One of the best things about camper vans is how compact they are. You basically get a mini-house, plus the mechanical means to drive it around from place to place, all packed into a neat little cuboid that still fits into a normal-sized parking space. This is also one of the worst things about camper vans. There’s a lot of stuff to be squeezed into a very limited footprint, so figuring out exactly what bits and pieces are going to go in there and how it’s all going to fit together is a crucial early step in the van building journey.

Making a wishlist

To get a handle on this, I started by considering our use cases: what are we going to use the van for? Our number one use, at least for the near future, is taking the family (two adults, two kids) out into the wilds for long weekends to go climbing, hiking and mountain biking. We also want to be able to do one or two longer trips a year during the summer, for anywhere from a week up to about a month. Mostly, we’ll be overnighting in either dispersed camping spots in the woods or the desert, or at US Forest Service campgrounds (which typically don’t have electricity, and often don’t have water). We’ll often get to a place and stay there for a few nights while we explore the neighborhood, so we don’t expect to drive every day. Longer term, once the kids are no longer traveling with us, we like the idea of doing some much longer trips (multiple months), but all that is a ways off. One thing we’re not planning on doing though, is living in the van full time, especially over winter. #notreadyforvanlife!

The next thing to think about is the level of comfort and convenience to aim for. At one end of the spectrum, you can look at the camper van as just a large metal mobile tent. All you need is a place for a mattress and somewhere to stash all your camping gear. You expect to be cooking and eating outside, and you scoff at the notion of vans with indoor toilets or showers or plumbed hot water or any other such nonsense! At the other end of the spectrum, you have the gorgeous tiny houses on wheels that you see all over YouTube. Packing in full kitchens and bathrooms, with beautiful cabinetry, illuminated by soft indirect lighting, these vans have every convenience that you would find in your home, slimmed down and ingeniously fitted into the limited space.

I fall somewhere in the middle but more towards the latter than the former! I enjoy many of the comforts of home, and a camper van is a great opportunity to take some of those comforts out on the road and into the wilds. There are limits of course, but half the fun is seeing how far you can push them…

With all that in mind, the next step was to come up with a list of requirements. First, there are the “must haves”:

• Safe passenger seating for two teen-aged kids, in addition to two adults in the cab.

• A comfortable bed for Amy and me.

• Sleeping space for the kids, though the expectation is that they will be turfed out to sleep in a tent whenever convenient. It’s better for everyone...

• An indoor toilet in a private space. We’re often going to be far from any public infrastructure, and I want to be able to do my business like a civilized person!

• A kitchen with enough space and stovetop capacity to prepare and cook meals for four inside. Cooking outside is great, but the weather doesn’t always cooperate.

• A kitchen sink with running hot and cold water and a gray water tank, for washing dishes.

• Table and seating big enough for four people to sit and eat a meal at, or play board games at.

• A shower for rinsing off after mountain biking (could be outside in a pinch).

• Enough storage for gear, food, kitchen stuff, clothes, etc.

• Carrying capacity for at least four mountain bikes (doesn’t need to be inside).

• A heating system and adequate insulation to allow the van to be used in the spring or fall in the mountains.

• Sufficient off-grid reserves of electricity and water to allow us to function without needing to drive anywhere for 3-4 days at a time.

On top of that long list we can add a few “nice to haves”:

• A shaded awning area where we can sit outside without getting frazzled by the sun / drenched by the rain.

• A bed arrangement that minimizes daily set up / take down.

• No propane. We don’t like the idea of burning it inside the van for cooking, and it’s an additional fuel we’d rather not have to deal with.

• A separate small sink in the bathroom for washing hands and brushing teeth. ‘Cos I just know that the kitchen sink is inevitably going to be full of dirty dishes most of the time.

Finding more space

OK, if you know anything about camper vans, you’ll quickly recognize that the above list is a lot. Especially in a medium length cargo van like our non-extended 159” wheelbase ProMaster.

The fact is, the majority of camper van conversions all use a rather similar layout. The back half of the cargo space is dominated by a bed, with storage and electrical and plumbing systems underneath. In front of that you have a galley kitchen on one wall, and a bathroom (if present) on the opposite wall. Finally, up front, you have passenger seating (if present) and some kind of table. Often swivels are installed on the cab seats so that they can rotate to face the back. There are lots of variations of course, but probably 95% of camper vans share most of these elements.

This is the Winnebago Revel Sport 44N, for example:

While this layout clearly works for many people, there are a few things we didn’t like about it for us:

• There’s not a lot of storage, except under the bed, which can be awkward to access.

