If you thought that van life would free up your time, you thought wrong.

I have a vivid memory of standing in my pre-van life kitchen, crying over chopped onions, and saying to my partner, “When we move into the van, I’m gonna have so much time to do X, Y, and Z!”

I imagined the sound of my Slack notifications becoming singsong-y forest birds. I hoped that my stress would dissolve away with my escape from urban life. I expected that every day, I would look up from a deeply intuitive session of journaling and think, “Wow, it’s only 7 AM? I’ve got so much time!”

Pft, as if.

After spending a whole day doing who-knows-what near Powell River on the Sunshine Coast, we arrived late at our campsite yet again. This was a particularly sketchy spot — a skinny pullout on the side of a forest service road that drops into the abyss (of shrubs, but it was too dark to tell).

Along with our poor time management, I was regularly wondering, “Am I doing enough?” because my tangible output during van life had plummeted.

In an effort to objectively study my time use, but mostly to make myself feel better, I tracked every minute of every day for a week. Let the bean counting begin.

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Explore. My 2021 Word of the Year.

In the year of lockdowns, social distancing, Zoom dates…I landed on this word, of all words, to guide my purpose for the year. To me, the word explore embodied giving myself permission to fail, leaning into resistance, and ultimately, following my heart to fully live out my values and commitments.

Despite the juxtaposition that was my word and the world, I had plenty of safe adventuring. I explored in the true sense of the word, beginning van life, traveling from Toronto to Vancouver Island, then down south into the Californian desert.

Despite the fear that others would judge me as being foolish, I shared my journey publicly and as authentically as possible (it’s hard to be on camera). I explored different mediums — most resilience-building of them all was YouTube.

Despite the fear of failure, I quit my job to focus on my coaching business. I explored various avenues for coaching, from business coaching, to embodiment coaching, to directing a life skills masterminds for students in BETA Camp. (This was a dream come true. When I was 9 years old, I drew my future self: a teacher with long, blonde curly hair.)

Through it all, I gave myself permission to just try. Each moment opened me up more and more, like a water lily upon seeing the sun every day. Each moment shifted my perspectives, helped me feel deeply, and taught me life lessons.

Of these lessons, I’m offering you my top three learnings. These learnings kicked me in the gut, left me frozen momentarily in time, and as I melted back into reality, I felt a completely new symbiosis with the questions, “Who am I? Why am I here?”

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After a bit of a summer break here on the blog, we are back with more content. This time, we want to show you how we are controlling the LED lights in our camper.

You will learn about:

• LED strip lights,
• Our self-designed controlling circuit board,
• How LED dimming works,
• The Homie convention; and
• Our home automation system

If you are interested in our electrical system and electronics, we have a video dedicated to electrics!

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We left you in the breeze on our shower, but rest asured, work has continued. We took a break from building as it was scorching hot. Despite our insulation, the box heats up beyond 36°C and we weren't keen on sweating in this hotbox.

With the days cooling down as of late, we finally tackled the shower stall.

This post, we'll show you how we:

• waterproofed the shower stall walls,
• installed them to the frame,
• installed the shower head, and
• how we setup the ceiling and lights.

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We are SO behind on our footage. With the hot hot summer heat, climbing, and work taking over our schedules the past few weeks, we’re so happy to be releasing this episode!

If you've read our blog post about How to Build Drawers, make sure you give this video a watch to see them in action.

We cover a seemingly simple project of building drawers in this video. Rectangles, square corners, easy peasy right? Well, not quite, but we got through it and we’re really happy with the result. This was done with only a circular saw, mitre saw, a couple of power drills, a load of patience, and lots of ice cream.

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As Canada enters its fourth month of COVID-19 lockdown, it only makes sense that sales of camper vans and RV trailers are trending.

Without flights, the only options are to travel by car, by bike, or by foot. (Or horses and mules.) It’s no surprise, then, that “camper” reached its peak popularity in the last 12 months of Google searches.

People are bored, and they want to escape. Building a camper sounds like the perfect weekend distraction with an escape pod as a reward.

But do they really know what goes into a camper conversion?

Well, we thought we did, but we were wrong.

If not for...

• us being in this together,
• keeping each other motivated,
• expecting failure at every turn,
• and planning for a lot of time to screw up and cover our mistakes,

we’d have thrown in the towel long ago.

Highlight reels on social media rarely appreciate the sacrifices that builders make, or the endless stream of challenges that builders face. I'm here to debunk some of the myths of building a camper van while proving that there are ways to overcome these obstacles.

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