Scott Fillmer

I started a new category, Offgrid, on the blog a while back and I’m finally getting around to posting content to it. Thinking “off-grid” is about thinking outside the box, not living like Davey Crocket or something like that. There are so many different ways to “thinking offgrid,” but for us, it’s about how do we live with less, to be content with less. More on that later.

Most recently, we bought a model 2000 Ford Econoline E250 to convert it into a camper van. It may be the cool #vanlife hashtag now, but we have done this before when we converted a Greyhound Bus into an RV. So we were cool way before it was cool, maybe. But even before that, my wife and I both have photos of ourselves in our family’s camper vans traveling across the United States in the 1970’s, now that was van life at it’s prime!

Fast forward to 2022 and we had this great opportunity to pick up this van that had been in our extended family for about 15 years and realized that this has the potential to make a great camper van. Our present plans are to start work on this van conversion where we can take it camping or travel the roads without having to rent a car, get a hotel room, or any of that nonsense that accompanies travel today.

We are just getting started on this particular project, journey. I’m guessing this will take the better part of a year, but who ever knows. These photos are when we picked up the van. The first step is to take out all the seats and all the interior materials and go from there. Right now plans are to make the back third into sleeping quarters, a galley on the port side, lav on the starboard side, and to make it as self-sufficient as possible.

Video Update

I’ll have more updates here as the project progresses. I know there are tons of conversion van projects going on out there in the wild right now. If you are in the middle of one send some links over my way, I would love to see your progress as well. The video above is from wife’s YouTube channel, she will be chronicling the video side of things while I do the writing.