We've been living in Bertha full-time for six months now, and something happens around this point that nobody really warns you about: the novelty wears off, and what's left is just your actual life. Which is, honestly, the best possible outcome — but it's also when the real flaws in a build start to show themselves, the ones you can't spot until you've lived with them through every kind of weather.
So here's the properly honest version. Not a highlight reel. The list.
What we got right
Before the complaints, credit where it's due, because plenty went well. The layout works. The bed is genuinely comfortable, which sounds like a low bar until you've slept in a van that got this wrong. The diesel heater has been worth every penny of what it cost, every single week since October. And choosing durable, wipeable surfaces over anything precious has meant the van still looks decent despite Tilly, mud, and the general chaos of actually living in a space rather than just photographing it.
What we'd change: storage, storage, storage
We underestimated storage by a wide margin. Everything that seemed like plenty of space when the van was empty became not nearly enough once real life — clothes for two people across every season, dog things, tools, food, all of it — actually moved in. If we were building again, we'd sacrifice floor space for storage without hesitation. An extra cupboard is worth more day to day than an extra square foot to stand in.
The kitchen is slightly too small
Workable, but only just. Cooking anything more ambitious than the one-hob meals that have basically become our house style involves a genuine logistical exercise of moving things out of the way to make room for other things. We'd add even fifteen more centimetres of counter space if we were doing it again — it sounds trivial, but it would change the day-to-day experience of cooking considerably.
We should have oversized the solar and battery setup
We wrote a whole separate post about our power and water setup, but the short version relevant here: it works, but it works with less margin than we'd like on a genuinely grey week. If we were speccing it again, we'd go bigger on both the panels and the battery capacity, purely for the buffer.
Noise insulation was an afterthought, and it shouldn't have been
Rain on a metal roof is charming for about the first month. After that, on a proper Cornish downpour, it's genuinely loud enough to disrupt sleep and conversation. Proper acoustic dampening, not just thermal insulation, is something we'd budget for and prioritise from day one if we started again.
What surprised us, for better and worse
- Better than expected: how quickly it stopped feeling like camping and started feeling like home
- Better than expected: how manageable winter actually was, once the diesel heater was in and working properly
- Worse than expected: how much mental energy goes into planning logistics — water, waste, laundry, post — compared to a house where all of it just happens in the background
- Worse than expected: how quickly small storage problems compound into a genuinely stressful clutter issue if you don't stay on top of them weekly
- Completely unexpected: how much we've come to actually prefer the smallness. Less to clean, less to maintain, less stuff between us and actually being outside
Would we do it again?
Without question. Every one of the things on this list is a refinement, not a regret — the kind of thing you only learn by actually living somewhere for six months rather than a long weekend. If you're at the start of your own build, take this as encouragement rather than a warning: get the storage right, oversize the power system, don't skimp on sound insulation, and everything else you'll figure out as you go, the same way we did.
— Wild Coast Mama