Scientist & Engineer Show How to Build Out a Van on a $8000 budget - CAMPER VAN FULL TOUR

Hi, I'm Patrick with the New Jersey Outdoor Adventures YouTube Channel here at Asipink Wildlife Management Area and I met up with Becky and Austin from Lifepophasis and about two months ago we featured their mid-truck project. way, well, today they are back on the canal. and they have finished the truck and will give us a

tour

inside and out. Hello and welcome back to New Jersey Outdoor Adventures. It's good to be back, thanks for having us, so we'd like to

show

you our completed van today. As Patrick mentioned, we had

show

n intermediate construction about 50 percent of the way through the project in a previous video featuring outdoor adventures in New Jersey and now we're excited to show you what we've done to finish it off as we go.

We'll give you some details on the decisions we made, many of which were

budget

oriented, so I'd like to mention that we were working with a

build

budget

of 8,000 which doesn't include the cost of the van itself, so first you'll see when we come in, we have a mat right here, which is very useful nowadays, where we are is a little bit sandy and we covered this floor with a wood plank look vinyl floor. We have this kind of border here that helps us. You know, finish it off but also protect the most worn area and then you can see that here this is our kitchen.

We have all of these cabinet faces actually secondhand from the Habitat for Humanity restoration. We put these handles here. We just got here from Home Depot and we used all the space we could, so these two sink drawers open up so we can put some extra storage in there, the sink above, this was actually another quote. Find, we write this down. for five dollars at a garage sale. We are very happy with it. I wanted a really big sink that was pretty deep so that we wouldn't have any problems, you know, washing dishes or doing anything to fill a pot with water.

You'll notice that we have a very small faucet right here and the reason is because we have a foot pump system, so if you look down, we have a foot pump which is a double action galley foot pump, which means that On the downstroke and upstroke it pumps water and comes out through this little tap. It is actually a drinking water faucet that helps you maintain pressure. If it were a larger faucet, we'd have a little more trouble with the water pressure, so we have four down here. seven gallon containers and we actually have an extra fifth container in the garage, giving us, if I'm doing my math right, 35 gallons total.

Now our pumps down here and the hoses we used were three-quarter inch food grade nylon. For draining, they actually sell a specific piece that fits into a standard drain faucet, but is designed to fit into a gray water container like the ones we have here. We had to modify it a little to get it. fit exactly right, but they gave us a pretty good foundation to work from to start. As you can see three of these containers are for fresh drinking water and they will be changed when they run out and then this one in the back that has the black tube that goes to it is our gray water container that will be emptied every time we change to a new one. fresh water container as they have the same capacity, so let's look at the cabin for a moment.

Not much has changed since our last video. I still have a pretty standard cockpit setup. A little extra information I added. I also added a Bluetooth receiver for those long trips. It's good to have some songs. We have also added a trash bin and recycling bin in the front. Here they are empty. now, i connected a standard 120 volt household outlet to our inverter and placed it on this bulkhead wall on this side, i added a class k fire extinguisher, since it will be near our kitchen, a type k is designed for house fires, specifically grease fires, and I think it'll work pretty well on a diesel fire too, so we kept it up front here.

This bulkhead came with the truck we made. It made the front look good, but it has a steel frame and I decided to take advantage of that so I actually put some neodymium magnets along this length and that's actually our security system to keep this door closed and also we added a brush here for a door brush just to keep it sealed and keep the The cold space in the cabin is separate from the warm space in the living room so here we have a uh I built a frame with just a sheet of plywood three-quarter inch, which is the same plywood I used to

build

the rest of these cabinet boxes to turn this door into a sliding door, just adds a nice little bit of finish.

We have some molding on the top and then a nice strip of wood on the end so it doesn't show. the plywood layers now in that configuration. We made a pretty typical looking backsplash, but there's a distinction here, we didn't use tile grout, standard tile grout, the reason is that tile grout is rigid, so if the truck when the truck moves , it flexes and if it flexes normal grout would crack so it's actually silicone caulk and it's a lot harder to make than standard grout but the results will be something that's going to be long lasting and something that we can use on In this type of application we liked that the color accentuates everything else, so this countertop looks like concrete, but is actually laminate.

