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Writer's pictureAlino

(Sprinter van interior) Empty Nester Downsized VanLife.



After their kids moved out of the house, Rich and Heather decided to downsize and renovated a sprinter van as their new adventure home on wheels. Take and tour and learn how this couple is adjusting to van life.

“I am Rich and this is my wife Heather. we're in pastebin Park outside of Austin Texas. we'd love to take some time to show you our diy campervan conversion plans. We really got to this point about four years ago. We saw a documentary on Netflix about tiny homes.”


It really made question why you know I was paying for a full mortgage and why we had all this stuff and we knew that when the kids got out of the house we're not going to need

a four-bedroom house a swimming pool and all that so we started looking into tiny homes. Originally, we decided it's really going to be difficult to do that, we were worried about the logistics of moving it around finding parking and it seemed like a kind of a stressful thing.

“When we looked at all that we were thinking you know let's downsize as empty nesters for a few years. We kind of have this window between when the kids get out of school and when they kind of find their way figure out where they're gonna end up you know. We're gonna be mobile for a few years kind of see where things go. Van life's the perfect way to do that. We bought our sprinter van house brand-new from the factory it's about $55,000 for Sprinter with the four-wheel drive package."

The price to convert the van for materials only was about $22,000-$23,000. It's a long tedious process, it really is. We estimated about 900 hours of work between the two of us 30 weekend's over, a year to build it yourself or to have it built. Mean first is going to be financial: what can you afford are you willing to take the time to do it right and to research it and if you're willing to put in that time then you can come up with a really nice van.


We wrote it on a napkin and then we made it happen. Yeah look at it! It looks exactly like we thought and it's just a great feeling really. The van life is going to be the financial aspects of it and the freedom… We married young, we had kids young you know so we were kind of tied down since the beginning and we really want to go an adventure now before we get to retirement age, we got to get out there and do what we can do well.

We can do it and have our adventures now, we don't want to wait you know. I think van life makes that possible for us.



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1 Comment


Julia Schultz Hellerman
Julia Schultz Hellerman
Nov 21, 2020

I'm so curious about the ceiling in this sprinter van. Any way to get a little info about it?

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