My first tiny van & my start of the vanlife journey

With all these cute and cozy pictures of the vans you see on Instagram – someone sitting in there watching the sunrise or sunset near the ocean with a cup of coffe or tea, it looks way to good to not try it yourself, right?

When I started my vanlife journey for the first time, I made it very simple. I was living in Australia and already had a Suzuki Swift, which is a very tiny car. I was looking around for something bigger but didn’t really know what to look for and all the build vans out there had already been driven many kilometers, which usually results in more problems than a new one.

Finally, I ended up camping for a night or two in my little car, just to try it out. With the back seats felt down and a small mattress with some blankets and a pillow, I was ready to go! When I came back from my little camping trip, I was sold. I decided to make this little car my new home and since it was possible for me to stretch out properly at the back, I felt like this could work. The comfort was still very important to me since I was going to live in the car full time. My back seats where taken out and I cut a foam mattress in the right size of the car and put it in. With these simple steps, my bed was done!

Now I needed somewhere to put my stuff, like clothes, cuttlery and all other things I owned. Let’s say the space under the mattress where you have your feet while sitting in the back seat, where packed with stuff. Haha! If you know how to play the game Tetris, then you will do this without any problems. If not, then you know how to play it after trying this. Of course I had to get rid of some things to be able to fit everything in the car, even if it wasn’t really that much since I was already living very minimalistic before. My passenger front seat became the other store space. It may sound like the whole inside of my car looked very messy but I must say I got everything to look pretty good.

This was the best picture I could find when it was almost finished. I did change some things after this so click HERE to see the end result on Instagram!

I didn’t want to make things too complicated since it was my first car converting into a home and even if I had been on a few camping trips before moving in full time into it, I still wasn’t sure if I wanted to keep doing this for a long time. Then you can’t even do or build that much in such a small space anyway.

So, this turned out to be an amazing experience for me and I loved almost every day of it. Like many people do, they name their car or van, so I named my little tiny one ”Alf”. I was living like this for a year and would have continued if I didn’t sold the car and left the country. Now I got to experience all these sunrises and sunsets and I must say it was incredible! I knew then, this wasn’t the last time I was going to live like this. It was the beginning of a new lifestyle.