Charlie and Dale’s Climbing Van Tiny House Project

We are Charlie & Dale, two climbers from Bristol in the UK.

In January 2019 we took the plunge and bought our bright yellow ex-DHL van called Ringo, and started to convert it into a campervan. For the previous year, we had spent a lot of time designing and planning our build, deciding exactly what layout we wanted and all of the features that we would install. We are both climbers and ever since we met we had both dreamed of having a little climbing home on wheels to take wherever we wanted to climb.

We spent just over 12 months converting the van, and completed the entire build ourselves, from electrics to plumbing to all of the woodwork.

We have backgrounds in design, engineering and science so we had a good basis to start on, but neither of us had much practical experience in doing anything like this before, so we spent many hours trawling the internet and learning exactly how to do all the different parts of the build.

We wanted to create a space that was functional as well as beautiful.

So we made sure to design in enough storage and clever features so that we could maximize the space in our campervan and it would be comfortable to live in full time. Packed into out LWB Sprinter campervan is an L shaped kitchen with a 4 ring hob and a big Belfast sink, a ‘cloakroom’ complete with shoe storage, coat hooks, and even a ‘poop shovel'(!), a ‘bedroom’ with a full-sized double bed, an openable bedside table with extra storage and a bookcase across the back of the van, a seating area that doubles as a second bed and also has a pull-out table, and a ‘garage’ with enough storage space for all of our climbing gear and even an outdoor shower setup! We have 300W solar panels and 360Ah batteries, as well as a big 25L LPG tank and a 70L water tank so we can be completely off-grid while we travel around working and climbing.

After we finished our build, we wanted to create a resource to help others looking to convert their own van.

We spent so many hours reading about different parts of our build online and could never find all of the information we needed in one place. We created a website to share the knowledge we gained throughout our build, so others could have a single source of reference whilst converting their own van. We have also created a layout configurator tool to help people find the perfect layout for their conversion.