An adventurous woman has turned her back on expensive rents and property prices – by living full-time in a van.
With an interior measuring just 13ft 2in long, 5ft 8in wide and 6ft 2in high, Eileah Ohning, 31, has made a home of her Freightliner Sprinter High Top van.
The photographic producer from Columbus, Ohio, has lived in her compact four-wheel home since May 2017.
The van comes complete with a memory foam mattress, storage compartments, a desk and a camping stove, and she even has plans to add in a shower, toilet and fridge.
Eileah Ohning, 31, lives in a $10,000 (£7,800) van that she converted into a luxury home after deciding to abandon property prices
Eileah said: ‘I don’t need a house. I don’t need something that big, I don’t need something that eats up most of my monthly income. I’m not saying that living in a house is bad – a family of six needs more than a van – but that’s the motivation for me.’
And while other van dwellers, and fans of the vanlife movement, extol the virtues of living in a vehicle as a way of facilitating a more nomadic lifestyle, Eileah is staying put in one place.
She parks her van close enough to her workplace that she never needs to worry about the morning commute and showers at her local gym.
Eileah said: ‘When I wake up, I freshen up a little bit, make a little coffee and I usually do cereal for breakfast, just because it’s easy and it doesn’t require cooking. And then I get dressed and grab my laptop, bag and my purse and go to work, which is 20 feet way from me.’
Unsurprisingly, Eileah has received mixed reactions about her living arrangement.
Eileah has spent $9,000 (£7,000) doing up the van so she doesn’t have to pay high rents
The photographic producer got bored of what she calls ‘traditional’ living in an apartment so created a tiny bedroom in her van and showers at her local gym
She said: ‘Some people think it is really cool. They just want to hear more and a lot of people respond by saying, “Oh, that’s amazing!
‘But I can never do anything like that.” There have been some people who just don’t get it and they think it’s really weird and strange. They just think I’m an odd-ball.
‘My mom had her reservations but she was at least open to listening and working through the process with me.
‘My father is a lot more traditional and so I think he was scared that I was going to be more vulnerable. He never spoke directly against the idea but he definitely made his concerns known.
‘I tend to only park in neighbourhoods or places that I’m comfortable with and that I already feel safe in. I guess that’s a luxury of your home being on wheels – you can move it if you don’t feel safe.
‘I don’t hang my laundry outside of the van or make a big scene so for most people it’s just a van parked on the street.’
Eileah says she doesn’t now if she will return to ‘traditional’ housing after living in vehicles
Her family were worried about her safety in the van but she said she only stays in safe streets
Eileah didn’t tell her boyfriend that she lived in a car when they first started dating
Eileah said: ‘I sleep great, I love it when it rains because the tin, the walls, the roof; it kind of echoes and reverberates in it.’
But the van isn’t the smallest space Eileah has called ‘home’; from August 2015 to July 2016 she lived in her 2004 Acura TSX car.
Eileah said: ‘It was really simple. I mean everywhere I went I had everything that I needed.
‘When you are cleaning such a tiny space it takes minutes to clean it – that gave me more time to spend how I wanted to.’
In a bid to strip back and live more simply, Eileah set herself the challenge of living in the sedan style car for a whole year. Putting her belongings into storage, Eileah loved her minimal lifestyle but admits sleeping in its cramped confines for 12 months took its toll.
She said: ‘I missed the ability to stand up in my home. If I was really tired and exhausted, I had to crawl over the seats and put them down and make the bed. I couldn’t just come home and relax.’
The van’s name is Marta and Eileah says parks up and sleeps close by to where she works
Eileah, who showers at the gym, sold all of her possessions that she didn’t need in the van
After a year of sleeping on the back seat, Eileah was excited to move into a regular apartment, but what she hadn’t anticipated was that a short while after living in a conventional building, she would begin to miss the simplicity of living in a vehicle.
So, in December 2016 she traded in her car for a the van, which she calls Marta, and has been in the process of converting it into a living space ever since.
Eileah said: ‘So far I’ve spent about $7,000 (£5,460) on the build out. There have been a couple of repairs that were probably about $2,000 (£1,560) and then to finish the build out I am going to have to spare maybe another $3-4,000 (£2,340-£3,120).
‘It’s still a fraction of the cost of buying a home.’
Eileah held a yard sale to get rid of all possessions she couldn’t store in the van, and is spending most weekends finishing off the refurb with her boyfriend of one year, Brian Laston.
Eileah said: ‘When I started [thinking about] the van, we had really just met, we hadn’t been dating for long, so it took me maybe two or three weeks to tell him that I had lived in my car.
She estimates that she will need to spend $3-4,000 to finish the van but says it’s the ‘fraction of the cost’ of buying a house
‘It took me probably another month to tell him that I wanted to live in a van and I didn’t like the idea of living in a traditional house, which I’m sure would probably be difficult for him considering he owned a home.’
Brian said: ‘I knew it was something she was always interested in.
‘I was hoping, I think at that point, it was just a dream that she is just gonna talk about or just skip over ‘
After Eileah sent Brian a text saying she was on her way to Florida to pick up a van; he knew it was neither a joke nor a dream.
He added: ‘Once she got it back and slowly started including me in the build, I took a bigger interest in it.’
Her boyfriend Brian says the van has gone from Eileah’s dream to one that they share
So far Brian has only stayed in the van a few times when the couple have gone away for the weekend, but he has slowly come round to the concept of van living
He said: ‘It’s now more or less gone from her dream to become our dream.’
Once the van is complete, not only will Brian be a more regular visitor but Eileah’s dog Aza (currently with Eileah’s parents) and Brian’s cat Kernel will also move in full time.
It will certainly be cosy but Eileah doesn’t see herself living in a big house any time soon.
She said: ‘I don’t know that I ever see myself going back to traditional housing, I just think that there is a better way to do housing in general.’