Building a camper van requires a lot of time, patience, and—most importantly—creativity. After all, you’re trying to create a comfortable and efficient living space inside a relatively small area. To do that, you often have to think outside the box in order to find a way to get everything to fit inside the vehicle. That is exactly what YouTuber DualEx went through when he installed a kitchen in his Ford Transit Connect.
In the video above, DualEx takes us through the entire build process, from conception to completion. For this project, he had his sister—an expert on building wood furniture—create the countertop using pieces of olive wood held together with epoxy. While she worked on that, he focused on building a storage cabinet, drawers, and other features.
Photo Credit: DualEx
Throughout the video, viewers watch the entire project come together while seeing exactly how the components that make up the kitchen were constructed. When it’s finished, the kitchen fits nicely into the back of the van in an otherwise-unused space located beneath the bed. When it comes time to prepare a meal, the entire thing slides out from the rear of the vehicle, creating a full-featured outdoor kitchen.
In addition to one of the coolest countertops you’ll ever see in an RV, the kitchen includes a two-burner electric stove that can convert to propane if necessary. It also has a small sink attached to a five-gallon water jug, for easy clean-up, with a second water jug acting as a greywater tank. There is even a removable hose that can double as an outdoor shower in a pinch.
Photo Credit: DualEx
While the video itself isn’t a full tutorial on building the kitchen, it provides plenty of footage to help convey how it was put together. To make things easier on viewers, DualEx does offer free downloadable plans for this project, along with numerous others.
Even if you’re not building your own camper van, there is a lot of interesting content on the DualEx YouTube channel that RVers and vanlifers are sure to enjoy. You may even find a few ideas that you can use to spruce up your vehicle.
