A Boy and His Van: The Nasty Work

When contemplating building out a camper van, one's mind goes to the finishing touches that will make the plain vanilla, blank slate cargo van you start with into a tiny home on four wheels. The queen-sized comfy bed with storage room underneath for a couple of bikes. The electrical system that will work its photovoltaic magic and convert solar power into reading light, cold beer and food in the fridge, and induction burner cooking. The hardwood table that slides out from storage below the bed. The beautiful exposed wood everywhere. The composting toilet, and yes, the hot shower.

Before getting to these desired ends, though, less glamorous work has to happen first. Insulating the walls, ceiling, and floor. Installing flooring, siding, and ceiling treatments. Building storage compartments, seating, shelving and cabinets.

The adventure van in its work-life configuration

Before even the less glamorous work can begin, however, the truly nasty work must be done, and that's where I've been for the first few days of the van buildout. In its previous 10 years of life, the Sprinter was a working rig, the first nine years as a Ryder fleet van, and the past year hauling stuff to special events. I've described the van as a blank slate, but that's not entirely true, since it had battered, thin plywood flooring, cheesy ceiling material, hard plastic sidewall, side door, and rear door interior covering, and a carpeted built-in thingy of indeterminate purpose glued and screwed in place along most of the driver's side of the cargo space wall. All of this had to come out. There's also some minor surface rust in numerous places on the van's exterior, which will need to be ground down, sanded, primed, and painted.

"Oops, I just ran over a boulder. I think I'll just ignore that."

The cancerous rust at the base of the cargo side door and one of the two rear doors will need to be dealt with, too, and I've elected to have Valley Autohaus do professional repair of this nastiness. They will also be doing the welding repair required on the frame front cross-member that was badly damaged. How can you do this kind of damage to your frame and just ignore it?!? Oh well. My friends at Valley Autohaus will make it stronger than original. While I intend to do just about everything else on the van myself, I'm happy to pay someone else to do major work affecting the safety and longevity of the vehicle that I lack the skills to do myself. Yay for Valley Autohaus!

The first order of business for me was tearing out the ceiling (simple) and sidewall/door panelling (easy). Ripping out the built-in, carpeted thingy was a bit more difficult and heavy to drag out of the van on my own, but very doable.

Removal of the flooring was more time-consuming and difficult. A number of the bolts holding down the thin, battered plywood were badly corroded after 10 years of hard use. Even after soaking with penetrating oil, two bolts proved impossible to remove, so I fired up my angle grinder and cut them out. First fun with power tools! Success!

Under the plywood was an asphalt-based underlayment, some of which pulled up easily. However, a fair amount of it was stuck to the flooring, and had to be laboriously hand-scraped and removed bit by bit. Eventually, all the nastiness was successfully removed from the floor. Ten years of accumulated crud was scraped from around the perimeter of the plywood flooring base, and the interior of the van was now fully exposed. This leaves the van ready for the next stage of the nasty work, dealing with the exterior surface rust. I'm going to wait on that until Valley Autohaus has completed their work, probably sometime late next week, so actual work on the van will be on pause until then.

The few days of nasty work was broken up by garden work, biking, and other semi-retirement pandemic fun, so it wasn't non-stop nasty. I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of work I can do with my grinding, sanding, and painting skills to get the van looking reasonably good on the exterior. It won't be perfect (in the right lighting, you can see ghost lettering from the van's Ryder incarnation), but I don't want to go to the required effort, time and expense to repaint the entire rig myself. When I asked Valley Autohaus for a ballpark estimate for repainting the entire van and was told it could be in the $10,000 range, Anne and I decided we could live with a tiny bit of cosmetic imperfection.

The slate is now pretty much blank

After Valley Autohaus' work, and dealing with the minor surface rust myself, the next steps will be more dramatic: I'll be installing two new windows (t-sliders to allow cross-ventilation; one in the passenger-side cargo door, the other on the driver's side a bit further back in the van), and insulating the entire interior.

Installing the windows will involve cutting precise window openings in the van, the prospect of which is a little bit daunting, but I'm game. I figure I can carefully follow a traced template, with small guide holes drilled along the way, with a jigsaw without too much trouble.