• Counter space is pretty limited.

• The table is too small, and is awkwardly positioned for the passenger side cab seat. And it can’t easily be made bigger without blocking the side door.

• Squeezing in sleeping for the kids is challenging.

One big factor here is simply the enormous fraction of available square footage occupied by the bed. So, what if we got rid of the bed?

There are some pretty neat designs that feature beds that either fold up against the wall, or that raise the bed up against the ceiling using a powered lift mechanism, but we ultimately decided to go with a fairly old camper van solution: adding an upstairs sleeping area by fitting a “pop top” to the roof.

I’ll talk more about the pop top in the future post, but suffice to say that moving the bed upstairs frees up a lot of space downstairs. So the next task was to figure out how to best make use of that for everything else we wanted to fit in.

Concrete inspiration

Around about the same time we were thinking about this, I stumbled across a YouTube video describing the bizarrely named, but wildly viral Concrete Oasis van. This is the kind of van that YouTube loves, full of beautiful finishing touches, and inhabited by beautiful people who seem to move in perpetual slow motion. But, looking past the glitz, it features a couple of really interesting layout ideas.

First, like us, the builders had decided to get rid of the bed in the back. In their design, the bed lives at the front, but stored out of the way, up against the ceiling most of the time using an electric bed lift. Our pop top achieves a similar goal of getting the bed out of the main space, but with different tradeoffs.

Second, the layout features a really nice and open lounge area at the front of the cargo area, with seating for about five people and a fairly decent table. The interesting bit here is that rather than trying to incorporate the cab seats into the living space, the cab is sealed off from the living space by a partition wall. At first glance this seems wasteful of space, but the upside is that it gives you a lot more flexibility to position seating and tables in a more user friendly fashion. In particular, the design incorporates a rear-facing bench seat that spans the width of the van.

Third, there’s a decent-sized bathroom at the back, featuring a composting toilet that slides away into the wall when not in use, a shower, and a sink. Even with all this, the bathroom only takes up about two-thirds of the width of the van, so there’s also room for a vertical “garage” space.

Finally, there’s an impressive amount of storage and counter space.

Sketching out the plan

The Concrete Oasis can keep its “desert inspired micro-concrete wall finishes”, and “handmade artisan wood-burnings” (cool though they are), but there are a bunch of other ideas here that are definitely worth stealing! So inspired, I fired up my CAD software (SketchUp), and sketched out the following:

There are a few significant differences from the Concrete Oasis layout:

• I kept the rear-facing bench seat from the Oasis layout, but instead of incorporating it into a “L” , I paired it with a forward-facing two person passenger seat, with a table in between. This is primarily for safety reasons, but also makes for a dining table that four people can use easily.

• There’s no solid partition wall between the lounge area and the cab. This allows the rear-facing bench seat to slide into the cab area by about 6-8”, with the cab seats pushed all the way forward. This goes some way towards making up for the fact that the Oasis is built on a Sprinter 170” wheelbase platform, which is about 20” longer than our ProMaster.

• There’s no need for a bed lift, since our main sleeping area is in the pop top.

There are many, many other details that I could talk about, but this has already been a very long post, so I’ll just finish by summarizing the main advantages of this layout.

• Decent-sized table that four people can sit around.

• Spacious (for a van) bathroom with hide-away toilet, a shower, and a separate sink.

• Tons of storage space.

• Great counter space - about 6’ long.

• Roomy sleeping for two adults upstairs. Optional sleeping for two kids downstairs in the lounge area (details TBD!).

Time to get to work building it!

So, you’ve got yourself an empty cargo van and are ready to start transforming it into a camping palace that will be the envy of the internet. You have this nagging feeling that what you should really be doing is sitting down and painstakingly creating a detailed plan for everything you intend to build. But.. you also want to get going on building something, just to prove to yourself (and your spouse) that you can do this. What to do?

Software engineers have long faced a similar dilemma when starting out on a new project. Sure, the right thing to is to sit down and carefully analyze your requirements and start generating lists of tasks of everything you’re going to need to do. But you also want to do something quick and easy that demonstrates some kind of progress.

For generations now, the standard resolution of this problem has been the “Hello, World” program. In other words, a simple program that does nothing more than display the phrase “Hello, World” in some way. Of course, this isn’t an especially useful thing in itself, but the process of creating this trivial behavior allows you to test that you have the basic tool chain in place necessary to build working code, while scratching that itch to see some kind of progress, while also not taking too much time.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the analogous step in camper van conversions is the time-honored and oft-ridiculed process of adding noise control mats to the inside of van builds.

