Our layout.

As far as the bus conversion goes, I’m confident in saying that the floorplan is the one thing that we are the most proud of. Before we bought the empty bus and quit our office jobs, we had 2 years to dream up the ✨perfect✨ layout.

Of course, what’s perfect for us won’t be perfect for everyone. I think the key to deciding on your ‘perfect’ layout is being realistic about what’s important to you. There will be a lot of trade-offs and choices, and as long as you stay true to what works for you, it’ll probably be fine!

Our controversial opinion.

When it comes to optimizing a living space, vanlifers are hands-down the #1 champs (usually). But, for the most part, we tried to avoid using multi-purpose furniture in our bus build.

There are a TON of ingenious ideas for convertible furniture setups in a van/bus build. We’ve seen dinette/couch combos, showers that fold down into the floor, beds on suspension systems, etc. Pretty much any combination you can think of, there’s someone out there who has done it in their conversion.

While we can 100% appreciate how cool that is, we know ourselves. And if we have to mess with a fitted sheet to convert our bed into a dinette for the day, then we might as well not even have a dinette. So many people are able to save space with convertible furniture, but we just didn’t feel it would work for us. So we devoted a lot of time to figuring out how to have everything we wanted, all at the same time.

Kitchen.

  • We went with the Dometic CFX3 75DZ, which to be honest was a bit overkill for us. Now don’t get me wrong, we really liked this fridge. It was super energy efficient (12V power, chest-style holds the cold air in), but it had way more space than we needed. And after a few months on the road, we realized that we didn’t really need a freezer either. Since this is a dual-compartment fridge, we just changed the temperature of the former freezer compartment and used it as a second fridge. So we definitely could have gone smaller, but you live and you learn!

  • If we thought our fridge was overkill, the fact that we included a microwave is undeniably bonkers. Our Electrical System could handle it no-problem (1 minute of using the microwave took ~1% from our total power supply), but our microwave was used almost exclusively for bags of popcorn. Seems like a lot of space to use just for popcorn . . .especially once you learn that we also had an air popper at the time. 😅

  • Our cooktop was our primary method of making food, and it honestly worked great! We connected it to a propane tank in a sealed box we stored in the garage. To be fair, we likely would have used an oven quite a bit if we’d installed one, but the stove can be used for so much that we didn’t really miss having an oven, at least most days.

  • Washing all of our dishes by hand is already painful enough, so having a large sink was important to us. We went with this kitchen sink and this faucet, and they both worked great!

The kitchen counter was built to be 7.5ft long, 3ft tall, and almost 2ft deep. That’s pretty big for a little bus, but honestly we could take up all of that space pretty easily, even with our simple meals. And we had plenty of food storage with our many overhead cabinets, the front ‘snack cabinet’, and even some back-up reserves under the couch.

The thing that really enabled us to have such a large kitchen was that we broke our own rule and built convertible furniture. 😊 A 3ft section of the kitchen countertop can flip up to reveal a 32in television mounted to the underside. This was simple enough to be worth it for us, and it’s really the best way we could come up with to have a ‘normal-sized’ TV without being a permanent eyesore. No regrets!

Bathroom & Shower.

  • After a good bit of research, we bought a Nature’s Head composting toilet because it seemed to prevent odors effectively, and we really didn’t want to deal with black water.

    If you’re unfamiliar with how a composting toilet works, there are two compartments, one for liquids, and another for solids. The solids are composted (with peat moss), and need to be emptied about every 6 weeks. The liquids tank needs to be emptied pretty frequently –daily for us. This is kind of what I was getting at when I referenced ‘making compromises’, but we still think this is the most pleasant way to accommodate having a toilet in a conversion!

  • Since our freshwater tanks are mounted outside, we would not have been able to use the shower for most of the year without some form of hot water. For our water heater, we went with one that was tankless, vent-free, and could connect to our propane tank. We stored it underneath our sink, and installed an extra CO2 monitor in the compartment for safety.

To live on the road, the bathroom is where the most compromises are made, at least from our experience! It’s tough to justify building a luxurious room with all the comforts of a house, when you’re only likely to spend a daily maximum of 30min in that space.

Since this was our first build, we wanted to play it very safe with the bathroom and shower area in terms of retaining comforts from our lives as apartment-dwellers. For that reason, we built in a permanent shower with fixed walls and a toilet.