We got it from ikea and it kind of flows with the stainless steel look we have with the sink as well as our Ramble wood stove, the Ramble wood is great because it is propane and connects to our propane system. It has a spark that runs on our electrical system, so it's plugged in there. We like this because it is a two burner setup that we can cook on. pasta and a main dish at the same time, but it doesn't take up all the counter space either. The upper cabinets here give us a lot of storage space, so let me give you a look inside this one we're using. like our medicine cabinet with vitamins and our medications and things like that, here we have some toiletries, some quick dry microfiber towels and then personally my favorite part is the snack area so this is where we'll keep all of our easy type of grab-and-go foods, this is like our breakfast, oatmeal type section with toppings, you know, coffee and tea, and then other grab-and-go snacks.

What I love about these is that they open flush and Austin can tell you how they stay open. So originally we thought we were going to have standard hinges on there and keep this open as long as we went in there, but I think the best 20 or so we spent were these gas struts that hold the cabinet open so you can actually get in there with two hands definitely It's worth it and the installation wasn't that difficult, just one hinge up here and one down here. We've also come up with a couple different ways to hold fruits and vegetables because as you saw, we're working with a mini fridge that I can show you again a little later, so we got this container from ikea.

In fact, let's mention that all these containers are from IKEA, the white plastic ones too and we have a fruit hammock that is also from IKEA and the idea was to free up space on the counter instead of having a fruit bowl that could slide or use the inside of cabinets for perishable products. We could keep them out, they also act as decorative elements, um, but we can see. what we have and make sure we use it. One of my other types of decor pieces was our countertop herb garden, so we have basil and parsley here and I'm also a big fan of succulents, so we have a couple of succulents here.

I plan to add more mini succulents that I have to the rest of the van as decorative pieces here, this is where we keep our knives, our utensils, any of our types of spatulas and serving spoons. It is very strong, I think it can transport. 15 pounds per square inch, so we don't have to worry about anything coming off because it's magnetic, so everything fits together when we drive, there's no shifting, things don't go from left to right, we don't have to worry. now they're falling down here, let me show you, actually, you can see this is not very easy for me to open, I actually have to press this tab, this is a childproof lock that we're using to make sure that when we're driving, the doors don't open on us um and then the drawers you know come out and everything in here spills out, so this is our kitchen, kind of a cabinet for kitchen utensils and these again are ikea drawers, in We actually buy them second hand. and we were able to fit all of our pots and pans, our rice cooker, our blender, our electric kettle, toaster, and actually the only two plates bowls that we have here on top of our microwave, so we decided to bring a microwave because we thought.

It was one of the easiest ways for us to reheat food and if we have abundant electrical power from our solar system, we don't have to pay to recharge our propane to reheat something on the stove, for example, so we like to prepare meals. We usually make a meal for four and then eat two servings and save two servings so that works well with our lifestyle so down here we have exactly what the size is something in the other 2.7 feet cubic, 2.7 cubic feet, so it's a nice big dorm refrigerator again, a kid lock here, which is a great way to keep all of this stuff safe.

Things change during travel. Everyone has a tray of old ketchup and soy sauce packets somewhere in their refrigerator, so that's a good lesson in how things change. The refrigerator in transit is empty right now, we haven't been living here long so we haven't had time to stock it and there is a small freezer compartment right there, why did you put this here? Don't know. because they were in the refrigerator it's like a pound because the soy sauce we have is like a quart, it's too big for this bridge, okay, anyway, we're going to clean that up again later, when it falls off again, okay, so now One thing I wanted to consider with this refrigerator is that it's going to be one of our biggest long-term power draws in this system, so if we have a series of cloudy days and we don't have a lot of power.

In our electrical system I wanted to have the ability to turn this refrigerator off at will and I did it with a secret rocker switch down here, it's a little hard to see but if I turn it off it disconnects the refrigerator from the rest of the electricity. system and we could actually use it as a refrigerator. You could put an ice pack in there and keep it running that way if for some reason we don't have the electrical power we need. One more thing I want to mention about the cooler before we continue, you can see this strap taken out, we have it tied around the top and across the bottom.

We also built a wooden frame on the back that holds the metal piece above or rather below the compressor so the refrigerator can't move at all, so when we are in transit it can only slide about an inch this way , but it can't tip over and can't go out to the living room and with the child lock combination. and that we don't have any problems with our refrigerator flying or opening while we move. I think the next thing we should probably talk about is the siding, so if you look around here you'll see that we have a white boat. back on the walls and the ceiling um we also covered the doors with that, so it was quite a project um putting all that in, but it was definitely worth it in terms of the aesthetic that we were going for um we wanted to keep everything nice white, bright, bright and airy so we installed the white ship lab it was pre-primed and it's called nickel breakaway board so I think that's because there's about an eighth of an inch of space in there that you can fit a nickel and They themselves keep that consistent spacing when you put them down, so one more thing about the overlap.

