Couple makes garage home + campervan a consistent life combo

So this was our graph, so the house behind it has three bedrooms and two bathrooms and the city told us that it was actually legal to live in your

garage

as long as you allowed it the right way in Portland. Advertise an accessory dwelling unit for you so that every lot in Portland, every residential lot can have an accessory dwelling unit, usually in a

garage

, sometimes in a detached building, but it's all legal and when we came in, they put an ad for you, actually, if you do it as an ad, it will actually be free and we thought, ooh, freeze the perfect number for us right now, we actually ran away and we didn't want to have God, we drove south in our old Volkswagen. bus for about a year and a half we had saved money for what we thought would be less than half or two years we left we came back and thought everything was going to have to end and this is where we usually end up working or having breakfast just to get some natural light nice and then obviously we can pull out two extra stools and seat four to six people here or if we really have to start entertaining we can extend this all the way to seat six adults at the end and then have a little kids table here at the bar.

I wonder if it's necessary, so we spent years before cutting the cord and downsizing, moving into smaller and smaller spaces, purging everything, saving money, no, we actually mostly live in the van out front that we have. many morning conversations like this is where we want to be today if not, why are we here? Let's get in the truck and go, and this is what we thought would be the base of operations and it will be, and we consider it that way because our friends and our tribe is here, but we actually spend more time living in the van and allowing other people to come in and read this, which then helps fund the trips.

When we returned from our first trip, we had cleaned all our furniture and so I taught myself. solder so that instead of going to buy things we could just make some items, so these stools were one of the first things I soldered and I tried selling furniture for a while until I realized there really wasn't any money there for me and then once we started creating the house, it seemed like an easy transition to the cabinets and everything we needed in the house, literally just giant industrial wheels and some steel, so you'll notice that almost everything here is pretty industrial.

Modern by nature, when we returned from our trip we found a community carpentry and metal workshop and I learned how to weld it on my own, I just moved it to the cabinets too, so instead of going to Ikea we just built solid steel frames and then we came. I walked in and found a bunch of reclaimed wood to use as doors and panels, so literally all of this comes from scraps from other people's projects at the community woodworking shop we work at. We kept saving and collecting bins and bins of wood until we thought we had enough to take care of the kitchen and living room and then we went in and tried to arrange them in a way that was beautiful and would go well with the steel.

They're actually just two-by-fours that are glued together and you can see all the old nail holes from what they used to be, which are just posts inside old Portland houses, so in some cases we just keep those uniform two-by-fours and we used them as they are here, we tried to get as much out of a Whittle as we could and so instead of using even full two-by-fours that could be used for something else, we just took out the scrap from the container when people finished cutting the things on the table. just glued on the inside of these points just OSB which again was reclaimed cheap you know it was cheap yeah I mean by the time we literally got back from our trip we had saved money for what we thought would be urine after two years back. and we started spending money renting a place and stuff like that and then when this project came up, we decided it was better to literally put the rest of our funds into creating a roof over our heads than to come back and live on the road for another six months, for what this was just a run down old garage, dark dirty garage door, and then when we got back from our travels, we were in Portland for a month or two, we thought it would be a

couple

of weeks, we rented a place for a few. a few blocks away I realized how strange it was to be in your own neighborhood while someone else lived in your house and one morning I had an epiphany that our garage was unused so the tenants were inside but there was nothing in the garage, so we started. the process of trying to figure out how to turn it into a house and we were hoping that we would just stop our bus inside when we traveled or whatever, it would be very simple and then the designer in me took over Portland when We are trying to back up some good debt .

Vistal is trying to support good density, so the use of advertising right now is waiving all system development charges to help in some way promote the idea and oppose, you know, our neighbors, There used to be small bungalows here. So a developer bought the bungalow, tore it down to build two giant houses, and for us, we just tried to reuse what we already had in a different way. Part of the code is that we have to keep parking, something we never seem to do. Use it, we always park on the street but we wanted to keep it, it's nicer for our neighbors and us so we kept some parking and then tried to get the rest back since it was for two cars so this was all road entrance and then we tried to recover the rest while the neighbors of the garden, the interior and exterior space, thanked us, thanked us for beautifying this terrible corner.

