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Van Tours: Shaiden’s Van

(chill music) What's up guys, I'm with my buddy Shaden here. What number van is this? How's it going guys? This is number four right here. All right. So he's a mad man. He's constantly been building vans, building number five. This is number four. Show you guys. Yeah. We'll show you guys all the crazy features that he's put in here. (chill music) Yeah, this thing's pretty sweet. This is my baby, or at least it was my last baby. And it was a design that I had put a lot of time into to try to kind of solve all of the problems that I had experienced in van life in the past. So I put some really cool features in here that aren't very common in van life. For example, should I jump right into it? Yeah let's see this thing. We got a pretty cool- Kind of first thing that you'll see at the back here is I have this lounge area. It's a big living room. I really like to entertain friends in my vans. That's a big thing for me. So you got seating on each side. You can sit about 10 people i...

n here. I have 10 seat belts bolted to the frame and above this, the cool part is this entire bed actually comes down. So this is a queen sized bed. So you can basically have a living room. And then literally with the press of a button you have a bedroom with a bed that you don't even have to make or convert, which is super convenient. So I'm pretty stoked on that. So basically the bed comes down just right here. Just push this button. (machine whirring) Drops all the way down. (machine whirring) It's a little bit of a process. There you go. (machine whirring) That's that. So that's usually where I bring it to when my board's on the bottom, but you can bring it to whatever level you want all the way down within the rear cushions, or you can bring it up to the ceiling and sleep like five people between the top and the bottom bunks. So it's pretty convenient. Got a pretty sweet little skylight opens up above the bed there. So you can see a nice view of the stars. And I have a full surround sound system in here around the bed as well to make sleeping and hanging out in here really fun and be able to cool movies and stuff like that. Bring it back up. (machine whirring) So cool. Love that. Yeah. It's a little bit of a process like 20 seconds but it's a lot easier than making your bed every day which is what a lot of people have to do if they want to have a convertible bed space which I think is pretty important. Which this does convert into a bed, correct? Yeah. This table drops down onto little slats underneath here and you can bring these cushions down and turn this into- and actually it's a California king underneath. So you basically have a queen size bed up top, Cal king underneath. How much does the Happy Jack setup cost? So the Happy Jack's about two grand-ish just for the outer frame. And then you have to build the entire platform in between. So call that another 500 bucks. But usually you could pretty much choose between a Happy Jack or overhead cabinets, essentially. So most people are not gonna do both, but you know you're just kind of sacrificing the cabinets and you have to make sure there's framing but you can put the Happy Jack anywhere you have a dual bench seat like this. So, yeah. Perfect. That's awesome. Should I just give you guys the full walkthrough here? Yeah. What's in each of the benches? Yeah. So basically this bench over here is all electrical. So we've got all kinds of beefy electrical system in here. There's about 10 batteries in this bench 10 lithium iron phosphate, 100 amp hour batteries. Those are wired in a 500 amp hour, 24 volt configuration. I've got dual alternator chargers in here pretty beefy solar charge controller. That's taking a thousand Watts of solar from the roof and keeping my batteries nice and full. Basically your whole roof is solar. Yeah. The whole roof is solar except the skylight. So I really went crazy on solar. I just wanted to max out on that to try to like- My goal is always to maximize the amount of electricity I can generate without being plugged into shore power or into the grid. Because I like to be able to have all the amenities that I can possibly have without having to run a generator. That's super important to me. Awesome. So got a ton of battery in there. Tons of alternator and solar charging 4,001 inverter in here. And I also have a piano inside of this bench and then a subwoofer. So subwoofers part of the sound system, obviously back here but that's pretty much that whole passenger side bench. And then this bench is air conditioning back here. I have a little 24 volt, zero breeze mark two air conditioner that gets ducted up to here. So I can kind of slip that in bed with me when I'm sleeping. It's a similar set up to mine. Yeah. Quinn has that one too. Yeah. And then we have a Lavasto SDC 2000 gasoline heater under there. And then this is just all storage for all my gear. So I have tents, fins, wetsuit all kinds of junk in there. That's your garage. This is my garage. So essentially that's one of the things that you kind of sacrifice by doing this is kind of a layout is having like an actually dedicated open garage but with a bench like this, it's not that big of a deal because you just have to kind of clean things off throw them in there. And you're pretty much good to go. There's definitely a lot of storage in there. So that's pretty much loaded. Appreciate it. All right guys. So this is my sliding door. And if you take a look around me it is actually my shower as well. That's super important in this van build because it allows me to have a huge shower without dedicating a huge amount of volume to it. This is basically dead space that you're walking through, through your sliding door every day. And by making my shower right here in the sliding door I was able to kind of double purpose that dead air space. So right here, we have a Nautilus shower door. That comes all the way across (shower curtain crinkles) and retracts. And then on this side we have a curtain in that you pull. And then I have a little magnets that kind of pull it out of the way so you get more volume and then we have this super cool Nebia shower head with a light right here. This thing comes down. You can point it outside even so you can take an outdoor shower. Got a little wand here as well. That snaps on there with a magnet, just so that you can rinse off outside or