Building a Self Converted Sprinter Van in Italy

Build a self converted camper van in Italy they said, it will be fun they said. No seriously it has been fun, but here I want to lay out all the hurdles (and there have been a lot ) that we have faced in this journey and hopefully this blog post can be the exact blog post we wish we had read before embarking on this project.

Who are we? We are Octavian and Rachel or Octav and Rach if you will, Octav is an Italian/ Moldovan software engineer and Rach is a Scottish psychology graduate/ spirituality fanatic. We decided a couple of years ago that we were kind of done with the monotonous unenlightened rat race that society imposes on all of us and wanted ADVENTURE and how better to achieve that dream than to build a camper.

We saved lots of money in Scotland, our then home, Rachel as a support worker and Octav in his tech job and then decided to move to Octavs family home in Italy to build the van. The logic of building it in Italy vs Scotland was:

So we saved our money , faster than anticipated as covid hit which meant we forcibly could not have a social life and then got on a plane to Italy… all sounds perfect right?

Well, herein lies the start of all of our hurdles, setbacks, hiccups. I am going to split this up into separate phases and phase 1 is purchase the van.

Phase 1 : Purchase the van

Okay so it is fairly well known that in Europe, your best bet for getting good deals on vehicles is going to Germany. This is because Germany is the home place to a whole host of car manufacturers. So if you are wanting to build a camper in Europe we recommend checking out German offers.

After hunting online we found the perfect van which met the following specifications :

We traveled to Germany via motorbike on a Friday, stayed in a hotel with the intention to buy the van and drive it back (with the motorbike in the back) on the Saturday morning. We get to the dealership, see the van, take it for a test drive and negotiate a price of 13K€ before tax , an absolute steal considering a van of the same calibre in Italy for example would cost upwards of 20K€ before tax.

So we are chuffed, we immediately feel an attachment to this van and we are already envisioning the end of the build..sipping on coconut somewhere tropical. So we go to close the deal and they ask, so when will you pick up the vehicle? To which we reply, now? To which they laugh and explain it’s impossible as we need our 5 day temp plates and the offices are closed until Monday.

In all honesty this wasn’t the biggest problem, it just meant an impromptu weekend break in Heilbronn which was actually a lot of fun and Octav managed to reschedule his work so he could take the Monday off.

Come Monday though and we had our first stress, we had a remaining balance to pay off and did this with our TransferWise Account. This is another tip to offer , if you do a fair amount of international travel then TransferWise is the best bank for conversion rates and transaction fees. We sent the money at 9am and despite receiving a PDF confirmation that the money had left our account and was being processed by the dealership’s bank, the money didn’t arrive in the dealership’s bank until 6pm literally moments before they were about to close. Meaning we sat in the van in the car park on an unseasonably hot Septembers day, in the same clothes we had worn all weekend, for 9 HOURS. The relief when the money went through was second to none, as there was no way Octav couldn’t work the Tuesday and we really didn’t want to do another night in a hotel.

In retrospect, we should never have counted on such a big money transfer clearing quicker, but in our defence we knew it may take a while (as in a couple hours) but never anticipated it taking that long.

So we drove through the night back to Italy, high on life and the possibilities ahead of us and arrived around 3am.

The next day we decided to take the van into Mercedes for a quick look over as Octavian’s dad has some connections there. Here comes our second stress, turns out the exhaust system isn’t working properly, we learned that this is a known issue with sprinters over 100K KM, and so we had to fork out 3000€ to replace it. In some ways we are lucky as it would have cost way more under normal circumstances at Mercedes if it wasn’t for our connections, plus we didn’t have to go to an independent garage and gamble with the quality of the works. Nonetheless, after the stress in Germany, it was a bit of a tough pill to swallow.

At this point we thought surely this is the difficulties out of the way and its full steam ahead with the conversion. Well, sadly not, at this point we discovered the logistical nightmare that was doing a self converted camper in Italy. You probably think, why didn’t we research this properly ahead of time, well hindsight is 20/20 for 1 and for 2, van life is such a popular movement with people all around the world converting their own vans, we honestly had no idea that there would be so many laws associated with it. This brings us to phase 2, which for lack of better words I will term the messy phase.

Phase 2 :The Messy Phase

Okay, so If you are changing the use of a standard cargo van into a livable space, in order to be able to legally drive this and insure this vehicle in Italy/ Europe, you need to get a Change of Use (COU) on your vehicles documentation. Different parts of the world have different rules in order to get this COU, in Europe, Germany has the most achievable rules, but for Italy the only way you can get this COU is if a verified professional has converted your van.

We didn’t even for a second consider this as an option for us, a huge attraction to this whole process was the creativity and sense of accomplishment of building the camper ourselves, plus it would cost a fortune to have a professional build it.

So we were in a check mate and saw no other option but to sell the van, which in fairness due to the different markets in Italy compared to Germany and the now improved mechanics of the sprinter, we could get a tidy profit on and have more money going forward.

So we were now in the mindset of selling the van, we completely cleaned it, took lots of pictures, put it on a few websites and fortunately started to get interest and even offers.