Some background first. Being in a cargo van is like being inside a metal drum. As you drive along, every bump in the road causes the metal walls to reverberate unpleasantly. Cargo vans are not designed to be quiet! The solution that the van building community has generally arrived at is to attach little plastic self-adhesive noise-control mats to every wall panel inside the van. They look like this:

The theory is that adding a noise control mat to a panel adds weight (about 0.5 lb / sq ft of mat) to the panel, reducing its natural resonant frequency, and so making any vibrations less noticeable. Many mat makers also claim there is a damping effect, as the mat flexes and turns some of the vibrational energy into heat, but to be honest, the science is a little fuzzy here.

Applying the mats is simple. Just peel off the backing, slap a mat onto each wall panel, and then use a metal roller to press the mat against the panel to ensure good contact (this is the most tedious part). A few hours later, you will have a van that looks like this:

Opinions vary about how many mats you need to add, but the consensus is that 100% coverage is not required, except perhaps on the wheel wells. I ended up using a box and half of 80 mil Kilmat, which is about 50 sq ft. I didn’t add any to the floors since I knew that I’d be covering that up with heavy material in a future step.

Was the result of this effort a perfectly noise free interior? Nope! Did it help with the noise even a little bit? Well... maybe? I would say that on subsequent test drives, the mats maybe changed the character of the noise a little, but it was really hard to tell if it was significantly better.

Critics of the whole noise control mat thing point out that, whether or not the mats do much, most van builders immediately cover up their walls with layers of insulation and wall finishes that almost certainly have a much more significant effect on noise reduction. Additionally, finished camper vans have lots of other sources of noise that the mats aren’t going to help with, such as drawers full of rattling silverware.

Still, I, like many other van builders before me and no doubt many after, decided that since the effort and cost involved is fairly minimal, and since if you’re going to do it at all, you clearly have to do it before you add anything else to the inside of the van, this is a great starter task to get the van build ball rolling. Hello, Progress!

People have used vans of all sizes for camping, but we knew from the start that a smaller van wasn’t going to cut it for us. We want to be able to stand up in our van without bumping our heads, and we want to sleep, cook and eat in the van in some basic degree of comfort. We want a camper van, not just a van we can go camping in!

In the current US market, that pretty much restricts us to three vans:

• Mercedes Sprinter

• Ford Transit

• RAM ProMaster

These three large cargo vans are (by far) the top three choices for camper van builders in the US today. There are plenty of websites out there that do a great job of comparing them (like this one) so I won't attempt to cover every detail here, but briefly, these are some of the main pros and cons of each van.

Mercedes Sprinter
For much of the last couple of decades, choosing a cargo van for a camper van build came down to choosing which model of Sprinter van you wanted. Sprinters were the first widely available high roof cargo vans in the US, and they still dominate camper van builds today.

The lineup also includes the longest cargo vans available, maxing out at a whopping 16.2’ of interior space (for the 170” WB extended model). And they have models with AWD, which is great for adventure vans.

However, as you might imagine, that Mercedes badge on the front comes with a pretty significant price markup compared to the alternatives. Beyond that, servicing and repair for Mercedes cars is much more expensive than for other brands, if you can even find a Mercedes shop in your neighborhood… Sprinters have historically been diesel-only, which, while good for engine torque, is an increasingly unpopular fuel in the US. Finally, although Sprinters are long, they are also the narrowest of the three options here, and additionally, they are more “curvy”, which can complicate camper van builds.

Ford Transit
High roof Transits only arrived in the US in 2015, but have rapidly increased in popularity for camper van builds since then. The high roof model has significantly more headroom inside than the high roof Sprinter or ProMaster, and it is wider than the Sprinter. Since 2020 it’s been available with AWD, and it runs on gasoline. It also has the most powerful engine option available (the EcoBoost engine).

Transits are a bit cheaper than the equivalent Sprinters to buy, but are significantly cheaper and easier to service, since there are Ford dealers everywhere in the US.

RAM ProMaster
And then there’s the ProMaster, which is actually a rebadged European Fiat Ducato. It’s currently the least popular of the three for camper vans, but is slowly becoming more common. Unlike the others, it only comes in a FWD version, with a gasoline engine. They are the “boxiest” of the vans, with the widest interiors and minimal curves, which in some ways makes building the interior easier, though all of these vans are far from the ideal cuboid boxes that van builders would prefer!