whatever you want. But this thing definitely comes in handy. It uses very little water. It's a low flow Nebia shower head. So that helps when you are in a van and you don't have unlimited amounts of water with you but that's pretty much the shower. Definitely pretty sweet. You got four foot by two foot here. This is just a little temporary cassette toilet as an emergency toilet. And yeah, it's pretty fun to take showers in here. I love having a shower in a van because otherwise I'm stuck taking showers in gyms all the time, which is cool. But sometimes you want to have that flexibility. So yeah, that's the shower coming in this way. You have this nice aisle here that goes all the way throughout the van. So you have really good continuity of where you can walk in the van. And then we got our kitchen over here. This is basically just two overhead cabinets. These are just some big beefy cabinets for food. Got a little oven over here, which is where I make cookies, toast, little trader Joe's frozen meals as Quinn likes to say. Oh yeah. Little bread shelf. I kind of keep some extra food in here usually And down here we got a fridge. This is 110 liter. The medic fridge, freezer, pretty sweet to load up. You got a freezer up top and fridge down below. That's a side opening fridge freezer. So you don't have to dig through your stuff when you want to get to the stuff on the bottom. How does that do with the efficiency of power? So chest fridges are a little bit more efficient but you're just basically sacrificing that organization element. You know, you kind of have to stack things up. And I definitely, in my experience I've always preferred to have a side opener but everyone kind of has their own call on that. Convenience factor. Yeah. And you can definitely fit a lot more food in your freezer, in a chest, but pros and cons of both. It kind of depends on what you prioritize. That freezer is pretty small. It's like, I don't know of that whole volume. It's probably what, a quarter of it? 25% A sliver. Maybe even less. It's actually less. It's probably like 20% of the fridge. Maybe 15. Yeah. But you can fit like a little bit of frozen fruit, enough for a smoothie I figured it was a good incentive for me to eat more fresh food. Because I used to eat a lot of frozen food and I'm kind of like, "okay, I'll just eat more fresh, more more veggies." Yeah. But we basically got a dual burner induction stove mounted in the counter right here. That thing's pretty sweet. That runs off of the inverter. So that's about 1800 Watts just so you guys kind of have an idea. This thing is about 1100 Watts and that's basically our cooking appliances in here. Four drawers going down. This is just silverware. This is kind of like miscellaneous paperwork. This is a pots and pans drawer. And then kind of just a junk drawer for like electronics and things like that. And then over here Is everything raised? Yeah. So basically everything is raised above a water tank in here. So there's a 50 gallon water tank. It's actually 52 gallons right here inside of the toe kick. So my kitchen is actually four inches higher than a standard kitchen height. I kind of like it because it's like a bar kitchen almost and it's kind of a nice standing desk height. But it also allows me to put my water underneath which is pretty sweet. Over here, I won't open this up, but we have a trash can in here, water heater, and a three stage water filter. So that basically gets your hot water ready for your shower. All that plumbing goes through this front toe kick right here. So it's kind of nice to have all of my plumbing. Like literally all of the plumbing in the band is just right here and if I ever need to access it, I can just pop this open and get access to all of the plumbing for the van. So that whole thing pops open right there. Yeah. This whole lid- I mean it's three screws and then I have access to all my plumbing. Gotcha. Nice. It's like you shouldn't have to access your plumbing very often. If you do, there's a problem. But if you need to do maintenance then you can just literally lift that off and you're just back into your whole plumbing closet. Yeah, that's it. So this is another very important feature for me. I don't like rolling my clothes or folding my clothes up every day. So I have a full hanging high closet here. I fit about 50 shirts in here and then I have three drawers going down for pants, shorts, underwear, socks and then a nice big laundry basket at the bottom. So those are some important things in a van to have a trash can and a laundry basket dedicated. Otherwise you'll end up putting your laundry on your couch or your trash in a bag that's sitting in your aisle way. So I find those to be pretty useful little features and kind of make it feel like a house versus always living in a vehicle. That's pretty much everything for my van. Thanks for checking it out. All right Shaden, if you had one tip for someone who wanted to get into van life what would you say? Yeah well, first of all I have tons of tips for you, but the most important one would probably be that there's no reason that van life has to cost you a lot of money for the whole experience. So the way that I got into it was with the intention to come out of it positive. And depending on how you build your van and what materials you put into your van there's a way that you can basically buy a van put the materials into it and then actually sell it for pretty substantially more than you bought it for. And you know, all those materials cost. So I look at things always as an investment and there is a way to make van life an investment. And it's also a way to justify it to yourself. So you're not just throwing money down a black hole for a couple years at some hobby, might as well build your van out the right way and make some money off of it while you're doing it. Plus then you get to upgrade down the road which you absolutely will want to do. That's how all of us feel at all times, so. I don't know any van lifer that just made one van. Yeah. You know, the DIY van life crew is always talking about the next van. Yep. Building one currently, thinking about the one after the one they're building, it's just a constant upgrade and that's the beauty of it right? Yeah. Nice. No matter how good your van is there's always a better idea that you'll have. You'll just want to, over and over and over. Sounds like it's kind of an addiction. It is. Cool.