DIY PAINTING CONVERSION VAN – VANLIFE

Overall, project was a success and we’re very happy how it came out. Would we do it again? Probably not! It took just too much of our time and van had to sit there in a driveway for days for paint to dry, and it required a lot more work then we expected, with 5 people working on it, it still took us 10 days, so NO, we will not be painting a vehicle again, especially not one of the biggest vehicles on the market hah. But you know, we’re still glad we’ve done it once, but NOT AGAIN!

Everyone told us, DON’T DO IT!  We did it anyways, We painted the whole van with rollers and spray gun. One of the main reasons we painted a van was because when we bought it, it was a used van, and previously it had some stickers on both sides, so once they were removed, it left really weird three shades of white on both sides of the van, rather then trying to fix it, we just decided to paint the whole thing in a color we really liked, GRAY. 

We’ve seen quite a few cool looking converted vans, and a lot of them had this exact gray color, so we knew we wanted it to look like that.
Steps were pretty simple once we’ve done our research and gathered materials:
– Sand down shine from previous paint to make it adherable for new paint
– Protect every piece that you don’t want painted(windows, tires, trim etc.)
– Slowly start painting(primer then finish paint)

This project took us 10 days, part of the reason was that we first try to do the whole job with rollers haha, don’t get me wrong, it’s doable but it takes forever, especially with our van being one of the biggest on the market. We have managed to roll on a coat of primer completely with rollers, it took about 2 days with 5 of us doing the work.

Once primer dried out, you have sand it down again with really fine sand paper(we used 800 grit i think). Sanding was like a nightmare, everyone hated it. But we were half way into it, so quitting was not an option.

You can check out our full video of painting our van from white to gray on our YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/ILg4P4Tia5M
Below is a slideshow of photos of the process and how final project looked like, let us know what you think via comments on YouTube video

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