hey there welcome to my channel where i take you on tours of unique homes and showcase stories of
people living alternatively we've toured a lot of van conversions on this channel
but today's van dwelling is a real head turner this guy comes walking up and he goes that's a
terrible idea for a car and it is a terrible idea for a car a terrible idea for a car but
it's an awesome idea for a house but it's a great idea for a house john and carly are going to take
us on a tour of their woodsy van and explain how living nomadically doesn't mean you have
to skimp on some big home comforts and if you like these kind of stories make sure that you
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make this house
wooden walls in an air so cold pleasure's not enough when you're on a roll
hi my name is john and i'm carly and welcome to our funky little van what
this journey with the van started almost exactly two years ago that's through about
five interior rebuilds about three exterior rebuilds a new member moving in right yeah
we joke all the time about what it looked like before carly moved in well it's very obvious that
a girl moved in right and he was like the first van lifer i ever met lucky for me because they're
all pretty cool so that was a close call i could get rid of everything i own and be totally happy
before i used to have my own car and i would follow the van behind and we would just kind of
caravan and i would get to see all the people looking and turning and talking slack jaw
faces of just what is yeah so this one day i was sitting in the front seat of the van and
this guy comes walking up and he goes that's a terrible idea for a car and then his wife is like
honey honey there's a person in there and i was just like
hi and he was like i like your voice your van scrambles away and it is a terrible idea for a
car a terrible idea for a car but it's an awesome idea for a house but it's a great idea for a house
welcome to the outside of woody woody is a 1996 gmc savannah 1500 it was originally
very classic 90s family conversion van for road tripping
we took a lot of time to really modify it and make it look nothing like a family road tripper
obviously got his name from the very custom wooden raise up here added 16 inches of height making the
interior 6'4 certainly wanted to be able to stand when i was traveling around and just got sick of
hunching over i actually did that alone in the desert which i don't know if i would recommend
i was pretty dangerous but quality of life has been dramatically improved
the colors are definitely eye-catching and i just picked a couple of colors that i thought
would work pretty well for wood stain when i was bringing it out and doing the work and immediately
after putting it all together i realized it perfectly matches harry one of our dogs
the van has a 5.7 liter v8 engine we get about 15 16 miles to the gallon right now
which is excellent in our latest round of renovations one thing that we wanted for a
long time was a roof deck we knew we wanted it to be the full length of the vehicle so
it's an 11 foot roof deck up there with 400 watts of solar on top that we actually built into
these wooden frames that pull out on wooden puzzle slides so now we have all four panels extended out
winning back a good amount of space about 12 inches in width on each side
when we built our roof deck obviously we needed a way up there and we found a great
deal on these flipped down ladder steps four easy steps with the bumper and you're on the roof deck
carly decided to do a couple little paintings on the inside from here we have phases of the moon
and when we're in bed we can see those perfectly in this most recent round of renovations we added
the skylight here we got the part for less than 100 and it has increased quality of
life dramatically for sure we get a ton of natural light when we're hanging out when
we're cooking when we're hosting and it really really fills up the space so our latest addition
here starlink from spacex is high speed internet pretty much anywhere we've been very dependent
working full-time from the road i work remotely as an adventure coordinator and i also do full-time
photography i do a lot of digital marketing i do a lot of social media stuff i do a lot of
graphic design branding web development it has been a major form of sustenance for us
one nice feature that we did add to the van is our water fill so this feeds a 30 gallon water
tank that with two people three dogs it lasts us about a week all of our exterior lights are
independently solar powered so none of the power comes from our house batteries so at night time
when it gets dark they automatically turn on just like that all right let's check out the inside
welcome into woody this is one of my favorite walls
in the whole van for christmas because carly's a photographer
i bought her a polaroid camera and now actually all of these all recent memories
my guitar of course which i have set up here in kind of an interesting way i think or at least a
simple way these little wall hangers are made to hang a guitar perfectly vertically but i built a
very small wooden box down here that just holds the body of the guitar too and this doesn't move
at all when we're driving next to me here this comfy little stool looking thing is actually
our toilet it's a really simple cassette toilet there's a little release on one part and the top
