A CHALET girl has gone viral on TikTok after filming herself upcycling an old Transit van and turning it into a campervan.
Amélise Burr said she decided to join the “van life” after realising life is too short when her grandmother died recently.
Amélise, from Cambridge, had been planning the upcycle for over a year but didn’t have time due to working at a chalet and various other jobs to fund her project.
Last year she bought the Ford Transit van for £5,000 and has been using lockdown as an opportunity to convert it.
The chalet host set up a YouTube account with a TikTok allowing people to follow her journey to the nomadic life and van conversion.
So far, Amélise has spent £2,000 kitting the van out with insulation, flooring, a kitchen, shower and other extras.
In the clips, Amélise is shown stripping the entire van out before insulating it and laying down floorboards.
She then cut windows into the metal to give the van more light.
An air ventilation fan is then added before she begins building a kitchen from scratch.
Impressively, Amélise even begins work on building her own indoor shower.
The clip then ends showing the campervan almost complete.
Amélise shared the videos on TikTok last month, writing: “Would you do this?”.
The clips have attracted over 787,000 views and hundreds of comments from impressed viewers.
Jamesnormandy wrote under her post: “Love this. Working with wood is so satisfying right.”
Shauno said: “Fantastic work and solo well done. Look forward to seeing the finished project.”
Travel family wrote: “Epic. Girl You’ve got all kinds of mad skills. I used to be a DT [Design Technology] teacher and that gets an A*.”
Speaking today, Amélise said: “I have been using lockdown as an opportunity to start the van conversion, it really felt like fate!
“It’s been really challenging, and I can’t believe I can look at this tiny house in the back of my van and say that I’ve created it. I’ve literally built my own house at 20.
“It’s a huge project, I’d be lying if I said that it was easy, it’s not; the van build has been a steep learning curve for me, and sometimes really tricky (especially when it’s raining outside).
“When I do go out and really start getting through a project, such as the electrics, ten hours could pass by and I wouldn’t even notice, that’s when I realised that I am actually enjoying the build a lot and all the things that I’ve learnt.
“I have almost finished the build, it will hopefully be finished by the end of this lockdown, that’s the time I’m giving myself, because I just want to get out and travel in it.”
She added: “A few people are naturally skeptical and wonder how I could live in a van.
“People generally understand more when I explain to them that the whole purpose of living in a van, is actually to be living outside of the van.”
