Check out our Europe travel van conversion!

the whole van camping thing has become pretty popular in europe and for good reason you can travel all over the place and it's a lot of fun so when i moved to switzerland we bought a van i know it's not much of a looker and it's kind of small but we actually chose a small van for a few reasons we knew we weren't going to be living in our van we just wanted to do like weekend trips with it so it didn't need to be that big and we just wanted to own one vehicle we didn't want multiple vehicles and if you own a big tall van in switzerland it can't fit in parking garages and in switzerland if you can't fit in a parking garage it really cuts down on your parking possibilities so it doesn't really work as a daily driver so instead we chose a small little van the original idea was just to keep it simple and take the seats out put a mattress on the floor and sleep in it like that but then we ran into a couple of problems one if you're sleeping on the floor where do you put all of your stuff and then two i found out that europe doesn't have any 24-hour walmarts with free parking and free bathrooms so where do you go to the bathroom and really this isn't much of a problem but maybe it wasn't a bad idea to have an emergency option so i was going to have to build out the van but then we ran into a problem we bought a passenger van and in switzerland all of the seats have to be in place to have it inspected so anything that i built in the van i would have to be able to remove for the inspection so this is what i've come up with i made a platform using three boxes this way the boxes can be disassembled and easily removed from the van when the bed's not needed part of the platform collapses in on itself making the living room off to the side of the living room is the bathroom it's a little bit small you can either get to the bathroom by opening this little hat store or the entire bathroom can slide out the rest of the space under the platform is used for storage originally my plan was to make some sliding drawers that came out but i scrapped that i decided that the hardware needed to make the drawers would just waste too much space and i'd be happier with just simple storage the platform left a lot of wasted space on either wall so i decided to make these little wing things that come up on either side and then added a mesh pocket for small items like your phone and things like that for the bed i took a foam mattress and cut it into three pieces and then made cloth covers for each piece my uh sewing skills are seriously lacking for privacy we used a bungee cord to make a curtain going across the front of the van it hooks in place when needed and then is easily removed when not needed for the windows we made covers using kind of a dense foam that we wrapped in fabric we then use suction cups to suction cup them to the windows because the foam is somewhat rigid it holds it in place and adds a little bit of insulation because we only use it for a couple days at a time we've chosen not to add any electric and just use battery powered led lights and then use battery packs to charge our phones so far that's worked pretty well there's a tour of our van hopefully you enjoyed it thank you for watching i'm going to get back to enjoying these great views have a great day