The Van of My Dreams

It started with a dream, of weekends filled with bike racing and adventure. A warm place to have my friends in to play games, and a cozy place to sleep while in motion. It was 2021 and the van market was HOT. I didn’t have a lot of funds at the time but somehow happened to find a deal on this van. I had never done anything like it before but I figured that I could build anything, maybe foolishly? I mean…. it’s small, how hard could it be.

I got to work with a mockup trying to piece together a vision that prioritized space for bike storage, comfy sleeping space and enough space inside for friends to sit and hang inside during rainy bike race days. I found this amazing 3D software for vans and came up with a plan. I wish I had the millions of pages of notes of me scribbling out different ideas of which way things could be but it was definitely reminiscent of a mad scientist level energy.

The build itself took probably 20x as long as I expected it to. Every piece was a work of art, precisely cut and tetris-ed and planned to perfection. Some steps took forever and felt like no progress at all. Each portion was an entirely new skill I had not learned before that involved much youtube university. One million trips to home depot, hundreds of phone calls to friends with expertise and many many hours later, the van was complete.

The van was everything I hoped and dreamed it could be and then some.