Their biggest pro is simply the price. They are noticeably cheaper than Sprinters and Transits to buy, and, like the Fords, also have a great service network in the US.

So, what did we get?

When we started shopping for vans, I’d pretty much already decided that the van I wanted was a 148” WB non-extended AWD EcoBoost Ford Transit.

Consider these pros:

• Good interior length and width while being under 20’ in total length (so can be squeezed into regular parking spots)

• Powerful engine

• All Wheel Drive

• Reasonable reliability

• Simplest and cheapest service and repair

• Lift kits readily available to improve ground clearance

• Lots of aftermarket camper van accessories available

• Gasoline fuel

However… when we actually started visiting dealers, looking at lightly used vehicles (a year or two old), it quickly became clear that we weren’t going to find one for much under $60k, which was about $20k more than I’d assured Amy the base van was going to cost!

So, we started looking at alternatives, and very quickly realized that if we could live without the AWD, then the ProMaster provided most of the same benefits at a much lower cost. We convinced ourselves that, with the right tires, a FWD van could handle most of the places we wanted to go, and so we started touring the RAM dealers as well. And when we found a 2023 159 WB high roof ProMaster, in decent shape, with 18k miles for $38k, it seemed like too good a deal to pass up on.

What would we do differently next time?

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, the ProMaster has done everything we’ve asked of it. My main concern was the lack of AWD, but, so far, we haven’t run into any situations where this has actually made any difference. Yet! There are even a few benefits of not having a drive shaft running to the back wheels, such as the van floor being lower, and the underside of the van being relatively obstacle-free. Still, the ProMaster is undoubtedly a pretty basic and utilitarian van, designed primarily as a work vehicle rather than a camping platform, and it lacks a lot of the conveniences found in the more expensive vans. Cruise control? Nope. Tilting steering column? Nope. Noisy? Oh yes.

So, while there’s nothing especially wrong with the ProMaster, I confess that I do sometimes wish I’d just dug a bit deeper and found the extra $15k or so for an AWD Transit with a few more frills.

There are actually two parts to that question.

Firstly, why a camper van?

Like a lot of people in this neck of the woods of Colorado, my wife and I are outdoorsy people who like to spend time in the mountains doing (mildly) adventurous things. Typically this will include some mountain biking and rock climbing, but also plenty of just hanging out with friends, cooking food, making fancy(ish) drinks, and singing songs around a campfire. Camping is a way to get close to those outdoor places we want to be, and also a fun thing to do in its own right.

But as the decades have piled up, I find I really appreciate such niceties as sleeping in a comfy bed, having a decent space to shelter from the elements, and being able to make a proper cup of coffee in the morning. In other words, a tent ain't gonna cut it anymore! A camper of some kind provides a welcome upgrade in comfort level, and the ability to bring many of the conveniences of home with you on the road.

There are lots of ways of approaching this: teardrop campers, popups, truck campers, small tow hitch trailers, giant 5th wheel trailers, motor coaches, converted school buses, class C RVs1, and of course, camper vans. All of these choices come with different sets of tradeoffs regarding comfort level, cost, storability, carrying capacity, convenience, and so on. Since different things are important to different people, there's no single right answer, but for us, it seemed like a camper van would hit the sweet spot:

• Fewer storage hassles, since it can be parked in the driveway.

• Easy to drive.

• Fits into normal (in the US anyway!) sized parking spaces.

• No problems turning round on narrow forest roads.

• Good enough comfort and storage capacity.

• Fast and easy to set up for the night, with the option of "stealth" camping in urban areas if necessary.

So, a camper van it is!

Secondly, why build it out yourself?

As anyone who has looked at You Tube in the last few years is aware, camper vans have exploded in popularity over the last decade. As a result, there is no shortage of companies willing to sell you a fully kitted out camper van. There are at least half a dozen custom van builders within a few miles of my home here in Boulder, CO, and established RV companies like Winnebago and Thor have also joined the fray with more "mass market" models (though camper vans are still a pretty niche-y product).

To the uninitiated, the list prices on most of these vans are jaw-dropping, to say the least. A basic new camper van might cost $120,000, and the prices go up from there. For comparison, we used to have a small camping trailer, and it cost under $20k. A trailer, of course, requires a separate vehicle to pull it, but on the flip side, you can use that vehicle for things other than camping!

Used camper vans are of course considerably cheaper, but we're still talking $50-70k and upwards for a reasonably newish van in good condition.

