no idea how many hours. Between all of the late night research (particularly about the electrical system) and the doing (and redoing), it’s in the many hundreds. There’s a reason we read blogs of folks who spent years finishing their conversion, tackling one part at a time in between trips and seasons.

Thanks to COVID, I could essentially devote the last three months of summer to our conversion. It took every bit of it. K and I joke how if, say, we didn’t leave a neighbor’s BBQ one evening with the excuse we had a van to build, there’d be something we didn’t finish before heading out on our trip.



Regardless of the situation, it’s a massive undertaking.


3) Converting a van takes an awful lot of space.



Like I mentioned above, van conversions take a lot of tools, and tools take up space. Short of setting them up and tearing them down on the daily, having a space to dedicate essentially for a full-blown wood shop and fabrication shop is kind of essential. A place where the van can be parked and not moved is also pretty key.



Fortunately, we had a garage we converted to our shop and a shaded spot to park it in our driveway so it wasn’t too unbearable working in the ninety-plus-degree heat all summer.

On reading what I wrote, that’s an awful lot of, well, bad news. Or so it seems. It is the reality, however. Something I’ve thought about with our van, though, gets me back to that second point I made about why I think converting cargo vans is so empowering. Ours in particular. Despite all of the bad news, and because of the good, it’s totally doable.

We paid $8k for the van. Sure, it had close to 250,000 miles on it, but we bought it knowing these Mercedes diesels can crank out 500k+ miles. So the mileage didn’t really faze us. Then we approached our build with the mindset that, as Katie put it, we have a beautiful home so this van is just that: a van. She had to remind me that from time to time as my perfectionism kicked in or my lust for an expensive component surged. She was right, after all.

We haven’t done the math. That’s for later this winter, to add up all of our receipts and Amazon orders. If we had to estimate, we think it cost around $7k for our conversion and some maintenance. That and the cost of the van puts us in for $15k. I remember the first van we looked at, the New England rust bucket as we affectionately called it. In addition to all the rust, the guy had installed a passenger swivel seat, a roof rack and ladder, stuck a wood slab on a wall to serve as a countertop, and had a dilapidated plywood bed in the back. The mold K noticed growing from his lack of ventilation we assumed was included for free. He claimed all of that was worth $15k. I also recall paying $12k for my 2006 Corolla S when I bought it three years old. For a few grand more, we now have a fully-functioning RV. Yeah, that’s achievable for a lot of people. 

I say this because it seems the campgrounds, the trailheads, and the dead-end roads scratched across BLM land in the desert southwest are crowded with crazy-expensive Sprinter conversions. Revel 4x4 models that, uhh, start at just shy of two-hundred thousand. Dollars. Conversion companies charge anywhere from $20k to as high as you can imagine (typically $50k), on top of the cost of the van. Those kind of dollar amounts are less empowering. A little stifling, honestly.

What then, are my parting thoughts? 

Reality is reality, but, like time and space, it can be bent a little. Being smart, creative, and thrifty can yield high rewards. I don’t want all the bad news to dissuade anyone considering buying and converting their own van. It’s a hugely frustrating and, thus, hugely rewarding job. We lost count of the number of times we screwed up and had to redo something. Then redo it again. Sometimes, a fourth time just for good measure. Or of our toddler going inside to drop the F-bomb to Mommy and share with her how Daddy’s frustrated. Oops.

But we stand back now and look at our van, or scroll through these photos, and smile over our job well done. It's an awesome feeling thinking of all the work we did and all of the stuff we learned.

The key is, I think, a van conversion doesn’t have to be a plywood platform bed and a wood slab countertop on one end of the spectrum or a two-hundred-thousand dollar Revel on the other. There’s a lot of middle ground to be had without sacrificing form or function.

What we knew before we bought our van and then discovered on our trip was really about having the freedom. The freedom to go almost anywhere, to pull over, and to have a little house on wheels. Where we could swivel our seats around, kick up our feet, and relax with a beer. Where Sefton could play with his cars on his seat or on the floor while I downloaded photos to my laptop and K read her book. Where we could swing open all the doors and let in the warm evening air, then close everything up as the temperature dropped in the cool desert night. It was a little bit magical. Yeah, I get the allure.

Taking everything into consideration, all the time, the tools, the knowledge, the learning, the options, the frustration and the satisfaction, leaves me with this last thought. The bottom, bottom line, which is… (drumroll)… It’s totally doable and totally worth it.