Insulation I know. When you travel down the rabbit-hole of camper van buildout recommendations on the interwebs, all manner of insulation is recommended and debated. One of the intriguing possibilities is sheep wool, which is touted as a natural, non-toxic alternative with attractive moisture-absorbing and -release properties. However, I'm opting to go with a higher-performance, less organic option, the tried and true two-part polyurethane foam which I've had contractors installing in home rim joist spaces and other home insulation applications for many years. It has an extremely high R-value (6.7 per inch), provides a moisture and air barrier, and is recommended by many in the van life community. I've never actually installed it myself, but I'll pick up a kit from Menards, along with the required spray gun, Tyvek coveralls, nitrile gloves, and P100 respirator, and have at it once the windows are installed.

Onward!

A Boy and His Van: Prologue and Day Zero

Prologue

I’m a freedom-loving, adventure-loving kind of human. When I’m not engaged in an adventure (micro- or otherwise) of some sort, or gardening, reading, spending time with my love, my family, or friends, there’s a high likelihood I’m reliving a past adventure or dreaming and scheming about a future adventure. In recent years, dreams of future adventures have often included fantasies of an adventure van of some sort.

Mind you, lack of an adventure van has not stopped me from adventuring for the first nearly 62 years of my life. Many adventures begin and end at home, on foot or on a bike. When motorized transport is required for more distant adventures, an assortment of small, fuel-efficient vehicles have fit the bill for getting me from home to wherever said adventure begins, and back home again. My adventure mobile for my first solo backpacking trip in the Canadian Rockies in July 1979 was a 1968 VW Squareback (orange, with a sunroof if you must know). It got me there and back, though it literally died in my parents’ driveway, never to travel under its own power again, after a nearly non-stop 1300-mile return trip left its front struts in a state of collapse. My most recent adventure mobile, my 2016 Toyota Prius, has gotten me to the Wind River Range and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument for backpacking trips, to the BWCA several times for canoe trips, and has hauled wild rice home from rice-harvesting trips in 2018 and 2019. In between were a VW Fox station wagon, a VW Rabbit diesel hatchback, a Mazda B2000 small pickup, a Honda Civic hatchback, a Saturn station wagon, a brief and unsatisfying stint with a Toyota Previa minivan (no!), two VW Jetta diesels, and a 2012 Toyota Prius which came to an untimely end when a distracted driver tried to kill me but only succeeded in totaling my car. All of these rigs served me, my family, and occasional rice-harvesting and canoe-trip partners admirably in getting us to wherever we needed to go.

However, in recent years several factors led me to believe that the quality of my adventure time would be enhanced by a dedicated camper van. The biggest factor is that my wife of nearly 38 years, Anne Larson, has developed an aversion to sleeping on the ground and getting out of a tent in the middle of the night to pee. This is a not-uncommon aversion, I have been told. Anne and I shared a number of canoe and backpacking adventures in the early years of our marriage, and had a number of fun car-camping trips and canoe trips with our kids, but her zest for camping dwindled as the years progressed. It’s been many years now since she and I have camped together, even though she loves to hike and explore beautiful natural areas. She has always been intrigued by the prospect of having some kind of camper, and I have been coming around to the idea of a camper van in recent years. 

A second major factor is that, as I age, while I still love wilderness experiences and am happy to sleep in a tent for long periods of time when I’m hiking or canoeing in the wilderness, as the end of the experience approaches, I find myself fantasizing about taking a shower and sleeping in a bed at or near the trailhead upon my exit, not camping yet another night. Similarly, at the start of the trip, I’m not keen on car-camping and sleeping in a tent for one or several nights en route before getting to my ultimate adventure destination.

Finally, Anne and I both love to take road trips, exploring small towns and out-of-the-way landscapes. I’ve thought in recent years that these kinds of trips could be much more enjoyable for us to share in a camper van than driving in our Prius, and then staying in a motel or Airbnb place every night. We shared an epic road trip in July 2019 to Novia Scotia and Newfoundland, and while we enjoyed the various places we stayed on the trip, we both realized we would have loved having a camper van to stay in at day’s end wherever we were on the trip. The thought of camping in comfort in our own mobile tiny house has finally come to hold a lot of appeal for Anne and I both.

