Our Newest Addition
That's right, we bought a van!
Back in May, amidst all of the other things we had going on (guys, boarding school life is not for the faint of heart), we snatched up this beaut from a private seller at a price we could stomach. It's been almost a year of talking about the idea and months of H researching and hunting down a vehicle that made sense. In just a few days, mileage, inspection, and CarFax all checked out, and we drove her home.
Our summer 2019 project is converting this Ford E350, 15 passenger van into a camper we can use for weekend warrioring, extended road trips, and as an outdoor spot to hang around in when we're home.
But don't let us fool you into thinking we're all calm, cool and collected. The hunt took months, we flip-flopped between so many different options, and even if we found something that we thought could work in style and price, it would be gone before we'd get a chance to go see it, let alone buy it. It's a crazy market out there for the #vanlifemovement.
This is the largest cash purchased we've ever made and we panicked multiple times. I panicked as H was going to check it out, H panicked the day after we bought it, and we've both spent multiple toddler naptimes wrestling with the potential ideas for the van vs the reality (new tires, cost of registration for a commercially tagged vehicle, do we build walls or save that for next summer ahhh, etc).
Since we began adventuring about 5 years ago, we've followed the vanlife movement. How cool is it to be able to up and go whenever you have a moment? We tested our camper van interest by road tripping to Oregon while I was pregnant. We loved it. It took work and wasn't a luxury vacation by any means, but it satisfied many of our family values - adventuring, being outdoors, intimacy, and freedom.
Since our daughter was born, we've camped a few times, with the biggest trip being four nights in Yosemite when she was ~18 months old and the worst being one night in Joshua Tree in ice cold rain this past March.
With our previous camping experience and our future family vacations in mind we set our priorities for what we wanted in the van:
- Bed to sleep on inside
- Seat where the car seat could stay set up
- Table to sit at inside for food/hanging
- Storage out the back for a kitchen set-up
- Storage for gear, toys and clothes (especially for extended trips)
In H's vehicle research, he also started designing a bench/bed conversion that he thought would be best for everything we wanted. In the past few weeks, he's worked hard each day to make this vision come to life, without any prior experience of building minus a entryway table he made before A was born (his version of "nesting" at the time).
We randomly hit a wall of doubt, overpay for some hardware piece, or are stumped by an aspect of the project for a few days, but progress is being made! And I can't tell you how satisfying it is to create something with your partner in your minds and then actually see it coming together in real life.
Promise, more soon. In the meantime, wave hi to our newest addition, our camper van, June.