The floor is also just OSB oriented strand board so it's the same thing that would normally be in a lot of houses like the subfloor and then they are covered with a hard floor or something like that and we had actually done this inside the house when we renovated as well many years ago we left it, we weren't sure what we wanted to do with the floors and we are surprised that many years later it still looked and felt great, so we did the same here, we can always come back and renovate it with something else if we want , but so far we love the texture and color. so it's stayed up until now and these countertops are the means that we actually poured them into place on the floor, part of the beauty of having an industrial floor like this upside down, melamine, which is a type of wood with a slick white finish, build in the box the shape you want and then put down half a coat of concrete to make sure it's strong enough and then finish with concrete, let it cure for a few days and then I got some friends to help me put them in their place.

You'll notice that we lightly sealed the countertop and then left it completely dry and exposed. In my preference, I love raw concrete and would use it everywhere except as a countertop, it's nice to have. a little bit of sealant or repellent nature when things spill and it works well in a garage and it's a garage you know on some level and the same as these shelves, I mean they're just bent pieces of steel that we drilled and screwed into the studs, so they're absurdly strong, but it's literally just a sheet of steel. I mean, I can't imagine a way to make a shelf more affordable or more beautiful.

We just tried to work within the box that we had and we also tried to match it with our

life

style, so we still love entertaining, we love having people over, so it's a little strange in a 460,480 foot space. square feet, but at least a third of our living space is kitchen and living room, oddly enough, even then 480 square feet. ft., this is our perfect kitchen design, so we literally took over a very large part of the house to ooh, I wanted the Iowan kitchen because it's better for cooking and entertaining Jen. She's almost a master chef, so it's nice to have a good time while people are able to see and interact and sitting on the stools has enough storage space to literally make a wine rack out of scrap steel that we just welded into a bottle rack.

You know, these work the same way as the taller cabinets and everything here. tends to be a real kitchen and then the upper cabinets become long term storage and then this actually becomes more storage for guests and things like that so this is where we throw the umbrellas in, this is where you know a stool additional bar when we need it, garden chairs. There's a lot of stuff when people come in, if we have someone staying there's a nice closet that's basically dedicated to them storing their suitcases and stuff like that, oddly enough we have more storage space than we need.

We have the same rule when we lived in a Volkswagen. You know, if everything can be kept in a cabinet where it's supposed to be, then it feels more organized and

home

y and lasts, so this set of cabinets is multifunctional, so it's basically all the clothes in our closet, but we also needed a way. to get on the bed and at that point we wanted the dog to be able to join us so we made this set of cabinets that are basically for bedding and pillows and extra things like that can walk away and become part of the cabinets. when we're entertained and then just back up so we can climb some stairs to get to the bed right now it's just on the sliding plan, put wheels under it and put some tracks like most of the other things we have.

The project always seems to take a backseat to everyone else's, unfortunately the dog is now slowing down so he joins us less frequently than before, but we climb a

couple

of steps, get comfortable and, instead of having a kind of shallow loft bed where you have to be. Lying down, it actually still gives us a space where we can hang out comfortably and you can sit there and read, read the work, what have you done? I often do both, so no, we really don't and that has always been one of the design factors. is trying to put space inside a small house where you actually spend your time, so it seems ridiculous that we all have an 8 by 12 room that's boarded up and only used six to eight hours a night when you're sleeping, so we tried to turn it around a little bit and have most of the space really functional in a place where you're going to hang out and use it, so underneath we basically have a couple of tools and we have our dirty clothes. space, I mean, it's really just a utility room for us to store things that are not attractive, obviously, we also try to design this so that in 40 years, if we still need or want to live here, we can at that time the bed will probably be lowered so there will probably be a somewhat private bedroom underneath rather than a utility space, not the bathroom you'd probably expect in a small house in most cases, but I think it's the result of two people who live in a van and shower outdoors for a long time.

