Project Van: Our VW T5 camper conversion

If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll know that we made an incredibly exciting (and rather terrifying) purchase a few weeks ago. This is our new (to us) VW T5, and I still can’t quite believe it’s ours! We’ve day-dreamed about owning our own camper van for years, but I don’t think either of us ever really thought it would actually happen. But it has. Ben’s car completely died on us, and this rather accelerated the whole thing, and we are now the very proud owners of a 2014 T5 Transporter. The van has been named – Algie (short for Algernon) – named after the ‘LG’ at the start of his numberplate, and we’re all already besotted.

So what’s the plan? At the moment, Algie is just a standard panel van, and we’ll be converting the van into a camper to sleep all four of us. It’ll be a slow process – we want to do as much of the work ourselves, both to save money and hopefully to create a non-standard DIY van interior and do something a bit different. There are a couple of big jobs that need doing pronto – Algie has gone in this week to have all the windows fitted (Ben was tempted to do this himself, but I drew the line at a job that involves cutting huge holes in the size of our rather expensive van), and then next week we’re getting the rock and roll bed (and back seat) put in, as at the moment there aren’t enough seats for all four of us to travel in the van together!

Obviously, while Ben is fully immersed in technical research, my focus is all about what the interior is going to look like. I’ve had a ‘for the camper van we’ll own one day’ Pinterest board on the go for ages, but now we’ve got a van to convert, I’ll really start using the board to hone the design.

I’ll be sharing the conversion story here, and you can also follow along on IG, where Algie has his own account – YoungVanAdventures. We are so excited, not only to have a new project, but also about all the trips we’ll have – we expect Algie to be a big part of family life for many years to come.

So far, we’ve removed the original interior panelling and floor, applied insulation and sound-deadening to the lower walls and floor, and installed a new ply floor. None of us can wait to see Algie with his windows at the end of this week – the van will suddenly feel so much more like a camper!