What is Part Time Vanlife?

Part time vanlife is exactly what it sounds like: it’s when someone travels and lives in a van, but not all of the time. The rest of the time, that person lives in a bigger home (that probably doesn’t have wheels). Even if minimal time is spent at home or a home base, that little logistical difference has a pretty big impact. In some ways, part time vanlife is drastically easier than full time. In other ways, it can be fairly disruptive.

How is Part Time Vanlife Different?

Having a home base – be it a room, apartment, condo, single family home, or a portion of a family member or friend’s home – has both pros and cons. It can make some vanlife logistics simple, like having an address for your mail, but other elements can be harder, like the disruption of your routine going back and forth. There are many pros and cons to living part time vanlife. Here are a few we’ve discovered:

Pros of Part Time Vanlife

Part time vanlife gives you a balance of being on the move and settling down

• With part time vanlife, we’re able to experience the best of both worlds: we have a home base where we keep the non-essentials that make life easier. It’s a place we can retreat to when being in the van gets exhausting. But when we get restless being in one place, we’ve got the ability to easily pack up, go, and wake up in nature the next morning. It’s the perfect combination of adventure and rest.

Having a home base makes many vanlife logistics simple

• When it comes to a mailing address, package delivery, van registration, and insurance (both health and auto), having a home base or home address makes logistics simpler than being on the road full time. It’s essentially the same as living in a home full time, just with the need to occasionally hold or forward your mail.
• Having a regular mechanic in your home location can be a huge stress relief. If you know and trust a regular mechanic, there’s less need to worry about whether the shop you found on the road is honest, reliable, or overly expensive (until you break down, that is – but a regular mechanic helps!).
• The ability to store things is a huge pro for part time vanlife. Do we have the necessities with us in the van? Yes. But what do you do with the non-essentials that you just can’t get rid of? Things like your grandma’s trinkets and books, old photos, or maybe the antique drafting table that you use for work, but not everyday (ok, the drafting table is probably just us)? For us, those things stay at home. We’re all about a minimal lifestyle – we downsized from our single family home to a townhouse several years ago – but there are definitely things we want to hold on to that can’t be with us in a van 24/7.

Vanlife wifi and internet

• We work both at home and on the road, so internet access is a necessity. Finding enough service for our regular work tasks hasn’t been too difficult. However, we don’t always have strong enough cell service for client video calls or uploading/downloading large files. We’ve found out (the hard way) that there’s no guarantee that AirBnB or public wifi networks will work, either. Planning for internet access and taking the time to test the service before each call or project is an overall downside to vanlife. Part time vanlife has a slight advantage here: we can often schedule our shorter trips around our need for the best service – we know our home network is pretty reliable.

Vanlife kitchen and cooking

• One of the biggest part time vanlife pros for me is the kitchen. No matter where I’m at, either home or travelling, I have a full kitchen with me. Exploring new food and local restaurants while travelling used to be my favorite thing to do, but food allergies changed that in a big way. Can I still explore new foods when away from home? Sure, but I also have the security of having my own kitchen if I’m not confident I can safely eat somewhere. And since we have a home kitchen, I don’t need storage space in the van for all of the different weird flours and ingredients my diet requires – I can do some of that prep before each trip.

Vanlife showers

• With part time vanlife, we’re less worried about storage space on the road. Anything we don’t need daily stays at home, and this means installing a shower and toilet in our van was an easy choice. The bathroom takes up a lot of space, but we don’t miss the space the way we would if we were full time vanlifers. Also, we love the ability to take a quick shower anywhere – installing a shower has turned out to be one of the best choices we made during our build.

Renting out your van or your home when you’re a part time vanlifer

• We haven’t looked into renting out the van yet, mostly because after over a year it’s still not fully built (yikes). However, this is a definite pro with part time vanlife. You have the freedom to travel, and when you plan to be home you can rent the van out to help offset your costs (sites like Outdoorsy are a great place to start). Also worth mentioning: the ability to rent your home while you’re away (that is, if you landlord or HOA or roommate or ~ whoever ~ allows it). Although this would be a huge help in offsetting our costs, I have anxiety around having someone in our house while we’re gone. Although we haven’t personally done it, renting either your van or home is an option to help with what we see as the biggest downside to part time vanlife: the cost.

Cons of Part Time Vanlife

Vanlife cost

• Even if you’re trying to keep everything on the cheap like us, part time vanlife is the most expensive way to experience this lifestyle. We have a home and, although it’s a small townhouse, that means we also have all of the financial obligations that come with it – property taxes, insurance, utilities, and unexpected repairs. On top of the house, we’ve got the van payment and all of the financial obligations that come with it – registration, insurance, fuel, and storage for when we’re not on the road (the townhouse, since it’s not a house-house, doesn’t have a driveway where we can leave the van).
• Even the cheapest of van builds will still cost a decent amount of money. In our pre-van era, converting our Honda Element cost us just under $1000 – and all we did was build a bed with some storage and buy camping supplies (you can learn more about our #hotelement build here). We’ve seen van conversions range from a few thousands on the low end to tens of thousands on the high end. Either way, full time or part time, the build cost isn’t small. That’s definitely a factor when you have the financial obligation of both a van and a home base.

Part Time Vanlife Routine Can Be a Challenge

• Routine is easy in a house. Routine gets easier after spending long periods of time in the van. Routine is very challenging when you’re regularly moving through the home – pack – van – unpack – house – clean everything – repeat cycle. Full time home life or full time vanlife schedules don’t have nearly the level of disruption of part time vanlife.