After a year and a half, when we came back and started creating our perfect

home

, we tried to imitate a lot of the types of outdoor spaces that we showered and bathed in in Mexico and Central America, everything here is really covered in an acrylic eyes type waterproof concrete just to make it look like an outdoor shower that we hid for a year and a wet room that is very, very European in nature, I mean, you don't sit out here and so when I talked to a group of contractors about this, they thought which we were crazy, they had no idea, so we couldn't hire any people to do it, we literally had to do every stage ourselves and then we brought someone to ride this. stuff because I just didn't trust myself enough to do it and we ended up using a system called VD or wedi born which is actually a European system that is made exactly for this so all the panels are waterproof, you put them in your patch. between them with waterproof material and then come back and you know?

I mean, this is basically like stucco that you put on the outside of a house, so it's not like it's a material that when I used to use we just don't usually bring it indoors and so, construction-wise, It was different in terms of use, it's exactly what we were looking for, so it's light, bright, spacious, that's how we work with all the small spaces, instead of coming in designer houses cutting them into boxes, but having a bathroom that It has a living room to have a bedroom and the only walls we build are around the bathroom so that everything else becomes more open and thereforeThat's what you see there are two walls here around the bathroom, the other walls. everyone lets you know, recessed from floor to ceiling so there is plenty of storage and then everything else can open up to flow so the doors also stained OSB and we had seen these amazing barn door rollers at the various companies they made and charged several hundred dollars and during the last month or two that we were driving the bus in Central America we had one of our bearings break and we realized that the way the inside of a wheel works is very similar to that and So I just put things together and, you know, took a simple piece of bent metal, wrapped it around the inside of the bearing and called it a day, so what should have been a couple hundred dollars worth of hardware was, I think , fifteen dollars, it's a little ebb and flow, but if anything, this place is like the hotel room we check into when we get back to the city karma so we don't have to stay on a friend's couch or in their basement, although that still happens.

Occasionally, most of our trips were on the 267 v-dub bus, which was classic and beautiful and had all the kind of warm, romantic feelings you want your vehicle to have, but after that trip we started to realize which was also starting to prevent us from traveling, the more we shopped on Craigslist, the more it became apparent that we didn't have enough money to purchase a vehicle, but our credit union was kind enough to offer us a loan with very little interest as long as it was a new car, so we tried to get it done for a used car and they wouldn't, so the Sprinter 4x4 was as good as we could find there and we thought I had a hard time emotionally separating myself from the bus, but the comfort, the size and The ability to stand like a modern man instead of being a hunchback really made the transition quite easy for us, so we bought it as a The hollow shell we went in added the windows to the sides of the vent on top. , the swivel seats and then slowly we started isolating and building everything and unlike the bus where we pretty much had to have a couch at all times, then open it up to a bed at night, everything here remains pretty much static so if we get to a campsite we can rotate the seats to have a better type of seating, eventually we will put a table here to eat, but in general, things here stay as they are because there is enough space for everything to be comfortable without us having to bend a space or rearrange it at night and we have a full size mattress so it's very comfortable yeah I mean this is actually the same mattress that we use in our house why wouldn't we be so comfortable with the fact that that everything is built as a kind of kit of unscrewable parts, so we didn't actually drill any holes in whatever truck it was on?

