Living our best vanlife

How good is vanlife?! We had been thinking about building a van to live, travel and chase amazing photos in for quite a while but kept saying ‘one day, we’ll…’ and kept putting it off. Untill one day we just decided to go for it. 

Next thing we know, we found ourselves on a plane up to Gold Coast to purchase the perfect van (we named him Gigi Gerrardo) and drove back to Sydney the same day. Those 9 hours on the road back were awesome, we were full of excitement and already planning how we’re going to tackle the challenge of converting this ex-delivery van into a tiny home that’s gonna take us around Australia + who knows where else. That was November 2019...

Full of optimism, and HUGE lack of experience we set ourselves a deadline to leave Sydney in March 2019. Safe to say, we missed that deadline and many others and only managed to finish the build in November 2019!

Yep, it took us a year to finish it working most weekends and some nights after work. Mind you we build it all on the street right next to our apartment building in Manly, we became quite an attraction with many people paying us a visit during our build.

We had absolutely ZERO experience going into it and learned everything along the way mainly from YouTube so it was a challenging year, but definitely worth all the sweat, blood & tears!

Coming up with an amazing design and learning how to turn it into reality was just one part of the challenge. We were also determined to build everything without the use of any toxic materials that would off-gas for many years to come. It just makes so much sense, living in such a tiny space, we just didn’t want to be exposed to all the dangerous and sometimes highly toxic chemicals - which there are PLENTY in a lot of everyday building materials!

How did we go? 

The guys at Apartment Therapy seem to like what we've built, they even decided to shoot a video of us for one of their 'Tiny Living' series (you can watch it below), plus wrote this article about us as well. 

Let us know what you think :)