Given these prices, it's tempting to think that the main motivation for building out a camper van yourself is to save money. But let's analyze that thought in some more detail...

For starters, you're going to need a base van to build on. A new cargo van costs between $60-90k, depending on the model. The raw materials for a full camper van build will likely cost you another $10-30k, depending on how carried away you get. And unless you already have a well-equipped workshop, you're probably going to buy some new tools, probably another few $k there. So, you're already heading towards $100k, before you even start to consider non-monetary costs (see below). You could start with a used van to save some money of course, but you'll probably still be buying new stuff to put in the van, so it doesn't save as much as you'd think.

In addition to the pure financial cost, a DIY van build sucks up an enormous amount of time. There are apparently people who can complete a full van build in three months of solid work, but I have no idea what planet they are from. I could spend three months trying to figure out what color to make my countertops... For lesser mortals, a year to two years seems to be pretty common, though this depends a lot on what you're building, and how much else you have going on in your life. Putting a value on that time is tricky, but, for one extreme, if I used my (former) hourly rate as a software engineer, I'd be looking at, well, a lot of money!

Finally, beyond even the time taken, there is the physical effort. Building things in the real world is much harder than building software! You spend lots of time carrying heavy sheets of plywood, drilling holes, tightening bolts, working in awkward spaces, scraping skin off your knuckles, and making endless trips to the hardware store. And if you don't have the benefit of a climate controlled high ceiling garage to work in, there's a good chance you'll be doing all that in uncomfortably hot or cold temperatures. This too is a effectively a cost.

So if the effective costs of a DIY van build are as much, or more than the cost of buying a camper van, why do it?

Well, going the DIY route does come with some benefits:

• You have full control over the design of the camper van. In theory at least, you can build the exact van that matches your own unique requirements.

• You can try out crazy ideas that no traditional van builder would touch with a bargepole.

• You can build out the van incrementally, gradually adding bits and pieces over time, allowing you to defer costs until later.

• You can change the design whenever you want, as you learn more about what's important to you in a van build. All it costs is time and money!

• You get to solve hundreds of interesting little design problems.

• You can justify buying a bunch of shiny new tools.

Then there's the time issue. Yes, building out a van yourself is going to take a lot of time. But if you're in the fortunate position of having a good amount of free time, and you're not worried about the opportunity costs of not spending that time on things other than van building, or, even better, you enjoy van building so much that the time spent is effectively a negative cost, then a DIY build looks a lot more attractive!

You can even put a positive spin on the physical effort. It's got to be better than sitting at a desk all day staring at a computer screen, right?

Ultimately, I decided that these vague and subjective upsides made the DIY route more interesting to me than the ready alternative of buying a new or used camper van. When I started out, back in late 2024, I had recently quit my job as a software engineer, and I wasn't looking for paid work in the foreseeable future, so I had plenty of free time. I had some ideas for creating a camper van that would be fairly different from every other van build I'd seen, and I was looking forward to trying them out. And I liked the idea of taking a break from sitting in front of a computer to do something more physical.

And if it turned out that I didn't like it, well, the whole project shouldn't take more than a few months, surely?...

I’ve got four kinds of readers in mind.

Firstly, there are friends and family who know me personally, and who have perhaps been wondering what I’ve been up to in the months since I quit my job at Google. Well, now you know!

Secondly, there are my fellow DIYers in the van building community. I’ve learned a ton from reading other people’s accounts of their van building experiences, on YouTube, on other websites, and on the various online forums devoted to this kind of thing. Maybe someone else will get inspired by something I post here, or at the very least learn from my mistakes! Other, more experienced van builders might just enjoy vicariously reliving the van-building experience, while not losing any skin from their own knuckles. And for those of you who dream of one day building out your own van but haven’t got going yet, perhaps this will motivate you to get started... or to pursue a less crazy dream instead!

The third group is my fellow software engineers, especially those who are tired of being an office drone, and are considering giving it all up to pursue some kind of personal passion engineering project. Maybe it’s a van, maybe it’s a boat, maybe something else. There are interesting parallels and contrasts between software engineering, and “van-gineering”, some of which I’ll be writing about here.

The final reader that I’m targeting is, well, me. It sounds a bit narcissistic, but even if nobody else ever reads this blog, I’d probably still write it. Building out the van has become a far bigger project than I’d imagined, and it’s interesting to write down some of the thoughts and ideas that are going into it. If nothing else, future me is sure to get a laugh out of the nonsense that I wrote here.

Welcome to the blog, everyone!