This ended up taking a lot of extra time, but I think the result was really worth it. I countersunk each of these screw holes and pre-drilled them. Each hole saved us a lot of time putting it in and the fasteners we used to hold it to the wall were self-tapping drywall screws that were designed to be used in aluminum studs. The frame of the truck was thin enough that we could get those screws through it, so I went up on the roof and one of the things I'm most proud of on this truck isthe lighting system.

We have these dimmable, adjustable LED lights that actually work with our The remote is controlled by a remote control. Here there are 10 of them on the roof and when they are all together they draw about 45 or 50 watts, so we have enough battery to run, but I can adjust. the brightness here and you know, from time to time also up there we have a 32 foot strip of color changing LED lights that just gives us a little bit of accent lighting, so whatever color we feel like and behind here we can really Well, adjust the lighting in the bedroom area separately with a rocker switch that is hidden behind this cabinet.

We don't have a remote, but we just have this light switch that we can turn on and off to separate those areas. install a curtain that is removable, um, just with snaps that can close off this area if someone wants to sleep and someone else wants to use the living space, so this is probably the best deal we got on this build of our 25 warehouse windows scrap each one, they finished. They turned out beautiful after we refinished them, that collar ended up fitting perfectly with the thickness of the wall, the insulation and the wall board we used behind the backsplash, now they're not quite finished, the only thing you'll be able to do.

Note that they are missing is that we don't have curtains yet and we definitely want curtains there to block out the light and on top of that I'm not going to do that, I'm actually going to tint those windows down to about five percent light transmission, which will make be a little bit harder to see something I'd like to show you, it's actually our insulation, we cover this in detail in our mid 50 build video which you can find a link to, but here we didn't finish putting the backing on this particular cabinet , you can see that this silver is polyisocyanurate insulation. it's a foam board and then we cover all of our potential thermal bridges, which are the exposed metal columns that are standard on a cargo van, with these are recycled thermal bags that you actually get when you order whole foods online, but it's the same material as reflectix, so that was something we did to save a little money.

Another thing you can see here is that we also did spray foam insulation, which is this kind of off-white color to fill in any cracks between the insulation that we did in 360 degrees. the van on the walls now on the roof and on the floor we made a one and a half inch extruded polystyrene called xps it's the pink foam board uh to create the subfloor we made some framing around the outside and then we put up plywood at the top on the ceiling there are intersecting struts and you can see that again in kind of a mid build video where we fill the gaps between those struts with the foam board now under the cabinets here you can see what we installed Also there is some under cabinet lighting this is operated with this black switch here and it just gives you more light which as you know is blocked by having these upper cabinets in this area so I think one thing I think with too much It is often neglected in the truck building community.

Even sometimes in professional constructions, the CO2 or CO alarm and smoke detectors and a propane detector if you have the corresponding system, this is just a standard lithium battery smoke detector, you know, it is definitely worth it have 20 dollars on Amazon, you wouldn't sleep. In a room this size without a smoke detector, why would you sleep in a van without one? We also have our maximum family which was actually an open box deal on Amazon so we got it at a discount just because the box was damaged. it has multiple speeds and it's actually very quiet even on its highest setting so it's actually quite comfortable to sleep in, it's not bothersome to sleep in there and the way we set it up is we open the windows in the back, it sucks in air through the van and it exhausts it here so it's like having two separate fans blowing on you when you're there which is great in the summer it also works in the rain which is really nice so this max air fan in particular it has a rain cover, ours.

It's manual, so you'll notice there's just a knob we have to turn to open and close here, rather than having a remote sensor, but what we really learned through research is that remote sensors can also be a bit . sensitive and at the slightest mention of dew or fog, they will shut down and you will not be able to use your fan, which is why we prefer to have the manual option and it saves a little money. Now here you can see we have our couch, a lot of people get custom upholstery and things like that and as we mentioned before this was a budget van so we wanted to do it as much as we could but we understand our own limitations one of those limitations is upholstery is not our forte, so what we decided to do was buy these cushions, which are a five-inch high-density foam cushion, and then buy pre-made elastic covers for them, this one we cut to size so that fits our bank and we can show it. in just a second and then the backrest is two separate three inch pieces of high density foam that I cut separately on purpose because we can put one here to have a

full

length backrest, if the door is open we can put it this way side so you have a sort of chase lounge feel.

