As some of you already know, our van conversion journey started when Aimee approached me one day in 2020 and said “shall we buy a van.” I had my goals laid out for 2020. I knew exactly what I was working towards and how close I was to achieving what I had set out to achieve. Buying a van wasn’t on my life plan. For whatever reason I said yes and this is where it started.
Precisely six month later and looking back at the last 6 months…
We are active on social media daily – whether it’s our @letsmakeacamper instagram account or contributing or asking for advice for the self build camper van groups on facebook.
We are learning from the hundreds of Youtube videos that have been created by other van builders.
We are part of an amazingly supportive community that just feels great to be a part of. This is partly why we share our journey. It’s to put back in for others what other shared with us.
We decided around six weeks ago to create a blog to document our journey but also share it for others. We also found that the same or very similar questions were being asked time after time. So instead of being reactive and inefficient we decided to be proactive and efficient and when saw a question we can then answer it by sending a link and not having to write the same answer out over and over again. 6 weeks into creating this pretty basic blog we now reach 12+ countries around the globe which is truly humbling and we are so blown away by that in itself. It feels like a massive achievement and regardless of volumes it means that people in 12 different countries are reading our content and looking at our journey. If one person learns one thing we’ll be happy.
We host a weekly call with a small group of work colleagues and van owners who are all converting vans or have a desire to called ‘Vanter’ our play on ‘banter’ a UK term meaning ‘the playful exchange of remarks in a good humoured but slightly teasing way’ it’s basically a virtual weekly social where we talk van progress and share tips and suggestions amongst general chat. In such difficult times it’s good to connect and socialise.
I have always had a curious mind about how things work and are made. Fondly this comes from my Grandad and spending time in his workshop, tinkering on anything he could. At 17 I went to college and studied to be a mechanic, I ran my own iPhone repair business not because I wanted to be a mechanic or run an iPhone business; I just wanted to take things apart and see how they worked and then seen if I could put them back together again. The van is another extension of that. I’ve just signed up to a furniture design and construction course. I’m so keen to improve my carpentry skills for this van, our next van(s) and the rest of my life just because it’s a really useful skill to have, I love to design and create stuff, design fascinates me and I love the feeling of creating and building something that I made. Plus I love simple minimalist design and often things I find are just too complicated and not my taste.
Like many people I have things I struggle with. For me finances, decision making and productivity are three things that don’t come naturally to me. For most of my adult life I’ve struggled to budget and would have described myself as pretty bad with money until 2019 when I decided to change that and get my butt in gear. The van has been an amazing project for encouraging good financial habits for me. It’s helped me budget, manage budgets and reconcile expenses. We know exactly (like to the penny) how much we’ve spent on the van. We know what’s been spent on tools, materials, safety, decor, when it was spent, whether it was spent online or offline and where it was purchased from. The insights from this data also fascinates us and we’re so glad we made a point of tracking it. Decision making is not feared like it used to be. There’s nothing like a van build and the momentum of keeping a project going or grinding to halt to force you to think fast and make decisions. Bizarrely this is now something I enjoy whereas I would naturally avoid in the past.
Covid has made us all think about what we do in our spare time and how we spend it. I recently came across some information about self care. It talks about looking after yourself across five different areas Physical, Emotional, Spiritual, Social and Intellectual. An example of each would be movement, journalling/therapy, meditation, virtual meets, watching a documentary. Well guess what, converting a van ticks boxes for physical (the work you do) social (the chats you have – via text or zoom etc) intellectual (the learning, creating, designing, sharing and writing about)!
And we thought we were just buying a 12 year old white transit van for under £3K! I guess when you start something you really don’t know where you will end up but sometimes having the spontaneity to just say yes, to start something and leap into it with both feet and commit to it then following your instinct, do what you enjoy and see it through to the end is a great thing. So far we are absolutely loving it.
We cannot wait for the next 6 months, hopefully we will be allowed out and have more adventures!
Thanks for following our journey. Thanks for reading our stories. Aimee & Peter
Adventure Campervans. Camper van information and products. Sheffield. 