Yahoo Finance See how this man is living a minimal lifestyle in his Brooklyn-based van
Are you ready to ditch your house or apartment and live life on the road? That’s what Brooklyn van dweller Robb did and he couldn’t be happier! In this episode of In The Know: Extreme Minimalists, Robb explains, how after a health scare, he decided to transform a cargo van into a tiny home on wheels.
Robb first became interested in van life while recovering from colon cancer. “I was in the hospital and I wasn’t really able to move for about two weeks,” Robb tells In The Know. “Once I got hooked into the van life videos, I just went down a rabbit hole and just started clicking through all these videos people had.”
At first, Robb thought van life would be too expensive for him. But then, he discovered cargo vans. “They had Sprinters and school buses and all these different vehicles. I was like, ‘Oh, okay, that’s kind of unattainable,’” Robb recalls. “But then I found cargo vans. People were buying like $4,000 vans, $2,000 vans. I was like, ‘Oh, okay, that’s super attainable.’”
After leaving the hospital, Robb moved out of his apartment and into a cargo van. Over time, he transformed the van from a utilitarian space with little more than a mattress on the floor, to a beautifully converted tiny home with everything from a refrigerator to a full-sized bed. “This van has come a long way,” Robb says. “It [went from] a mattress, minimal electric system, to 18 different devices and 4 different lighting set-ups, so I’m really proud of how this van shaped up.”
After living in the van for a while, Robb was surprised by how few possessions he actually needed to feel comfortable. “At first, I had to get a storage unit and [eventually] I forgot what was in my storage unit,” he recalls. “I went back and I was like, ‘I don’t need any of this.’ So everything that’s in the van is everything that I own and that’s it.”
These days, Robb mostly parks his van near the East River in Brooklyn, New York. However, he loves the mobility that living in a van affords him. “If you’re sick of your street that you’ve parked on, you go somewhere else. If you need a break and you need to get out of the city, you can go somewhere else,” he explains. “It’s like a giant backpack and you can sleep in it too.”
Initially, Robb was embarrassed to tell people he lived in a van. But after talking to people about his experiences, he now realizes that most people view van life as an exciting adventure. “When I first moved out of the apartment, I used to lie to people. They’d be like, ‘Where’s your apartment?’ I’d be like, ‘Oh, it’s really far. It’s like not off a train [stop]. You have to take a bus to a train,’” he recalls. “Now it’s like, ‘Yeah, I live in a van.’ And they’re like, ‘Oh my god, that’s the coolest thing in the world.’”
The post See how this man is living a minimal lifestyle in his Brooklyn-based van appeared first on In The Know.
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