Her hands - her van - her empowering journey
“Hey, that’s a really great self-built camper van you both have there. Good job by your boyfriend.”
“Well, thank you. But it was me.”
It’s the year 2022, and it is still surprising that a woman does something artisanal like building a van interior by herself. Really?
(First published in Issue 4, February 2022) No, I am not a carpenter or anything similar. I’m just a marketing woman, usually sitting in the office and being creative. After my full-time job, I wanted to do something for myself and escape from my everyday life whenever I needed to.
Because of my love for nature and my curiosity to explore new areas, camping became my passion. I quickly realized that I needed my own van. Without further ado, I swapped my Mini for a VW T5. That was the beginning of a wonderful love story between me and my van “Ellie,” named in memory of my grandma, the strongest woman I had ever known.
I bought the VW T5 Transporter Van full of seats; windows were already included. At the beginning, I had no real plan and started by throwing everything out. When I sat in my completely empty van and surveyed the situation, I never imagined what it could become.
Step by step, Ellie’s interior work grew, starting with putting insulation on all the exposed walls inside. After that, she got a wooden substructure, on which I clamped the wall panels. This work felt like it was going to take an eternity, but the first results were visible and encouraged me to carry on. I did the complete renovation in front of my house outdoors, even during the winter. Of course, those were not the best conditions. The cold and early darkness made the expansion difficult, especially after a usual day of work. But big girls don’t cry, right? In addition to the wall cladding, I did a lot of other work that kept confronting me with new challenges. Laying a substructure for the PVC floor was the simplest of them.
I will probably never forget the moment on a Saturday morning when I cut a hole in the exterior of my van to install the socket for shore power. I was shaking all over, and my knees felt like pudding. Am I really cutting a hole in my van right now? Of course. Once everything was ready, I had to drink a shot before I could go back to work, and I was proud of myself like seldom before. All these memories will stay with me and follow me on my journeys.
The next step was to build the furniture. My van needed a bed, a kitchen, and cupboards—a lot of stuff for an area of approximately 5 square meters. The bed had to be extendable, so I built my own wooden bed and slatted frame. Under the bed, there is space for a table, chairs, a camping toilet, and other items. The kitchen in my van is equipped with a small refrigerator, storage space, and a washbasin with fresh and waste water tanks. In my living room, I assembled the kitchen as one part and then placed it in the van. The hardest part was building the drawers without any instructions. During the last inspection of the kitchen before installation, everything fitted perfectly, but when the kitchen was fastened in Ellie, no drawer or door closed. Great, thank you for nothing. So I had to remove and adjust every drawer and cabinet door again. Such mistakes kept happening, but I didn’t give up.
Another tough part of the van conversion was the electrics. I am the type of person who, as a child, held the light switch in the middle to see what happened between “on” and “off.” So how should I run the electrics in a van? Luckily, my boyfriend knows about such things and explained how to connect the individual parts. He could have just done all the work, but I really wanted to do it myself. If you have plugged cables into terminals, connected them to some fuses and junction boxes without knowledge, and at the end, the light shines—then you feel like the greatest.
All in all, my van conversion was a wonderful experience with all its ups and downs. I have grown with this task and have learned a lot, partly to become more relaxed. Things don’t always go as planned, and often the results of the work are not what you would like them to be. Perfection is boring. I want to encourage you to do the things you like to do. Don’t be afraid; something can always go wrong. But that’s no problem. Either you live with it, or you correct it. Enjoy your life and use every minute you have to do what makes you happy. You can do it. I believe in you.
