A lot of the things in our van that are like the coolest parts
I think are the things that we originally made mistakes on when we were building
it. So... From building their very first cabinet
to building an entire tiny home on wheels Nick and Raychel created an
awesome home out of a former ambulance.
Their van features a simple kitchen with
a foot pump operated faucet, great storage solutions, a platform bed, and
because it was an ambulance an electrical cabinet on the outside.
[electronic music playing]
Hi! I'm Raychel
I'm nick
And we are a couple that lives in a 2011 Chevrolet van that was prior to us living
in it
It was an ambulance.
We run a YouTube channel that is under the title of our own name.
So we're Nick and Raychel on YouTube as well as on Instagram just Nick and
Raychel. And then we also run a travel blog which
is notluxe.com so notluxe dot com. Yeah, so this is our
little kitchen set up.
It's nothing spectacular.
We have some regrets and that's this sink mostly.
It's hard to wash dishes in the sink but other than that it works fine.
Oh and the induction stove as well.
When we were building the van, we were
kind of learning on the fly, so we just figured, "hey we'll get an induction
stove" that way we're not working with propane and we didn't really understand
you know how inverters and batteries and all that kind of worked.
And so our inverter and battery setup isn't strong enough to power the
induction stove. So we do have like a little propane stove that we just have
underneath the fridge that we'll have to pull out.
Hopefully we're hoping that we can take the induction stove out and maybe install
a propane stove but other than that it works fine.
We don't have like automatic
turn one for the sink so it's just a foot
pump here
Just pump it
It comes up through some Pex lines that we wired in
I actually went to school for plumbing and pipe fitting so this is like a pretty
not so great setup but we did alright and everything else I think
Then down here we've got just like a little chest style fridge and yeah and
then we've got of course our Control Center here for all of our lights
We've got like different bars that you can power on and
Usually the one showing this part 'cause you can tell Nick can't stand in the van and
I can. I'm only 5' 3" and Nick is six feet tall.
And if you're taller than five-eight you may not be able to stand up straight in
here. But right here it's like the closest
thing we have to overhead storage other than where we keep our dishes.
Because our van isn't very tall we didn't have room to do a whole bunch of
overhead storage. So this is the best that we got.
So in here we just kind of keep extra spices and we have a, we call it like
our miscellaneous drawer.
And then here we keep a lot of... in Canada
we call them tuques.
We wear them all the time but not so
much in the desert.
And then like socks and undies are up
here and then when we had a installed well not much installation but when we
had hung this hanging storage here
we thought that it was going to be just
kind of like temporary storage, like if we got a bag of chips and then didn't know where
to put it or something... but it's actually just accumulated and accumulated so it's
kind of become like our linen closet.
So we have like towels and stuff in here.
And then shower stuff and whatever really doesn't fit in our closet kind of comes
here. And we thought that things would fly out but it kind of just swings with the
the van as we drive so it works.
It was &20. That's awesome.
And then behind here, so we have this kind of like fruit
basket which
we throw other stuff in there.
And then back here was like a newer addition to our van so obviously a spice
rack. When we first built the van we didn't
include a spice rack and I really recommend if you like cooking to include
a spice rack.
Makes it feel a lot homier like when you
can just cook and grab spices.
So yeah we made these ourselves and
stained them with the same stain that we did the
walls with and we love it.
We think that looks really nice.
This is a false wall too,
so if we were to take out one screw and
then take it off then we have access to our electrical cabinet.
If we want to like run any other wires or anything
yeah... That's smart. Yeah. So this is really big and bulky
Right now we just drove from Canada so we still have all of our coats up but we
also installed a shoe rack here which has been really helpful for us.
We didn't really know what to do with this step area that came with the
ambulance and we ended up doing that that's it's been really great.
So we've got our two seating areas here.
Typically we have like a little pull out
table that we'll put here.
So after we make dinner we'll pull that
out and then it's easy to to store.
And then underneath our seats this is
essentially like our closet.
So this is this one has all of our
clothes and everything in it.
Raychel's is over on this side,mine's
here. And then we just have like a shared kind
of sweater space in the middle.
Yeah and then over on this side and this
seating area...
This is kind of like all of our extra
food as well as like some electronics and stuff.
And then the reason I have it split up here is this heater runs off shoreline
power so if I have the ambulance plugged in somewhere then we can turn this heater
on so I didn't really want to have...
