We love to cook. Cooking is one of our favorite hobbies, so having a workable kitchen is important to us to make any space feel like home. Fortunately, Beatrix has plenty of room for our culinary endeavors! So here’s a brief glimpse into the thought process and design behind our van kitchen!
Counter, Cabinets and drawers
Keeping organized is super important in such a small space so we wanted to maximize our storage space for food, toiletries, cleaning supplies, etc. We spent a lot of time throwing around ideas for different layouts and ultimately settled on one that we thought would suit our needs.
It includes a sink and a small counter on the driver’s side, with a tall cabinet in front of that. On the passenger side is the stove on top of a shorter cabinet.
We had several large items to work around including a refrigerator, water/greywater tanks, and a propane tank, so we worked backwards from there. We started with the sink side, and using similar construction techniques to our bed this is what we ended up with →
The cabinet on the left is large enough to fit two 6-gallon water tanks (one for fresh water and one for greywater). The gap in the middle is for a small refrigerator, which left room for two drawers above that.
The tall cabinet on the right is our primary storage and is separated into two cabinets with several shelves. The drawers were straightforward to build with scrap wood and simple drawer slides but very difficult to get perfectly straight. That might have been the most frustrating part of this project yet!
Stove / Cabinet
Next up was the stove structure. I’ve been unimpressed with most available RV stoves. Fortunately we already have a propane camp stove that we’re in love with, so it was just a matter of building the structure underneath it. This was simple enough as the only thing we had to work around was the 20-lb propane tank, which we connected to the stove with a bulk tank adapter. The cabinet underneath gives us a place to store large items like pots and pans, as well as extra water.
After finishing the basic stove structure, we felt like something was missing and decided it would be really cool to be able to cook outside as well. When we completed the back of the cabinet, we built it so that it folds down into a little outdoor cooking surface/prep table!
Sink and Water
Running water is such a luxury. Almost too much of a luxury if you ask me. Buuuut we wanted to install a water filter so that we don’t have to buy purified water through central and south America, and that requires pressurized water. Luckily it ended up being really simple. We bought a small prep sink and a Shurflo RV water pump. Any faucet will work but for this small space we bought a small, low profile faucet with a sprayer. For our water and graywater reservoirs we used Reliance 6 gallon water jugs due to their narrow profile, and we keep a spare under the stove. With a trip to home depot to pick up some tubing and adapters, some teflon tape to seal up the connections, and a couple hours of fiddling with it, voila! Running water!
Several months later we installed a water purifier from SAFH2O. It includes a ceramic membrane filter followed by a UV lamp to remove or kill anything that could possibly harm us. This will allow us so much more freedom to stay off grid, collecting water from streams or questionable taps when we need to without worry.
Refrigerator
The final piece of the puzzle was the refrigerator. We don’t need very much refrigerator space as most foods actually don’t need to be refrigerated, but we did want something to hold meat, leftovers, and beer. Many people use a 12v portable refrigerator such as a Dometic or Arb but after some research, I saw a few problems with those options:
- Price. Good god these things are expensive. The bottom-end ones start at around $500, but generally you’re looking at closer to $800. That’s a lot of travel time when you’re living on a budget.
- Efficiency. They are more efficient than running a 120v mini-fridge but still pretty power hungry. They are designed to be light and portable, thus their insulation is crap.
- Repairability. These things use very specialized parts that we definitely won’t be able to find once we leave the US. We are expecting every single thing we bring to break at least once.
Fortunately, I came across a better solution via the Reddit r/vandwellers community. The idea is to buy a 120v mini freezer (not refrigerator) and run it as a refrigerator. Being a freezer, it has much better insulation than a refrigerator, so it won’t need to run as much. But it takes a little bit of fancy wiring and understanding of electricity.
The simplified version is this: the freezer is powered by an inverter connected to the battery. To keep the freezer at the temperature of a refrigerator, a thermostat is installed with a probe in the freezer. The temperature controller is then connected to a relay (an electrically controlled switch). The thermostat activates the relay when it detects the freezer warming past a certain temperature. So in my case when the temperature gets warmer than 40F, the temperature controller activates the relay, which turns on the inverter, which powers the freezer. When it drops below 38F, it all shuts off. Brilliant!
This setup is cheaper (about $200), easier to fix/replace parts, and actually more efficient than a 12v refrigerator! Rather than get into an exact tutorial I’ll just link you to the original post where I found the idea. I found this mini freezer which is considerably more efficient than all of the other freezers of the same size that I have seen.
Conclusion
There are lots of other little details going into the kitchen but that is the general gist of how we built it. Like this whole project it was a perfect balance between Stephanie’s eye for design and my technical engineery nerdiness. So far, we’ve cooked some pretty elaborate meals in it and it has all worked perfectly, so we are pretty stoked to say the least.
Have some good van kitchen hacks or delicious recipes? Let us know!!
-James
Products we used:
Stansport Outfitter stove