Faith the Ford - Introduction

Who are we?

We are Kez and James and this is the start of our document journey, where we are converting a 2015 Ford Transit L2H3 on our driveway whilst working full-time. 

At the beginning of October 2023 we cemented the idea of wanting to join the #VanLife lifestyle. From then we did months of research into how to convert a van and the best one that would suit our needs, AND, of course, lots of money planning, saving and trying to determine how we would afford to fund this new journey.

It wasn’t until the end of 2023 that we finally purchased our first van, Faith, who is a 2015 Ford Transit, L2H3 (more on this below) and JUST fits on our driveway.

What's this blog about?

We are aiming to document each step of the process so that we can not only take a look at what we achieved (hopefully) when everything is finished and complete, but also to provide all of you an easy-to-follow and very in-depth walkthrough of what we did (whether that be right or wrong! As you will find out there are a lot of conflicting opinions of different stages in the van community). We want to be as transparent as possible, showing you all of the good, bad and the ugly that came out of us converting this van into something beautiful.

When doing our research we found that some things just weren’t documented, such as installing a reverse camera and parking sensors, which meant multiple searches on different pages and trying to join the pieces together, we’re not saying that this blogumentation is going to remove that completely, but we will aim to explain everything so that you aren’t left confused like we have been at stages!

For those of you that are new to the van conversion process, welcome, you are in for a ride. To those that are already familiar we hope we can help your knowledge or your journey with these 😀.

To get Faith to a state that we were able to begin working!

Our First Mission

Our first mission was to take Faith back to a bare canvas so that we could asses the underlying state and determine what we needed to do. We were chuffed to already have her in a semi converted state but just wanted to make sure that the flooring had been done in the best and most long-lasting way possible. Therefore, we started by taking up the old plywood flooring to see what was underneath.

You should’ve seen the look on our faces when we realised that the flooring had already been insulated and that rust protection had already been started! Thankfully too, the beams that were down for the flooring weren’t screwed into the subfloor and were instead Sikkaflex’d which is plenty strong enough. This is the route that we had planned to take so we were very thankful that there were no unnecessary holes in the floor.

After knowing the state of the flooring underneath it was time for us to begin rust protection (as there were some missed areas) and to add in a few extra support beams to the flooring. You can read more about installing a subfloor here.

Van Size Breakdown

L2H3 breakdown.

If you’re confused about what these random assortment of letters and numbers mean, don’t be, once they’re broken down they’re relatively simple to understand. We are currently writing a van jargon blog so stay tuned for that!

In most cases, if not all, the first 2 characters (in this case L2) represent the length of the van and the second 2 (H3) represent the height. They are conveniently labelled with L for ‘L’ength and H for ‘H’eight so if they are the other way around you will always know.

The length ranges from 1-4 and the height ranges from 1-3. 

L1 – Short wheel base (SWB)

L2 – Medium length (MWB)

L3 – Long length

L4 – Extra long length

The easiest way to think about it is in terms of a matrix (a table), where any joining cells is a combination of van type.

These sizes generalize the vans that you can search for, however, between manufacturers the actual length and height will vary slightly between, so this is worth taking into consideration.

Throughout the process we will aim to give you a brief description of what we are attempting to do, the generalised steps of the process so you can skip ahead, the actual process of what we did, then followed by lessons learnt / what would we do differently the next time round. We will also give you the rough cost of the process and be as transparent as possible.