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Lessons
Why Van Life
24:42 2Understanding What You Want
03:02 3Breaking Down Your Budget
22:39 4Determining the Overall Best Layout for your Needs
03:52 5Bed Type
11:50 6Van Details: Bathroom or No?
07:37 7Van Details: Temperature Regulation
12:31 8Van Details: Power Management
14:05Van Details: Storage
07:02 10Van Details: Cooking
03:07 11How To Actually Live In Your Van
02:30 12Van Life: Where to Sleep
07:17 13Quin’s Sprinter Van Tour
37:11 14Quin’s Box Van Tour
24:55 15Van Tours: Keon’s Van
05:34 16Van Tours: Shaiden’s Van
11:19 17Van Tours: Brandon's Van
01:05 18Quin’s Van Life Tips
17:26 19Workshop Recap
00:46Lesson Info
Bed Type
(slow acoustic music) So I would say the first building block of designing your van is figuring out what type of bed you want. The bed takes up generally the most space in the van and it's also the most important. You want a comfortable place to sleep. So there's so many different types of beds but the main ones are a fixed bed which I have in my sprinter. So the pros of having a fixed bed is that you have a lot of storage space underneath. That's always gonna be there. You can count on that. You can put gear. So if you have large gear items like a bike or something like that, a fixed bed is almost necessary to be able to fit that in. And another big pro is that the bed is always there. It's always made and ready to go. A con is that it takes up a lot of volume in the van and it's not convertible. Like you can't convert it to have a more open layout to take photos and to show more of that open, airy space. I'd say the second most common bed type is the dinette setup that I have right...
here where you have a big, nice open workspace. And that workspace also converts into the bed. So you put some sort of wood bridge right here and you can rearrange the cushions into a bed. You throw the sheet on so it does require quite a bit of a conversion process, but the main pro to this is it looks really good in photos, and you have that ability at any time to have your living space. Basically it enables you to house more people, more people can sit here and socialize. It has a more roomy place to work. And then at any point you can potentially convert that and have a nice big bed. So the biggest con to this setup here is you can't just jump into the bed or jump on the computer. It's either or. Right now I could jump in there and work on my computer. But if you know, night comes, I have to spend the time to convert it into a bed before I can actually go to sleep. And then vice versa in the morning. If I want to get on the computer, I have to take it all apart, rearrange it, and then I can jump on the computer. And that just that conversion process takes maybe five, 10 minutes. It's really not that much time but over time it just gets, it gets tedious. If there's multiple people in the van you can't have one person on the bed and one person working. It's either or so you're either both working or both in the bed. So another bed setup is the bed lift system. So with the bed lift system, you're able to basically have your bed always made, always ready to go, but stored all the way up on the ceiling. So you can raise and lower it at the push of a button. You can raise it all the way up to the ceiling and have livable space underneath, and then when you want to go to bed, you just hit that button and it comes down and you jump into bed. So this enables you to have space, a lot of living space underneath, bed ready to go, and it's just really cool. It's really fun to do. It's satisfying and it's a good use of space. Some of the cons are that it's pretty expensive. The chains tend to rattle around a lot so it's loud when you're driving and there are a decent amount of issues with these. If the chain gets caught, you can really mess it up. Honestly, that's what I did with this one here. Yeah. So with the bed lift, you also have to factor in when it's raised all the way to the ceiling it's gonna drop the ceiling height down by at least six inches, maybe eight inches. And then you got the Murphy bed set up where it hugs the wall instead of the ceiling and with the Murphy bed usually it's on some sort of hinge and it just, you know, folds down from the wall and it connects with some sort of support in the lower section of the van. So the pros of the Murphy bed is that it's a really cool feature where it looks like a wall then all of a sudden it's a bed. So it's kind of the shock factor of when it pulls out of the wall. A con is that generally Murphy beds are pretty small, pretty narrow in a van. So you have to deal with maybe a four foot wide bed instead of a five foot wide bed. But yeah, it's a little bit more of a obscure option, more unique. So that's cool. So those are the main bed layouts, hopefully that helped you visualize your layout a little bit more. And so let's go into more of the nitty gritty. Okay. So this is the dinette setup. It's the workspace, it's the dining space, it's the social space, but when I convert it to a bed, the first step is to pull out this table and get this out of the way. And I have another mount for the table right here. Honestly, I leave this table here most of the time, even when it's in the bench mode, and then up here in the storage area, this is the wood piece that fills in the middle section that completes the bed. So I have a little wood lip that it sits on and then flip it out just like that. And then these are rearranged to make the bed. All right, so that's the beginnings of the bed. I have all of my bedding under here, pillows, bedding, mattress, topper. Okay. All right. So this mattress topper fills in the cracks between all of the different panels. With this, I don't feel any cracks when I'm sleeping on the bed. Threw the sheet on. Okay, I got the wrong corner. Okay. All right. So that's the bed. It only took about five minutes, but it is pretty annoying and not ideal to do multiple times a day. So although it looks really good in photos, I'm not a huge fan. And in all reality, when I'm driving around the country in this thing, I keep it in bed mode. And the nice thing about bed mode also is that this it enables a little bit more storage down here so when I have friends jump in they just throw their suitcases under there and we're good to go. All right, guys, we're hanging out at the beach, got my van my buddy Keon's van and Shaiden's van. So I wanted to highlight the difference in bed types in each of these vans. So let's, let's go check 'em out. All right. So Shaiden's van, right now, it almost looks like a bunk bed set up. Cause you can actually convert this one, and then you have a bed up here as well but this is on a bed lift system. So on your average day, when you're just living in here if it's the daytime, if you're not sleeping, this actually goes all the way up to the ceiling so that you have all this livable space underneath. All right, so this is Keon setup. This is just a standard dinette workstation that converts into a bed. So at any point you can either be working, you can be eating, using this space as you see it, or you rearrange these, you put the support in here and you have the bed. It's kind of either or on that. And this is my setup. This is just the standard fixed bed set up. It's the best for having all of this storage under here. So I can throw one wheels, climbing, gear, surfboard, all this storage is very handy, and that enables me to basically keep all of the above area very big and open. So when you stand in my van I don't have any overhead storage. It feels a lot bigger.