For all of these reasons, I started investigating what it would take, in money and effort, to do a camper van conversion myself. Anne and I are people of modest means, and we couldn’t afford to buy a new ready-made camper van (easily into six figures). We weren’t even interested in spending the kind of money it would take to buy a quality used camper van ($50,000-plus). After a fair amount of research, I became convinced that I could do a conversion myself, and get a quality, affordable rig built out for less than $20,000 including the purchase price of a used van (net cost after taking out the amount we will clear for selling our older used Toyota Tacoma pickup, since the camper van will also serve as our second family vehicle for other occasional general use). In addition to the cost savings, I was attracted to the idea of building something exactly tailored to our wants, needs, and aesthetic taste.

I won’t bore you with the deliberation over choice of vehicle type. Long story short, I decided that a high-roof Sprinter cargo van was the vehicle of choice, primarily because there are many of them on the market, they have ample headroom for a 6’ 2” guy, and they are powered by an efficient and durable Mercedes-Benz commercial vehicle diesel engine. The Sprinter vans are sold under the Dodge, Freightliner, and Mercedes-Benz badges, but they are all built by Mercedes-Benz with the Mercedes-Benz diesel engine. They also come in 144” and 170” wheelbases. While there are pluses and minuses to both sizes, we opted for the 170” wheelbase since my height requires a queen-sized bed, which would leave only a modest amount of room for other amenities in the 144” wheelbase version.

After watching the market for many months and seeing very few suitable vans for sale in Minnesota in my price range (i.e. CHEAP), I had almost resigned myself to having to travel a significant distance to pick up a decent rig for a decent price. When I saw what looked like an attractive rig (decent condition, relatively low miles for a cheapish cargo van) in Northeast Minneapolis last week, I was guardedly excited. When I arranged to see it on Tuesday May 12^th, I like what I saw, had a diesel mechanic check the vehicle over thoroughly, made an offer, and ended up negotiating the purchase in short order on May 13^th. The 2010 Freightliner Sprinter 2500, with 173,670 miles on the odometer (just getting broken in for a M-B diesel engine!), would be the base for our tiny house on wheels for the modest sum of $9,500.

Before negotiating the purchase price, I paid a diesel mechanic to give the rig a thorough going-over to identify any potentially problematic mechanical or structural issues. It was $152 well-spent, as he confirmed that the van was in good mechanical condition, identified a damaged front cross-member in the frame that would have to be repaired for safety reasons, and gave me a ballpark figure for repairing it. With this information, I was able to negotiate a lower purchase price. 

Day Zero: Van pickup on May 14^th

The adventure van in its previous incarnation

The van, previously owned by an event organizing company, had a wrap with the company’s graphics, and the owner had promised me this would be removed before I picked up the van, and assured me that the wrap wasn’t hiding any significant body/rust issues. I was notified the morning of May 14^ththat the wrap would be removed by early afternoon, so I planned to ride my bike from Northfield to Northeast Minneapolis (adventure! mostly by gravel the first half of the trip!) and meet the owner for the deal at 3:15. 

It was a beautiful spring day with delightful temperatures rising through the low- to mid-60s during the 51.4-mile ride, which took just over three hours with a light side/side-tail wind out of the south-southwest. The ride was a breeze, with visions of the adventure van awaiting me and plans for its build-out filling my head. I rolled into the parking lot next to the warehouse where the van is garaged a few minutes ahead of time, and met my man Ande to do the deal a few minutes later. I was somewhat disappointed to see that removal of the wrap revealed that the van did indeed have some cancerous rust at the base of both the side cargo door and one of the rear cargo doors. I decided not to make a big deal of it, handed over the cashier’s check, and moments later was on my way home. I did stop briefly by a nearby picturesque renovated warehouse building for a glamor pre-conversion shot in the van’s home neighborhood.

The adventure van, about to be driven to its new home in Northfield

T

The van drove like a dream at all speeds. It was solid going down the road, with no suspension or tracking issues, and the M-B 3.0-liter V6 purred at freeway speed. Homeward, my lad! The adventure was just beginning!