water tank and seat actually come off and the bottom were able to walk into safe dump areas
this front area up here behind me we reduced
our shelving up here really tucked it back and now it's things that bring us joy more or less
the shelving up here and trim throughout really a lot of the interior wood is just found pallet wood
so being able to find wood and rehab it and really bring character into each piece and use different
stains the wood is very homey it's very natural to us it makes us feel connected to nature it keeps
things really bright it's obviously also very durable and pretty practical and a lot of this
being pallet wood that's often cheaper wood so it's lighter wood it's not very dense
this is our kitchen where i made the first meal i ever made for carly where i made the first meal
for a lot of new friends that i've met out there i'd love to cook love to share things when i met
carly i didn't have a countertop in here at all uh it was just the frame of the top of it and i lived
that way for a long time i like a lot of stuff in here when a girl moves in you gotta step it
up a little bit you know you gotta up your game you gotta get the butcher block our pantry that's
really massive tons of spices and little smoothie additives carly wanted a full-size mirror because
i was totally living bachelor life really before that and i think this might have been
my mirror before she moved in but now we have a big mirror that i intentionally tilted down
our sink faucet was 30 bucks online it's usb rechargeable it doesn't go down to a pump an
actuator a foot pump anything like that it's plumbed into our 30 gallon fresh water tank
and it just turns on with the click of a button relatively quiet in the grand scheme of things
definitely quieter than most sink pumps we use this middle space for most of our cooking we
have this little tiny stove just runs off of one butane canister here no other moving parts
we swap out a single can of butane maybe every week or so and that's cooking every single meal
getting up making tea in the morning it certainly gets plenty of use and we don't really blow
through fuel for that as we come down the counter top here we have this handle and these hinges the
countertop actually lifts up and we have our top loading fridge nested underneath there
it's a 54 quart aspinora fridge half the cost of your average dometic when we're not using
the fridge we don't need access to it we have all of this additional counter space
all right let's check out the back the bed area the lounge area
we built this table out of this is a terrible start come here this table functions as
our office our dining room table it's also part of our bed that fills in the gap here it sits on
one leaf that comes out on hinges and actually slides in between two pieces of wood that act as a
sort of counter weight when we're done working or hanging out in lounge mode we switch into bed mode
we take our table and that slots down our pillows that act as backing here actually fill in the gap
it's a full size mattress you can use a bread knife to cut your tempur-pedic mattress
the lines came out really really clean and we actually upholstered the whole thing
with velvet curtains that we found we just thought it would be comfy maybe durable they were pretty
cheap and affordable we absolutely love watching movies watching tv it's something i avoided for
a long time on the road feeling like like it lessened my connection to nature or something
but being a couple and wanting to just hang out we prioritized in this rebuild a nice big
tv that we would be excited to watch here we're up above the bed in the lounge area and this is
our clothing storage also built out of pallet wood here this is basically all of the clothing
that carly owns and then this little one basically all of the clothing that i own
some of this was the first pieces that we built in this whole rebuild we did the back pallet wall
here that we loved and really set the tone for the rest of the build so as we're looking around
there's inspiration coming from that everywhere for sure we use the same wood stains we used a lot
of the same patterning uh to keep things kind of cohesive related to clothes storage uh one
really cool kind of diy hack we saw on instagram was to take your pillowcases and stuff them with
your extra clothes so we keep our winter layers in the decorative pillows on the bedding here
so this area down below the bed here is where we have the majority of our storage that's where we
keep our bedding during the day where we keep a lot of our tools extra things that aren't quite
daily grab things and everything under here flips up on a hinge and we can get into our storage
one other thing we keep down here below the bed is our power system we actually have a portable
power station it's 1 260 watt hours it's really really more than enough to keep us powered here
approaching 30 at the same time as my lease ending and my career changing dramatically
i sort of took a good hard look at my time on earth and realized that
i want to travel and i want to be in nature and i don't want to be up all night bartending
i definitely knew like one day i will live on the road one day
in an air so cold pleasure's not enough when you're on a roll
can bear the weight of where i've been of where i'll go of where i'll
gold but i'm here with you you're here with me so much world we've yet to see
you