Four things we’d change about our van conversion.
Don’t get me wrong, we love our van, but after living and traveling in it on and off for the last two years, we’ve come to think of a few things we’d change if we ever do a van build 2.0.
1. Lower the bed ever so slightly.
In order to fit two full-suspension mountain bikes beneath our bed, we needed to make it pretty high. Add to that a conventional-size mattress, and you’ve got a pretty tall bed. While we don’t feel claustrophobic and love the comfort of our mattress, the height of it means we can’t sit up fully when in bed, and while that’s a problem while we sleep, it means we have a huge part of our van that isn’t so comfy for those lounging around days when we may want to sit up and work, read a book or just hang out when the van is full of friends.
If we did a van build 2.0, we’d lower the bed by a few inches, either by getting a thinner mattress or finding a way to decrease the space needed for our bikes. A few inches can make a big difference!
Get the height of your bed right.
Laying in bed is cool, but sitting in bed opens up a lot more options.
2. Choose a window that opens for our sliding door.
When choosing the windows for our van, we decided on two universal small opening windows at the rear on both sides of our bed and a non-opening window for the sliding door. Our thinking behind this was that of all the places to break into our van, the sliding door window is a big weak spot, and adding a slider to it added opportunity for thieves and also for leaks.
In hindsight, there are plenty of other ways to break into a Transit, and if people wanted to, they would - end of story. By contrast, opening another ventilation point on the van while keeping the door closed would have come in handy on some of the hotter summer nights and while cooking in inclement weather.
More ventilation is always good!
A window in our sliding door would have been super handy.
3. Ditch the back door windows altogether.
Look, I’ll admit it: I wanted rear windows on the van because, in my head, we’d be able to sit and look out of them in bed and get those nice Pinterest shots that all the other van lifers get. In reality, we put in the windows before realizing how high our bed needed to be; the result is that they are completely covered with a 0% chance of giving us a nice Pinterest shot.
In fact, our rear windows are the opposite of helpful and actually let people see into our garage space, which happens to house some of our more expensive gear. As a result, we’ve now covered them from the inside, and they’re basically pointless. Lesson learned.
We could have saved £££ by not putting in pointless rear windows.
Ah well…
4. Add more depth to our bench seat.
By far, the most used area of our van is the bench seat, and on the whole, we love it! That being said, it isn’t as comfy as it could be because the van walls curve inward towards the roof, meaning you feel a little pushed out when sitting on it like you would a conventional sofa. To combat this, we needed to make the seating area deeper and potentially look at some clever back-rest/storage space options to give it a reclining feel.
Another thing we’d change about our bench seat in van build 2.0 is to make it into an optional sofa bed. We’ve already made some ad-hoc amendments that turn the bench seat into a larger square surface like a day bed, but it doesn’t really function as a proper bed. In van build 2.0, we’d think a bit more about how we can achieve this, allowing us to host our friends rather than having them camp out in tents nearby.
Really the bench seat is Fenn’s spot.
We just get use of it when he’s on the real bed.
As far as problems go, these are all pretty small, so we’re in no rush to fix any of them. But if you’re thinking about building out your own van for the first time, then maybe add them to your long list of things to think about.