The cool thing about this is that there's actually storage, so let me show you you pick this up, there's storage inside, but you can put a lot of different things in here, so Here's something that ended up being quite a bit of

engineer

ing and turned out really cool. I wanted a table that could slide out from here so I bought some caster wheels that actually support this wooden board on the top and bottom. This is a six. A piece of edge-glued pine is about a foot long and is three-quarters of an inch thick, making it a good size for a table.

It will get here. It has about 48 inches of usable space, but you'll notice it's a bit. floppy disk, so to solve that problem I put a sliding drawer next to the refrigerator, so now we have a nice sturdy table that you could use as a desk or we can use for food. I also put magnetic catches on the back of this and you I can see them underneath here that hold the drawer in place when we move. This is our direct access to the garage and this upper cabinet here we have it set up and this upper cabinet is actually going to be food storage.

I have another one of these kid locks here because it will eventually have shelves with cans in it, so we didn't want anything heavy to push the door open, but yeah, just general food storage, a couple of snacks and stuff in there. Down here there is a drawer for cutlery and kitchen utensils and I made this drawer to measure. I just bought some small drawer slides, 22 inch droid slides, so it's actually a lot of area, it's about four and a half five inches deep by about 20 22 inches. long, so it's a good amount of space and it was actually a bug that became a feature.

I built it about an eighth of an inch too narrow, so it's very sticky, but that means it just doesn't open on its own when we're on it. drive, so that ended up being a plus and down here we're going to use this as our utility closet itself, a little bit of clothing storage, we could keep a laundry basket in there and I mounted some of the controls for our electrical system here this is the on off switch for the inverter and then i bought a display that shows the state of charge and charge rate of our electrical system so it shows the battery voltage and if the battery is charging or discharging and how many amps is charging or discharging, it gives me a good idea of ​​what the solar panels are doing, what the batteries are doing and if we have enough electricity to be able to microwave dinner or if we have to use propane, so it's helpful to have everything right .

Down here is also where we have our toilet, so what we would do to access it is basically open the hatch, grab the toilet and take it to the living room area, use it, and then bring it back to where we're going. have a strap system to hold it in there obviously we don't want it to move around in the garage how does this toilet work uh is it's a chemical cassette toilet so it's made by Dometic it has a five gallon capacity the good thing about There's nothing on this one moment. There is a fill line so you know when you need to empty it.

To empty it, you simply separate these two sections from each other and remove the white piece. The gray piece on the bottom has a tube that can be oriented in any way to be dumped into a dump station to take in liquids and solids. You can use RV toilet tank chemicals in there to keep the smell down and you empty it. as soon as it fills up or every five days or so, whichever comes first and we're going to try not to use it too much to be honest, it's kind of a backup, but we plan to use the public toilets as much as we can. or nature, if that's a possibility for us, so let's move on to bed.

We have a

full

size mattress here. You can see it is oriented lengthwise, which is why a lot of people we see orient their mattresses side to side in the van like we do. We are both quite tall, five nine and five ten, so it wasn't enough length for us to lie down comfortably, what we decided to do was use this space to have a bed along it instead of maybe taking a shower or something. . Inside, what we like about this is that there's a little bit of space that you can see right here on either side of the bed, so there's a little bit of storage down there along with little storage bins for each one of us.

Next to the bed you will see that we have this is a co detector. Aside from our smoke detector, we have a little bit closer to the sleeping area and there is also a USB fan here that can be turned in any direction we have. it was Velcroed to the bottom of our upper cabinets here so in these cabinets this is where we keep our clothes so this is my side this is Austin's side and you can see we're using packing cubes here to keeping everything nice and organized, so there's a cube for shirts and a cube for pants, underwear, socks and things like that, it helps us fit in more in this area, but also know exactly where things are at all times without having to to throw everything down, towards the end, there.