It's there next to the factory so if we ever need to put something back down it's easy to do it without destroying the cabinets we put in, so if we ever want to reconnect something we put a couple panels in and run new assemblies of cables and just put everything back where it was, tried to learn the lesson from v-dub, rebuilt the bus twice and instead of building it right away we built everything from cheap OSB casing and just put it in boxes. that were about the right size drove to Vancouver, we spent almost a year, I guess, spending the summer and enjoying the van to make sure we had what we wanted and then last fall, just before a trip from winter, they ripped everything out and then left. final with everything, so we made some changes based on what we learned, but overall almost everything stagnated, we tried to learn from the things we learned before, so this is a Smith two burner stove, it is actually the same one we had on the bus, it's a German engineering kit we love it and it means we have a kind of worktop that you can still use the refrigerator is the place where in our v-dub we failed, we opted for the cheaper refrigerator which we had read about and which was just used on tractor trailers and seemed fine, but in most cases those guys are always driving and therefore the amount they get in terms of power from their batteries is not a problem, and even though we were sitting on the beaches of Baja California with the sun direct on our solar panels we just couldn't keep up with the refrigerator, so this time we opted more for what we already knew was the case, which It's buying sailboat items instead of car items, because they figured this out for decades.

It does that, we had done it with most things, but on the refrigerator, for some reason, we decided to save money and now, you know, we chose the marine refrigerator that should be on a sailboat to make sure that we can stay out of the grid. As long as we want to stay up to date, spices, pots and pans, everything here is again welded metal. In this case, it's aluminum to be lighter and we just prefer the aesthetic because it's a little bit brighter on the truck and then all the panels are bamboo. We also had some bamboo on the bus and funnily enough at the end of two years of traveling and living on the beach the plywood just wasn't holding up very well, it's very dirty, it's rotted, it was horrible as the bamboo looked great and bombproof, I mean, it's very waterproof, it's great to work with and it also comes in different thicknesses in terms of panels, from thick panels that need to hold their own weight to things that really allow us to bend over and get the kind of structure that we wanted here, you know, after living on the bus for a year and a half, it was very clear that if you live in a small space, you will spend time crouching in agony after cramming.

You corner yourself and like to hit your head or shin on something sharp, so we leaned over so we wouldn't have any more corners and this was the result. I guess it also tends to look more like an airline or a sailboat. We hear a lot of that. but mostly it was just not to keep hitting my head on the corners in the winter, this is actually a storage cabinet and in the summer we take out the back panel and remove the shelves so our surfboards can go all the way up so we can put our surfboards inside, this is actually our step to get into bed and then it folds up as well.

It's basically a small sailor. Most boats actually get a little wet. This is one of the models that is actually just a cassette toilet, so. This all comes out, it's a two-layer system, so the seat comes out of the top and then you can just take the container on the bottom and empty it into any toilet. I mean, you can do it, you know, at any bathroom break, fast food. bathroom or our own, you know, when we get back home, you know, and again for us, we're going to try to live in our van long term, the bed is important, having a nice open space is very important for us and then also We put the fan on top so we can get rid of some of the hot air which is a luxury we never had on the bus, well it looks cool.

I mean, the only problem we've had was in the middle of winter, I mean this trip. We actually went on a winter trip and the temperature was negative 25 degrees, it's hard, I mean, in that kind of cold environment with two humans and a dog inside one space, you're going to collect a lot, so the only way to do it is even though you're trying to stay warm is to keep something open and keep the air moving in the vehicle to try to get rid of it, so if you know we have room for all of our bedding, we have room for duvets and pillows. and sheets and things that you normally don't have a big enough space in a van to store anywhere so they end up outside and exposed at all times which is not the way we choose to travel and then we actually end up stealth camping 80 90 percent of the time we have a bunch of blackout blinds that we actually just built a storage space for in the bed and we're in a really crooked forest in stealth mode, but in stealth mode anyway, We have led the lane, but because we spend so much time trying to save money and travel discreetly, there is often no plan, so we are very rarely in campgrounds, we tend to just paddle to a spot and then find out in the last moment where we are.

