With a little creativity and some hard work, anything is possible. One young couple proved that when they bought a van and built it into their dream home.
Jessie Biser and her software engineer partner, Christopher Kelly, have spent the last 18 months traveling the world in their home, a Ram ProMaster van. The two first met in Atlanta when Chris moved there from Massachusetts for a new job. They were together just eight months when they purchased the van for $40,000.
From January 2019 to January 2020, the two worked on turning it from a bare van into a home on wheels so they could embark on their expedition.
"One day, shortly after we started dating, I mentioned I had the bucket list item to live in a van for a summer," Jessie, who is originally from Minnesota, told Newsflare.
Chris initially thought the idea was outlandish, but as he thought more about it and did some research, he started getting into the idea himself.
"We both love seeing new places, spending time outdoors and don't need a whole lot of physical things to be happy," he shared.
"I had been thinking about living in a van for a while but originally envisioned just living out of an SUV/smaller van for summer and not making a tiny home-on-wheels but when Chris said he was interested and that he wanted to go all-in with a shower, oven, toilet, etc., I was extremely excited," Jessie shared.
"My small dream soon turned into something big and great."
The two did all the renovations themselves, with the help of YouTube "how to" videos. In total, it cost around $18,000 to do the renovations.
"We did all of the build ourselves which saved us money on labor. We only had nights and weekends to renovate with only one Ryobi tool kit from Home Depot and a borrowed table saw for a few weeks, but everything else was done by hand. The whole thing took us about a year to complete but we were 90 percent finished after about seven months."