We'll see that we have book storage, it's what I call a little book nook, um, and it's next to Austin's bed, uh, which you can tell is from Austin because there's upper cabinets, there's little black guards. underneath to prevent him from hitting his head, but I am very accident prone and would get a concussion if I slept under that cabinet, so we put them there for his safety, but I decided I would have the open side of the bed. Yes, a quick note on the electrical system. This is the receiver for the remote control of these ceiling lights and then we have the switch that was mentioned earlier that turns the bedroom lights on and off and actually at the end of the bed here we have an outlet that I can show you.

The reason we put it here is because we want it to be accessible from the bed or the couch. It's essentially centrally located and it's one of, I think, four outlets that we have. There is one there. There is one in the kitchen for appliances. one inside the cab of the truck, I actually like it, there are five and then at the end of each side of the bed we have a USB outlet on Austin's side of the bed with two USB ports on my side of the bed , it's a little lower. Behind that organizer there is also a DC plug as well as a cigarette lighter outlet with two USBs.

The reason we decided to do it is because we have a heated blanket that is 12 volts and uses a DC plug and we wanted to use that. to be more efficient with our electricity instead of having to reverse it so we can use a 120 volt blanket and under our mattress we have this flooring that we put on the plywood platform of the bed, this is actually a leftover flooring that we had From our parents' Home Improvement Project, instead of my in-laws' and Austin's parents' home improvement project, we were able to use this flooring to cover the platform bed.

We decided to do it because we wanted it to be a good surface for the mattress and we knew it would have visible strips on each side and just to make it aesthetically consistent with the rest of the design. One more thing about the mattress I wanted to mention is that we chose a five-inch mattress, but you'll notice that it's much longer than five inches. That's because five-inch mattressesthey're not very comfortable so we decided that even though we have a relatively high platform bed, I think it's a 38 inch platform bed which leaves us about 34 to 35 inches above the platform, we decided to sacrifice three inches of this. room for a very thick mattress and that makes it much more comfortable to sleep here, so we recommend doing it even if you're going to lose a little bit of headroom because we're really just spending our time, you know, horizontal on the bed.

Now Austin will take you around the back and show you the garage. Well, come on, in the back of the truck, right here you can see the connection points for the slip lock, according to what we found, the weak point for someone trying to do it. Getting into the Sprinter van is actually these rear doors. You can put a lever here and open the rear latch and bottom latch quite easily for this lock to reinforce it, but the nice thing about this is that you don't have to screw it in. metal, it actually uses existing access or existing mounting points and this is our rear view camera that actually connects to a screen that is also a forward facing dash camera in the cabin.

This is actually a security camera and it detects motion and records it. We will detect motion and we will detect an impact and save a video. In any of those conditions, let's go in, so I mounted a class c to b and c fire extinguisher which is for automotive and electrical fires right next to our electrical system in case we have any problems here now. our electrical system, the base is generally the same as what you saw in the last video. We have a solar charge controller here, a 12 or 15 amp battery charger that plugs into a regular 120 volt outlet, here's the plug for that.

That would be fast enough to fully charge this battery bank in about eight to ten hours or overnight while camping. Here is our CC distribution. There's a bit of a cable clutter right now, but I actually labeled all the different places where. down here is our negative DC bar and this is our 2000 watt monster inverter, big enough to run a microwave, the DC to DC battery charger that uses the vehicle's alternator to charge the battery, so there are three different ways to charge here and then have the AC and DC output inside this box, this box is sealed and has a computer fan that applies positive pressure on that side and a tube here where the gases are that could potentially build up hydrogen sulfide or potentially explosive hydrogen gas. or toxic substances build up inside due to charging the batteries, causing the fan to blow air out of this tube. and then I turned off the taillight, so one thing I didn't want to take note of is that this It's a nylon tube and nylon is the best material I could find that wouldn't react with the hydrogen sulfide, but over time.

This will eventually break down, same goes for this nylon strap, so they will eventually be replaceable parts, so here are the mounting points and rollers for the table, so I built them out of some nice oak pieces because I wanted them to be as rigid as possible, in fact, it was very nice to work with something other than pine, pine, two by four, so there are two nylon rollers on the bottom and one on the top and then there's another truck here with the same thing and that allows you to uh, I got a nice smooth rolling action on the table.

I reused the cabin lights that were already on the truck, kind of hard to see from your angle, but wired into this switch here, so why do you know why buy something new when you can? use something you already have, so it is definitely a bad idea to store a propane cylinder in an enclosed vehicle, even if the propane cylinder is turned off you may still experience pressure changes or temperature changes that will vent the propane tank. So I built a box, a sealed box with a vent coming out the bottom of the truck to hold my propane tank.

