Hey guys,
I have two videos this week to fulfill yourself isolating binge watching needs.
First up is a tour of one couple's amazing van that is even outfitted with a
chef kitchen rooftop deck and a full indoor bathroom.
And afterwards,
don't forget to watch the sister video where chef Megg will take you on an in
depth tour of her tiny kitchen.
My choice for oven and stove top and also show it in action while she cooks us a
delicious meal. But wait, there's more this Easter Sunday, you can tune in to
the Vandam Instagram at 9:00 AM Pacific to see chef mag cook Easter brunch live.
I'll see you there. But until then, let's take a tour.
Hey guys I'm from New Zealand. This is my beautiful wife.
That's me, Meg
and our land yacht Van Dam,
before we moved into the van and started living the van life,
we were working full time on yachts.
I'm a private super yacht chef.
And Aaron.
I've probably been pretty salty for a good decade. Yeah.
First officer mate.
Mm.
I've been traveling for so long on a boat traveling the world that, I
really wanted to start exploring and uh,
what America and its adjacent countries had to offer.
We didn't want to stay renting anymore. So for us,
because we wanted to do some more traveling before we really settled down,
we thought let's look at maybe a bus or van,
but I'm no master carpenter or electrician or plumber.
It was a lot of back and forth. Only 3 million trips to Lowe's,
atleast 3 million, let's
forget all our friends and family that have helped us get VanDamme on the road.
Thank you guys. We love you much love
In retrospect,
we can now kind of laugh at some of the difficulties at the time that maybe were
a little stressful, but it always does come together in the end. Um,
especially working together, we make sure it happens.
Just trying to find the right Tool here.
Can you pass me the, um, nine sixteenths,
but I'll just get it myself.
So here I am, wiring up all the lights,
connections, heat shrink the works that I'm,
my supervisor. Seems to think that I'm not working hard and fast enough.
this, I'm not building this for you. Okay.
This is for me alright. Alright. You can come for a road trip.
I loved it. I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed the build and uh,
I had a great time and you know what? I'll do it again. Yeah, yeah.
You got to find out what really suits your lifestyle.
And originally we thought a beautiful large interior, you know,
big kitchen so to speak. But
we didn't think about the limitations for what we truly wanted to do on the
road. You know what?
My mate turned up in his rain pro master and it changed everything for us.
I jumped inside, I had head space, I could helicopter, it was great.
She's the extended version and she has a high roof.
I'm six foot after all the installations, sub floor, ceiling, etc.
I have an entry or two inches of space above my head. So good clearance.
I'm not bumping into anything and lots of breathing space.
Okay guys, let's check out the garage. Heaps of space to stow our toys,
my tools, spare parts, seasonal clothing, and much,
much more.
This chunky monkey to my left over here is a 2000 watt pure sign.
It's a charger inverter and I wanted to be able to charge the battery if the
solar wasn't enabled to, you know, we're in a dark environment.
It's winter time somewhere, a lot of clouds. And if we needed to plug in,
we could charge that battery. But uh, you know what, uh,
the solar is killing it. And uh, the battery,
which is 170 amp lithium phosphate is able to power our 110 volt fridge all
day every day. On the right we have an exterior shower,
which is great for just a, obviously showering
but just getting the dirt off our feet.
Even rinsing in our boards have a 30 gallon tank,
which has plenty of water for us or we try to take,
if we're going to go off the grid, smaller showers.
We also have the tankless water heater,
which gives us nonstop hot water all the time.
What we have down here as the propane,
the propane feeds the stove top,
the oven and the tankless water heater. We have a 30 amp plugin.
It's great if you're in a really cold environment and we have that ceramic
heater inside that we want to run,
but the battery can't handle it and and so it doesn't get used that often.
Up above here on the corner of the upper deck,
we have a wifi booster that does come in very handy.
It does have a limited range.
You do have to be within 10 but more like five feet,
but it goes from one bar to five. It really, really gives you that boost
And let's not forget the major feature and talking point is our Cedar deck.
It's custom made rack. It supports 300 Watts of solar,
which is more than enough to power lithium battery.
We love being up there. We can stretch a little bit of yoga,
maybe some wine. The sunsetting. We can just watch the world go by.
We absolutely love it.
This interior space was designed first thinking about the galley and how much
we're going to be cooking in here from our deep sink to our fridge that can open
up and store lots of food in there so we can go off the grid for awhile.
Obviously our pop up bench top,
one of my favorite features gives me a nice large space for cooking,
for parties, having all of my ingredients out at the same time.
My choice for oven and stove top was the fury on 21 inch.
It's a three burner stove top.
I love that the flame is nice and high and the oven is really quite large.
I can roast a hole or two even chickens in there cause we'd like to do a
Sunday chicken roast.
She wants it to go off the blue Scott up tile. I was like,
I don't know about that.
I don't know how it's going to look or feel and I love it. I feel like an Etsy,
we saw a lot of vans that were white,
which helps open up the space cause it is tiny. But we do love color
Another feature that might be my other favorite besides the bench top is the
pullout pantry. I love that it's a space saver,
but I also liked that I could access things while I'm working in cooking.
So for our shower area we opted for right behind technically the driver's seat.
In our design phase we laid out where else we could put a bathroom shower combo
and this is the location that we found to be the best and we didn't have to
compromise on all the other things that we wanted.
So we can have a long shower after we've been outdoors all day and we don't have
to go around searching for one. We have them right here in the rag
for our seating and dining. The van dam,
we opted for a versatility so we knew that if we're eating indoors we want to be
able to take that table and also use it outdoors. So one item,
two different uses as well. For our seating in here.
We have a kind of tight two person bench chair,
but we decided to use one of the drawers that we normally store some clothes in
to put it on sliders that we can pull out and create an L shaped seating area so
that we can fit more people or you can stretch out.
Welcome to our little bedroom area here in our tiny home on wheels.
We knew that we wanted at least a queen size mattress, Aaron is six foot,
so he wanted to be able to sleep fully stretched out and not have to scrunch up
and be uncomfortable sleeping.
My favorite feature of our bedroom area probably is the headboard that I
created.
I knew that I wanted something special and different than other vans that I've
seen and I thought the artwork that we create ourselves could really do that,
so I created a nice mountain scape that goes right behind our head as we sleep.
The idea I think is more that you're going to spend a lot of time outdoors and
you're not really holed up in this tiny space all that much.
It encourages you to meet people along the way people that will be friends if
not family for for a long time.
This allows us the freedom to keep moving on the road,
discovering new places and enjoying life outdoors.
That's the love of this life.
Thanks for watching.
Make sure to subscribe and check out the sister video where you can see an in
depth tour of this Van's chef style kitchen.