We're going to sleep, so the nice thing is that if we're getting tired on the way, we literally need two seconds to figure out where we're going to park. Take everything out of storage, go into stealth mode, and then just call him. one night we put curtains in here mainly for the winter, it's insulated and rolls down and we have a heater so not only do we stay warm in the back but no one knows we're here when you're so cramped. pretty completely darkened, yeah, especially in the dead of winter or if we're done surfing, we realized we needed a place to hang things and what

makes

the most sense is to be able to do it in here, so we actually just built this kind of hanging system. flat folding. to be able to hang wetsuits to be able to hang winter clothes and that way everything falls on a kind of front step so you can just get out of the vehicle again we looked everywhere for the best awning and when we were inside Baja, we actually saw two awnings in RVs fold up on vehicles and in a wind storm so we went looking at boat stores and found this awning that is built for a boat to be running and is where most RV awnings fold up. . they lift at about five miles an hour winds, this is really good up to hurricane force winds, so at 55 miles an hour you can leave the awning out so we can keep working for you instead of folding it down when you need it most. to a show in Arizona all three days the winds blew between 45 and 65 miles per hour and literally everyone had to roll up their awning and put it away and got sunburned in the process and we just left ours outside for the three days that if it were there, it's not hydraulic, it's actually a screw type, but there are two actuators on the side that basically allow this to wind inside itself.

Stainless steel again built for marine environments, so it's designed for much worse environments than our truck has ever seen. nature and then it just rolls up into itself when folded up definitely one of the best features we put on the VIN and then eventually we'll go back and put a second one on the back so that when we try to access our gear then we'll have some protection as well back here and this is just our garage this is our gear storage so everything under the bed about a third of the way forward allows for backpacking and rock climbing on the rack. barbecue and then everything here is the volleyball/surf area so our surfboards come in and can be stored inside and again it's important for us not to tie too many things on top and outside because we spend a lot of time stealth camping and So, if everything is inside, we just look like a work van, so it's much easier for people to not assume we're inside and knock on the door when we'd rather they didn't knock.

Did they sign it in the abstract? and then you just built it or yeah, well again, just like we did with our garage and other spaces, we designed everything in 3D first, so it seems like when you're trying to make sure you capture every square inch of a space in the best way . The way to do this is to start with the volume exactly as it is and figure out how to literally start carving out every square inch as we go. For us, it all depends on you knowing that each outlet is something that can actually be folded or folded back to connect to cutting boards.

Able Seaman actually has drawer slides, yes, and then here we have space for the pantry. What kind of essence do you think you can get by designing your own Chuseok vehicle? Romantic locks or cost, I think. it's huge on both, but it's probably not fair for me to say either because I'm a designer, yeah, and then I definitely set up a space somewhere and we eat a lot of vegetables, but there are a lot of people out there who are building their own bands from scratch. , so everyone has access to do it, it's just a matter of skill or confidence to do it.

I mean a lot of the things we talked about inside we had never done before, it took a lot of watching YouTube and reading books to figure that out. how to do things and it's working, I mean, we still have a long way to go, we have a lot ofthings we still have to finish, but like everything else, it's more important for us to get out there and start using it rather than sit back. in the workshop and finishing it, we talk to a lot of people who want to spend more time outdoors, they want to live in a van, they want to do whatever, but they spend so much time planning and thinking and worrying that they don't actually ever leave, but I don't know if, without just jumping in and spending time, you know whether to live in a van or whether to just live in a very small space if you still live in a five-bedroom house.

It's almost impossible to know what you want or what you need. It's basically a map of our travels and most of this started out as sort of tracking our trip south, which was to Baja Ferry. Dover crossed Mexico to the end. Central America almost to Panama and then back and around and then we delayed setting various courses because now virtually the entire west coast to the US has been tracked over the last five years and we have some Southeast Asia. some of Europe and right now we have chosen to travel by van mainly because we want the dog to be with us, so right now most of our travel is very limited by where we can drive to and then we can't.

I would like to talk about it, but when she is no longer with us we will start expanding horizons again right now, it seems like we could do it forever, but we are certainly open to the fact that things change as we get older, but at least until now. We are as comfortable living this way as we are not, and it also gives us the freedom to travel and explore, so why not do it? That's why most days we're in the band instead of here because we have the ability to do it now, we'd be crazy not to.