I've used some buckles and here weather stripping around this lid so if that propane tank vents, it'll just vent. the bottom of the truck without causing damage, uh, the best I could find because I found some kind of marine guide to having a propane tank and a boat and they said you should use a three-quarter inch pipe, uh, at least to vent, so that's what I ended up using from that propane box. I ran these uh, the line around my table and here to my propane distribution, so the high pressure line coming from the tank goes to this uh, this propane connector. which actually has a nice little valve, kind of a dummy valve or a dummy gauge that basically shows whether or not there's propane pressure, it has a green, yellow, and red arc, but it doesn't have any real numbers, although it's kind of useful and it glows . in the dark, which is nice on this side, the valve that's closed right now is a tube that's meant to mimic the connector on those one-pound mini green camping propane bottles and that's designed to connect to our Mr Buddy heater.

I wouldn't recommend using it in an enclosed space without a carbon monoxide detector and a propane detector in case of a leak. Now on the other side, I ran it through a regulator that reduces the pressure to about half a psi and that's the amount. of pressure you need for a home stove you can use a regular stove, most of them come with some type of adapter that allows you to convert to use propane instead of natural gas that you would get in a house, so that's what silver hose it runs here that reaches the propane stove in the kitchen.

Thanks for coming back to the channel to show us your completed project, what's next for you, so our plan is to leave in a week and we want to see all the national parks in the lower 48 states of the United States, we will be traveling for about 10 months and we hope stopping along the way to visit and see family and friends in the lower 48 states and really have the opportunity to spend time in beautiful natural places. I personally want to work on my photography and really just take some time off and relax. Yes, it will be nice to get away from it all for a moment.

In your build, you had a very strict budget that you were trying for. to fit in, is there an upcoming budget for similar travel plans? Because I know that's what you specialize in. Yeah, we have the uh, we definitely have the trip itself budgeted in detail month by month. Yes, as well as Patrick mentioned, that's something like that. My thing, I'm a money coach and I'm very interested in finances, money and how to use your money to create a free lifestyle, so one of our goals with building the van was to basically build an affordable home . um, but another thing was making it so that we could travel around the United States on a shoestring budget, so we estimated that our budget would be about two thousand three hundred dollars a month, at most, for two people to travel in the van. and that includes fun things, so if for some reason we want to save more money in a given month, we can't go out for drinks or eat at a restaurant and somehow reduce the budget that way, but we save everything. our money for this project ahead of time, so we were actually planning on building a tiny house this year in 2020, it threw us a curveball, so we took the money we saved for that tiny house and put some of it into the van. build and then we're also going to allocate some of it to the trip.

Now, is there any advice you can give our viewers about some of the obstacles you may have had to overcome to build a truck like this? Well, something that really got me. The build of the van was done in three stages, so psychologically it was the first 10 percent, the second 80 percent and then the last 10 percent, both of which felt like even thirds, we were a month into this build and if someone didn't know if someone just walked up and looked at the van, they would have thought, Hey, when are you going to start this even though we had done a lot of prep work?

But the key is really in the prep work and setting everything up so that you have a solid platform. to build on the little details, build a solid base so I can screw my cabinets to that, so I can have a nice backsplash on those cabinets, everything builds on top of everything else, but on its own, and then on the other end , we are. I've been working on this truck, what I would say is it's almost finished for about four or five weeks. Now it hasn't been substantially different from this, but all that little detailed work adds up and makes a big difference, so keep going because that's the hardest thing. part, it starts to drag on, I bet your budget is a big deal, I see a lot of builds on Facebook marketplace that are half done or almost finished, but they ran out of money or changed jobs, so I guess they'll really stick to it thereto.

Your budget is important because you don't want to go overboard and then you just can't finish it, yeah, and I think it's hard to know where you are with your budget and how it relates to your build if you don't keep track of what you're spending, so it may sound tedious, you know? If you're thinking I have to track every dollar I spend, but what we found really helpful was keeping track of how far we were with the tasks we knew we needed to accomplish. the build of the van and how far we were on our budget, so if we were 50 done with the tasks and 50 on the budget, which is where we were in the last video we filmed with you, then we were good, we were on the way right, but yes We were 80 under our budget when we were only 50 done with a build that would be worrying unless we had pre-purchased many of our items, so as we mentioned, we had a budget of 8,000 for this build and a from now on.