I wanted to kind of keep this space open
in case it got back there I wasn't entirely sure if it was going to but
because we're not plugged in very often we usually just use it for storage over
on this side as well.
We also have like this is where we plug
everything in so this just runs into the electrical box on the outside here.
And this just is connected to our inverters
This is where we plug all of our phones in and everything and then this outlet
here again is it only works when we're plugged into shoreline power so I wasn't
able to figure out the electrical that way
But this works just fine
And then we have lots of
Solar on top to to feed everything
So so how much solar do you have?
We have a 630 watts of solar so it's two, three hundred fifteen Watt panels
like 4 by 8 think.
So two massive panels on top.
But yeah they keep the batteries nice and fed but...
And what kind of batteries eo you have? Two deep cycle AGM batteries
is what we have back there. They're just like cheap brand whatever
that we could afford at the time.
So just for extra storage we installed
these little baskets here as well
just for, you know, quick access to things like you know tortillas or like peanut
butter or whatever we have in there just to so that we're not digging through the
pantry. So just extra storage.
That way we used to have two tiny little baskets there but we've we've since
upgraded to a bigger basket which is nice.
It's a great solution yeah
So we opted for a fixed bed.
We didn't really envision ourselves being able to like put together and and take
apart our bed all the time and I understand that that works for some
people but definitely for us like we love to just lay in bed all the time
basically. So what's also really great about having
an ambulance is that we are seven feet wide at the back so this is a full
length bed And like Nick said we also have room at
the bottom which is where we keep our fold out table if we want to just eat and
then at the foot of the bed we have some more storage.
So we had just like built this cabinet.
It's kind of an awkward size so it's
really tall and skinny
So we didn't know what to do and what we
ended up doing is just getting these belly baskets and then so this is extra
storage for us here in these baskets.
So I have like a lot of
hair stuff for my hair...
But yeah basically everything that we
didn't know where to put so...
That's great! Yeah. How did you make the
cabinets? So this is just sort of like c-grade
plywood. Really cheap plywood.
It didn't look very great and Nick made the cabinet and had never made a cabinet
before so we didn't understand that like when he put in the hinges you could... it
went through the plywood like on the other side.
We bought those kind of hinges.
And so these shims here were my solution
to covering that up.
I love
it! Yeah, and then we just used the same stain that we use for the walls because
we had a bunch of black stain leftover or ebony stain and went over it with that
stain and it ended up actually looking pretty cool but a lot of the things in
our van that are like the coolest parts
I think are the things that we originally
made mistakes on when we were building it.
So yeah this was kind of my response to that.
That's great!
Back here we just got all of our storage
underneath the bed we've got...
It's very windy
It is I'm sure you can tell
Yeah so this is just we've got like extra clothes under here, over on this
side and then a Coleman Grill.
I've got a toolbox there.
We keep some you know extra groceries, propane, and then tucked in the side
there's all of my skateboards and helmets and things like that and...
Yeah just kind of stuff that we don't need access to every day.
Ok folks sorry about the wind noise but this is where we are.
So this is their electrical cabinet.
Yeah so we've got like all of this
stuff here came with the ambulance.
I'm not entirely sure what all of it does but what we installed was our solar
controller here so that just feeds down from the roof and then we've got our 600
Watt inverter here.
Yeah we've got our two deep cycle AGM
batteries again that are fed from the solar controller.
And then we've also installed recently this amp as well just...
we put a little sub in the back just to kind of make it a little louder and yeah
I mean if you're always driving along the road it's kind of nice to have some some
music so we had room.
I think that if you're considering
like a cheaper van for vanlife if you're just you don't even know where to start
an ambulance is a really good option.
A really big part of our build was
stripping out all the ambulance things that come with an ambulance so it did
take a little bit more time than if it were to come bare bones but we
absolutely love our van.
And if you're thinking about doing
vanlife do it because we thought about it at one point.
This was just a dream for us too and now we're living in so anyone can do it.
Great! Agreed. Thank you so much!
Yeah thank you so much!
This is awesome!
I want to thank Nick and Raychel for sharing their van with us.
I encourage you to follow along on their adventures at notluxe.com
If you'd like to see more van and rig tours, van life tips, and other
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I appreciate your thoughtful comments and if you'd like to join in deeper
conversation join our Facebook group Gal Adventurers.
This is Joni with TheGalavan.
Enjoy your journey! 0:11:54.030,1193:02:47.295 [Electronic music fading]