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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Hello friends!

This episode, we cover a few crucial topics for van builds.

• Eberspächer heater set-up and mounting
• Electrical panel and hookups to solar
• Hot water tank teardown and mod for 24 V usage

We’ve chosen not to go too deep into these topics on YouTube as there are hundreds of other, more experienced builders with awesome videos. However, we do have more details and schematics for the hot water tank modification here.

In addition, we talk a bit about where our name came from, using IKEA furniture to complete our build, and dealing with leaks in our box.

We failed to include how we modded our fridge for electrical use, but you can read about it here in the blog.

Thank you for your support!

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We had our doubts.

Our friends had their doubts. The internet also had doubts.

But it worked! We managed to build a full set of drawers for our custom storage area with only a few simple tools and no table saw. In this post, I'll go over how we designed, prepped, built, and installed our drawers. The whole process took us 3-ish days.

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I’m going to take a van build detour to show you our entire YouTube process, from filming to video processing and post-publication social media alignment. This post is applicable to new videographers or those interested in the behind-the-scenes of YouTube videos. For veteran YouTubers, perhaps what we do might inspire you to try something different!

When we first had the idea of filming our camper build to document and share our process, we didn't realize there were so many things to consider. But it turns out that Moritz and I each enjoy different parts of the process and we've had a lot of fun learning together. Being able to share our story in multiple formats has also been extremely rewarding.

If you are new to all of this, don't let these tasks dissuade you! The best part is they can be broken down into bite-sized pieces. You'll begin to get the hang of making videos after editing around 45 minutes of footage.

This post is MASSIVE, so I'm going to start with a Table of Contents, which doubles as a checklist for every video.

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HELLO LOVELY PEOPLE! Can you believe this is our FIFTH video?! We can’t! 😄

We’ve come so far since Day 1 of our journey. In this video, we will show you:

• How we installed our pine panel walls
• How we framed our dinette
• Our travel route for next year (pending COVID-19 restrictions)

To maximize the space in the box, we decided to FIRST mount the pine panels to plywood strapping that would situate between our box’s frames. Then, we would attach the pine panels at a few points to the frame itself. An alternative would be to attach strapping over the metal frame, then attach the pine panels on top of that. But, that would’ve reduced our box width by 4 inches.

We used pine panels purchased from Home Depot, “Wallscapes 5/16-inch x 4-inch - 8 Feet Pine Knotty VJT T&G.” We do not recommend similar ones from Lowes—they were lower in price, but much shoddier in quality. Our layout is slowly coming to shape with the dinette framed. Moritz shows how he assembled the framing (sorry, no blueprint here, it’s all in his head). This was cheap 2x2x8 framing lumber from Lowes.

For more details, check out the following posts:

• It's All About the Right Framing
• Let's Talk Money (Part 2)

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In the first part, we went over building our own custom shower pan to fit exactly the way we needed it while saving significantly on cost. In this post, we'll go over:

• how to get hot water without using a propane heater,
• how to feed the water into the shower,
• how to measure our water consumption, and;
• a quick recap of how May's financials went!

We've modified a 10 L water heater to run directly on our battery. This saves losses we'd otherwise have from our inverter and it also keeps the size of our inverter low.

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