Part Time Vanlifers are More Tied to One Geographic Region

• Full time vanlifers can typically travel wherever the weather and road takes them. Part timers follow the weather as well, but also need to consider the drive distance to and from home. For us, this means we’re mostly travelling regionally. Even on our longer trips, which right now max out at about three weeks, we typically drive no more than 20 hours away from home. Splitting a drive like that into 2-3 days is time consuming, and splitting the time both to and from your destination eats up a lot of the days you plan to be away from home.

Vanlife Security

• This is a definite con for part time van life. In an ideal world, someone’s watching your house while you’re gone and someone is watching your van while you’re at home. No matter where you’re at, one of your houses is unattended – especially if you’re like us and can’t store your van at home. This isn’t just about break ins, although vans are definitely a target, it’s about other mishaps as well – what if a pipe freezes in an unexpected temperature drop, either at home or in the van? Although security systems are starting to offer temperature and flood surveillance, keeping both a home and a van secure can be tricky.

Others View Part Time Vanlife as a Vacation

• When you split your time between being in a van and being at a home base, people tend to view your time away as a vacation. Is it amazing to wake up in nature? Yes!! But it’s not exactly a vacation. Working while travelling is not exactly relaxing, and it can be downright exhausting – especially when you consider the conveniences you might have at home (like a washer and dryer, real plumbing, or a dishwasher) are nowhere to be found in a van. Although being able to work while out in nature or connecting with far-flung friends and family is incredible, it’s definitely more tiring than being home or on an actual vacation.

Why Did We Decide On Part Time Vanlife?

Travelling in a built out van served multiple purposes in our lives.

First, it helped us get out of the house and travel responsibly and safely during a pandemic. Aside from an occasional curbside grocery order or oil change, we have everything we need with us in the van and don’t need to be in close quarters with others. Not only does this let us travel with a low level of risk, it helps keep the people we visit safe as well (shout out to my 90 year old grandma, Dorothy. You bet she climbed her 90 year old self into the van to take a look around during our first visit with her).

Second, vanlife was a way for us to slow down and actually implement the lifestyle changes recommended for those with autoimmune issues. Having a van makes us more likely to get outside, take it slow, rest, lower our stress levels (ok, the stress levels didn’t lower until the major parts of the build were complete, but they have been lower recently), and easily maintain a restricted diet while away from home.

Third, not everything we do work-wise is fully remote. Although the majority of our work is either remote or based in our home city, we occasionally have to travel to job sites away from home. Work travel with dietary restrictions has always been hard. On those semi-rare occasions that we do travel for work, having the van makes it easy to bring food, haul tools necessary for the job site, and shower so we arrive clean and refreshed.

And fourth, which is the simplest reason, Joe refuses to live in the van full time. So part time vanlife it is!

How We Do Part Time Vanlife (Hint: Checklists)

Since we’ve decided that living in the van part time is what works for us, we’ve implemented systems to make the transition back and forth easier and less energy consuming – both are a priority when you have limited energy. Here’s how we plan our trips, and a couple of tools we use to keep us organized:

• Destination Selection(s) and Trip Planning
• • We start with the question “what are we looking for?” Is it a trip to a national park? Is it to see friends or family? Is it to get out of the city and slow down? We begin with an idea of where we want to go, and then we ask the following more detailed questions:
  • How many days can we be away from home (including travel time)? What days will we have to work, and which days involve video calls or the need for faster internet?
  • What is the weather like: is it too hot or below freezing? Are there likely to be storms or wind?
  • What does the cell service or access to wifi look like at our destination(s)? What about on the way there and back?
  • Will we have regular access to RV dumps and water, or are we going to have to pay for campgrounds?
  • Does the destination have restaurants that can accommodate our dietary needs?
  • Do we have friends or family that live in or will be travelling through the same area?
  • What activities do our destinations have to offer? Will we be able to stay active? Are there free activities? Are there cultural sites or functions? Will we have things to keep us occupied if the other person is working?

• In order to keep us organized and save mental energy, we use a lot of checklists and packing lists (click below to download or print). We created checklists of tasks we do regularly, things we do to prep the van for a trip, and a list of items we pack for every trip:
• • Regular/Maintenance Vanlife Checklist
    • Our regular checklist contains items like engine maintenance, plumbing and electrical inspections, and maintenance of our plumbing and electrical systems. We keep on top of these items in hopes of minimizing any problems we might run into on the road.
  • Van Prep Checklist
    • Our trip prep checklist includes the tasks we complete to get the van ready for a drive. It includes things like checking fluid, DEF, and diesel levels, charging the electrical system, checking tire pressure, and cleaning.
  • Vanlife Packing Checklist
    • Our van packing list contains everything we will need in the van on a trip. Packing, especially if we decide to go somewhere last minute, gets hectic and having a thorough list makes it so much easier to remember everything we need. The less we have to think, the better.
  • Last but not least, a Vanlife De-Packing Routine
    • We try to do the same tasks over the same amount of time whenever we return from a trip. This way, we don’t ignore the boring tasks for weeks, but we give ourselves a few days to decompress.

Is Part Time Vanlife Worth It?

Yes, for us, part time vanlife is absolutely worth it! In our experience, the biggest burdens living part time in a van are the cost and constantly changing routine. Fortunately, we’ve found ways to ease the burden of both. Being able to pack up and go where we please (or, alternately, retreat back to our home base) is worth the challenges. When we began this way of life, our goals were to safely travel in the world of COVID and to make big lifestyle changes that would work better with my changing health. Hopping on the vanlife bandwagon, especially part time, absolutely helped us achieve both.

Click to Download or Print Our Vanlife Checklists