Our Van Life Timeline: How Long We’ve Been Planning

As I write this, Sean and I are just over a week away from embarking on full-time van life with our cattle dog in tow. I could not be more excited! (It’s taking all my self control to resist ending every sentence with an exclamation point.) Ahh!

Lately I’ve gotten a lot of questions about our timeline for hitting the road. It’s been years since we first planted the seed of “hey, wouldn’t it be cool to live in a van?” in each other’s minds — and I’ve shared about our plans on Instagram throughout. Turns out some members of our community have also been feeling like it’s taking forever 😉

So here’s a look at our van life timeline, from start to finish. When did we initially start dreaming, put down deposits, and bring our rig home?

(You can read more frequently asked questions about our van plans in this article from last month, if you’re curious!)

High level overview of our van life timeline

• Late 2019: Sean and I started daydreaming about van life. It was a distant fantasy.
• 2020: We moved in together and continued casually imagining life on the road. Over the next months we started more seriously investigating living in a van as an actual possibility.
• Middle 2021: We started looking into van conversion companies.
• November 2021: We started designing our van build and put down a deposit to secure our conversion slot.
• December 2022: A year later — after so much waiting — our build finally started!
• January 2023: Sean picked up Hermes the van on January 9th. We plan to hit the road full time by the end of the month!

Late 2019: Daydreaming about a distant van life fantasy

My dad and I had long talked (in the lofty voices that make it clear we were never really being serious) about how cool it would be to live in a VW Bus or RV and travel the country. He gave me a love for camping and all the little wonders of nature growing up. Living at a Thai elephant sanctuary for a few months after graduating college magnified that sentiment — and coupled with my resistance to the idea of “settling down” after I called off my emotionally abusive long-term relationship, it was a great recipe for wanderlust.

When Sean and I started dating in August 2018, neither of us had any idea what we wanted life to look like long term. Over time we learned more about each other — and ourselves — and started daydreaming about traveling in a van.

I distinctly remember one of our first conversations about the topic, sitting on the bed in my freezing Madison, Wisconsin apartment in the middle of winter, Scout curled up by our feet, falling deeply down the #vanlife rabbit hole on YouTube and Instagram. I was in awe. Living on the road was no longer a pipe dream to joke about with my father. It was a real thing that real people did.

Sean and I thought having our own van sounded incredible and joked that maybe we could do it by the time we were 27.(This was an entirely arbitrary date, five years into the future, just to illustrate that it could be a “someday” thing.)

2020: Do we really want to do this van thing?

In the spring of 2020 Sean and I moved to Florida for a job offer he couldn’t refuse. My company agreed to let me work remotely, which got my wheels spinning even more — of all the careers out there, copywriting is especially easy to do from anywhere with an internet connection.

Then came the coronavirus pandemic. We made it to our new state by April but everything was locked down, giving us more time than ever to daydream and fantasize and maybe, just maybe, actually plan.

Both of us still loved the idea of van life. It was at this point that we started to investigate it more seriously, reading articles and watching videos with the mindset of “would this be a good fit for us” rather than just “oh my goodness this is so cool”.

We found more and more things to consider — finances, logistics, all of it — but we never wavered in thinking it was something we wanted to pursue. By the end of 2020 our actual plan and timeline was still completely up in the air, but both of us felt confident that yes, living in a van absolutely was something we wanted to do.

(You can read an older article Sean wrote about why we decided on van life here.)

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A post shared by Haley 👩🏼‍💻 (dog nerd, writer) | Scout 🐺 (@paws.andreflect)

2021: Logistics and deciding what conversion company to work with

Come 2021, we purchased our house not far from our previous apartment. Owning rather than renting seemed like the best financial decision for where we were — and thanks to our price range, we got to experience the joys (and mostly the woes) of renovating before we moved in 😂

I’d already doubted whether or not a DIY van build was in the cards for us someday. This experience cemented the fact that while we could do it on our own, that route wasn’t going to bring us much joy.

As the year went on, we continued thinking about van life, creating what felt like a million budget spreadsheets, and scheming about our timeline. We came to realize we could do it even earlier than we’d imagined — within the next few years, not some distant future date! — if we planned things right.

Summer was filled with phone calls to conversion companies and research about van models and an underlying buzz of excitement. We finally settled on Rossmonster out in Colorado (in part because Sean’s best friend lives nearby). By the fall we had a rough idea of what we wanted our build to look like.

(Details on the initial thought process behind our layout decisions in this article.)

November 2021: Deposits made — no turning back!

And in November… we made a deposit to secure our build slot! This was the moment it first started to feel real, just a little bit, like maybe we were actually going to make this thing happen, this far-off dream we’d started to consider two full years ago.

We told our friends and family it was “official” with no turning back. I shared our first official Instagram feed post (not just story slides of daydreaming) about how I’d been thinking about preparing Scout for our new lifestyle.

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A post shared by Haley 👩🏼‍💻 (dog nerd, writer) | Scout 🐺 (@paws.andreflect)

Then when Paws and Reflect grew larger than I ever could have imagined, I left my full-time marketing agency job in December to go out on my own as a freelance dog writer. The ability to completely set my own schedule was something we’d hoped to have by the time we moved into the van. It all felt too good to be true.

(Sean wrote a bit more about turning our dream into an actual plan in this older blog.)

December 2022: Our van build began (ahead of schedule)

Then came the waiting game.

We had a few more calls with Rossmonster to confirm our design details — and we got to do fun things like finalize cabinet colors and choose the floor material and daydream destinations and select Scout’s travel crate and start to condense our belongings — but by and large 2022 required us to just sit back and wait for our time to come. Good thing we were plenty distracted with our wedding (!!!) and several foster dogs 😉

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A post shared by Haley 👩🏼‍💻 (dog nerd, writer) | Scout 🐺 (@paws.andreflect)

Just before Thanksgiving in 2022, our conversion company called to say they had some openings in their schedule and would start our build early. We were ecstatic! We got the first photos of our van in their shop the week after the holiday and eagerly checked the shared Google Drive folder multiple times a day. (Yeah, it was overkill on our end… but we were like kids on Christmas Eve).

It was wonderful to see the process unfold as new things were added every day. When all was said and done, Sean was able to pick up our van to bring home the very same day the build was initially supposed to start. A gift indeed!

January 2023: Hermes is home!

Early on January 11th, Sean arrived home from his visit to Colorado… in an obnoxiously bright yellow van that is everything I could have hoped for. We’ve spent the past few days pinching ourselves, taking entirely too many photos, and wrapping up the last details before we hit the road.

We plan to be living in Hermes full time by the end of the month! We’re meeting family across the state for my mom’s birthday celebration this weekend and will make final adjustments once we get back next week before driving away for good.

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A post shared by Haley 👩🏼‍💻 (dog nerd, writer) | Scout 🐺 (@paws.andreflect)

Why did it take so long to get ready for van life?

Some days I feel like it’s taken absolutely forever for our van to get here. We’ve been dreaming for so long! I’ve spent so many nights lying awake! The months of waiting have seemed endless!

Other days? I’m in awe that we’re going to be living on the road so much earlier than we initially imagined. It took just over three years to turn our first conversations about a van into an an actual reality. When I think about everything that went into the process — all our discussions, questions, financial projections, savings decisions, cost-benefit analyses, spreadsheets, phone calls, on and on and on — it seems pretty darn fast.

At the end of the day: We’ve looked at our van as “our dream home” and wanted to make sure it was truly what we wanted — and that we were fully prepared to embrace it.

Time to see if we really have our heads around this thing as well as we think we do 😉