When I bought the van, I had absolutely no experience converting one.

I’d never insulated a van. I’d never fitted ply lining. I’d never installed solar. I’d never built furniture. In fact, if you’d told me a year earlier that I’d be living in a self-converted van, I’d probably have laughed.

Yet somehow, here I was.

The van itself was just an empty shell. A large white delivery van that had spent its previous life carrying other people’s things around the country.

My challenge was to turn it into a place where I could live.

Not a luxury camper.

Not something that would end up featured in a magazine.

Just a practical, affordable home that would allow me to reduce my costs and focus on getting out of debt.

Like most people these days, I started with YouTube.

I spent hours watching van conversion videos. Some people watch Netflix. I watched people insulate vans.

Three creators in particular became regular viewing: Will’s Whereabouts, Love Sundays and Greg Virgoe.

What I liked about them was that they felt realistic.

There are plenty of channels showing £100,000+ conversions with every gadget imaginable. They look amazing, but they weren’t what I was trying to build.

I wasn’t trying to build my dream van.

I was trying to build a better future.

Greg Virgoe’s channel was especially useful when it came to understanding the technical side of things. Electrical systems, solar, batteries, wiring – all the things that seemed completely overwhelming when I first started.

Will’s Whereabouts and Love Sundays helped me see the practical side of van life. The reality rather than the fantasy.

The more I watched, the more I realised there wasn’t one right way to convert a van.

There was only the way that worked for you.

The first stage was sound deadening.

It isn’t particularly exciting, and it certainly doesn’t make for dramatic before-and-after photographs, but it was one of the first things I tackled.

An empty van is noisy.

Every panel seems to vibrate.

Every bump in the road echoes around the metal shell.

Adding sound deadening immediately made the van feel more solid and less industrial.

It was one of those jobs where you don’t fully appreciate the difference until it’s done.

After that came insulation.

Again, not glamorous.

Nobody looks at a completed van and says, “That’s excellent insulation.”

But when you’re trying to sleep on a cold winter night, you appreciate it.

I knew from the start that I intended to stay in the van through winter. If I was going to make this lifestyle work, I needed to give myself the best chance possible.

So the insulation went in.

Then came the ply lining.

For me, that was the stage where everything started to feel real.

The bare metal walls disappeared.

The inside started looking less like a commercial vehicle and more like somewhere a person might actually live.

I could finally begin to picture the finished result.

Or at least what I thought the finished result would be.

The truth is, the van wasn’t finished when I moved into it.

Far from it.

I reached a point where I had a choice.

I could wait until everything was perfect.

Or I could move in and continue building.

Looking back, moving in before the conversion was finished was one of the best decisions I made.

Living in the van taught me things that no amount of planning ever could.

It quickly became obvious which ideas were useful and which weren’t.

Things I thought would be essential turned out to be unnecessary.

Other things that I’d barely considered suddenly became priorities.

The van evolved because I was living in it.

Every improvement solved a real problem.

Every addition had a purpose.

I wasn’t building a show van.

I was building a home.

The funny thing is that the conversion followed the same pattern as my debt journey.

Neither happened overnight.

Neither required perfection.

Both were built through small, consistent steps.

One weekend I would fit some insulation.

Another weekend I’d work on storage.

Then there would be a period where I simply lived in it and worked out what needed changing next.

The debt worked in much the same way.

One payment.

One decision.

One month at a time.

People sometimes ask me whether living in a van was difficult.

The answer is yes.

Of course it was.

There are inconveniences.

There are compromises.

There are days when it would be easier to have a conventional home.

But there is another side to that equation.

The van gave me something that my previous lifestyle wasn’t giving me.

Progress.

Every month I wasn’t paying rent was another month I could put money towards clearing debt.

Every improvement I made increased my comfort without increasing my financial burden.

The van became a tool.

Not just somewhere to live, but something that helped me move towards a different future.

Today, when I sit inside it, I don’t really see the cupboards, the insulation or the solar panel.

I see every decision that led here.

I see the moment I stopped waiting for things to improve and started making changes myself.

The conversion wasn’t perfect.

In many ways, it still isn’t finished.

But neither am I.

And perhaps that’s the point.

Both the van and I are works in progress.