Like I said, we're a week away from leaving, we're under budget by a couple hundred dollars, so if we want to splurge and splurge and get something we maybe thought about, we'll get it later or maybe. We won't get it at all, that could be an option for us or we could just put that into our life of the van budget instead of the build budget of the van, but either way we were careful to make sure our budget matched our rhythm. and we weren't spending too much and as we went through this build, I pointed out what different things cost and how we saved money, but we found that it was important to make sure that we were focused on the overall build and what we wanted to get out of this where the little ones Details made the difference.

We could find ways to get them cheaper or secondhand instead of buying something new and that would help us reach the end of our vision instead of having it half finished. product that had exactly what we wanted and I know that off camera we talked a little bit about the timeline. I know you had a certain period of time that you're trying to finish. Can you tell us a little about that? Yes, well, a Gantt. chart is definitely your friend in this case, it sounds very nerdy to talk about it like that, but we were both project managers, he is an

engineer

, I am a

scientist

and I used to manage projects, now I like managing money, so how do we approach this? it was like you manage any project that has a schedule, has manpower needs and financial needs, and what I definitely recommend to someone who maybe hasn't managed projects before in a business sense is to double down on your schedule, so do your research and create a schedule and, our schedule, we said it would be 10 weeks for a full-time build, we finished in 16 weeks, so it wasn't double, but if we had planned for a 20-week build, we would have gotten ahead and felt Much happier probably at point 80 than at our point 80 when we were losing motivation because we were already four weeks over our build schedule. had expected um so that's something we knew we still made that mistake uh and then the same thing for budgeting is to do your research and see what other people make their budgets for, but I would say if you think you know what your budget will be.

Unless you've detailed what each of those costs are, you probably want to double the budget too, yeah, so you've probably never built a truck before, neither have I, yeah, so the fact of the matter is that I don't know how much. any of these things will take time. I had never built a cabinet before. I didn't know if that would take one day a week or several weeks, so you have to give yourself abudget, but or. a time, a schedule, a time budget, but being flexible and forgiving yourself when the siding takes two weeks or the insulation takes two weeks, when you thought we could knock it out in an afternoon, that will be the key to being successful in a van. build like this you mentioned full time construction so this wasn't something you did in the evenings and weekends this was a full time job our first four weeks were part time um and then we moved to full time full, so I mean, we're talking most days, we work eight hours and we don't take the weekends off eight hours, a 16 hour day was not unheard of, yes, yesterday, which was when we considered that the Construction was finished, except for minor details, um, we had spent about 1,25 hours between the two of us on the belt and that was in a 16-week period, so you know, it depends on what your goals are right and what your limitations are. , you're not necessarily going to make it.

You'll be able to do it as fast as we did, but you might be able to do it faster. I mean, I've seen people do builds in 30 days and it's only two people working full time, so skill level matters. Past experience matters, restrictions. what do you have in your work schedule, if you can work full time, whether you know we started to get cold, we started to snow, we were actually very lucky to have a very warm October, which was the center of our construction was in October. Well, but there are all kinds of things that are difficult to take into account and that is one of the reasons why I recommend doubling the construction schedule because it can be difficult to anticipate all the things that would affect the time that takes a long time.

People don't realize that there are about 300 human hours that go into converting a manufactured production

camper

van and that drives up the price, which is why they cost what they do. You were able to save a lot of money by building one yourself, but then your labor. it was obviously higher because this was new. This is the first time you had a lot of discoveries to make. How will our viewers be able to find you and follow your travels along the way so you can follow us on Instagram, which is our main platform? We're on the life hypothesis, it's a little hard for me to say, but here's the spelling and you can find links to all our other social media and our website there, but that's www.lifepothesis.com.

We also have a YouTube channel. that will be linked in the description and we will be happy to connect with you and so you can follow our travels. We still have a lot of documentation from the build of the truck that we hope to share. We have videotaped everything. parts of our process and wrote some blog posts about how we were able to save so much money on construction and do what we call budget luxury construction where we wanted it to look luxurious but do it on a smaller budget. Well, thank you all for taking the time again to give our viewers a

tour

of your absolutely beautiful and stunning

camper

van conversion.

This is Patrick with the New Jersey Outdoor Adventures YouTube Channel. I hope you like this video, comment, subscribe, share, we love it, we'll see. soon thank you thank you goodbye