Okay, but what would we be able to do differently the second time around? Well you may remember , when we travelled to Germany the first time, we took the van to Italy with 5 day temporary plates to then import the van and register it as an Italian van. So, what we should have done (and again hindsight is a beautiful thing) is get the 3 month temporary plates. Why? That’s because, I also just mentioned that Germany has the most relaxed rules when it comes to self converted campervans, they stipulate that you need to have a sleeping area, sitting area, fixed space to prepare food and ventilation and then they will grant the COU and legally declare it as a camper. So, our rationale here was, buy another van (with a bigger budget), get the 3 months plates, use this time to convert the van to the minimum requirements transport the van back to Germany and as it is still with German temp plates it is still regarded as a German vehicle so we could get the German COU, at this point technically have a German camper van and finally transport the van back to Italy and import and register it as an Italian camper van.

This is a lot of faffing about and jumping through hoops, but we felt ultimately having the van officially registered as a camper could only be a good thing as we would be eligible for full insurance packages. In some countries such as the US (from what we’ve heard), you don’t need to re register your van when its converted , which is good as there is less of of a logistical nightmare but its bad as you can only get van insurance on the vehicle and if you travel overseas and get stopped (which happens ) you can get fined if your documentation don’t meet that countries requirements , like Europe.

Okay, so a big setback but we felt we finally had our heads around the rules and a method for going forward. However, our stress was far from over. We had to wait to close a sale on the purchased van until the van was registered in Italy, and what we were learning was that there is no efficiency in Italy in the public offices. At this point all that was happening was that the van was turning from a German cargo van to an Italian cargo van with new Italian plates. This process albeit simple had its own set of stresses as Italy required another document for us to organise (COC) which confirms that the vehicle has been manufactured with legitimate parts, and we didn’t receive this document with the purchase of the van (this is one thing we were on the ball with and asked the dealership to give us but they didn’t have it, however, after some research we discovered we could pay for external companies to give us one).

We were waiting weeks and weeks and weeks and in the end even went to stay in another part of Italy, Lago Di Garda, to try to break up the time. Eventually we heard from the registration offices and they refused to register the vehicle as the COC we had paid for didn’t meet their requirements. At this point we are in December 2020 and we had travelled to Germany to buy the Van at the beginning of September 2020. We knew there were other places we could get the COC document from but in a last attempt, we traveled to Mantova where there was another business connection of Octav’s family who worked in the field to see if he could register it and to our great relief about a week and 800€ later he said he had the Italian plates for us.

Okay so we are now at the end of December and all we have managed to achieve is pay a lot of money on a standard Cargo Van to export it from Germany to Italy. The thought of now having to sell it after all the stress was disheartening. So we found plan C, a company called Non Solo Camper, ran by Sergio who takes care of the documents for Italians in our position. He is able through his company to take Italian registered cargo vans that have been converted to campers through to Germany, turn them into German camper vans and then import them back to Italian vehicles but this time fully registered Italian Camper Vans. So this way you avoid the rules in Italy for a certified professional to have built the van. Perfect right? Well the downside is that he does this for quite a fee which normally we would probably refuse to pay (around 3000€) but we were so fed up of all the waiting and setbacks and we had already put so much money into this van, we crunched figures and realised we could afford it so decided to go down this route.

The positives were:

This brings us to Phase 3, the build phase:

Phase 3: The Build Phase

The build phase has been the most smooth sailing and enjoyable part of the process which is ironic in a way you’d think this would be the most difficult. Our whole lives revolved around the van with Rachel, doing as much work as I could alone during the days while Octav coded and both of us putting in the graft in the evenings, weekends and Octav’s annual leave.

It took us from the beginning of January 2021 to The beginning of May 2021 to finish the work on the van. We were able to support local companies for a lot of our materials which was important to us, we prioritised building the van to a high standard with an extensive off grid solar powered electrical system, extensive water system with hot water shower and most importantly made it beautiful. Which we truly believe we achieved and are delighted with the results.

Once completed we let Sergio know so that all that was left was these pesky documents. Which brings us to Phase 4: The Documents Phase

Phase 4: The Documents Phase

This phase has easily been the most frustrating, stressful and time consuming. We Started the process in May 2021 and we can only now just about see the finish line in sight in Mid September 2021, with the process being finalised probably in October. The German side of things was extremely efficient with Sergio getting the van exported to Germany and imported as a German camper in a couple of weeks (including the time it took to do some minor mechanical work to the van (brake pads) to pass the German MOT). However once back in Italy and re-registering the van now as a camper took months. Fortunately we were able to travel in the van as soon as it was back from Germany with German temporary licence plates but these ran out after 8 weeks so we were forced to park up the van and wait until we got the new Italian licence plates which took until the second week of September. The position we are now in is waiting for our final documents to match the new license plates and we anticipate we will get these docs at the beginning of October.

Conclusion

To conclude, we absolutely did not know what sort of ride we were in for when we embarked on this process and my god we have learned a lot! It has been a real nuisance building the van in Italy as the public offices are extremely inefficient and has made us feel out of control at times. If you are European and want to build a van then it is so important to see what the regulations are in your country for registering self conversions, the ideal locations we have learned so far include Germany and France.

Despite all the problems though, we still think given our niche circumstances we have ended up with the best possible outcomes. We had access to a huge array of tools in Italy to use, we lived rent free whilst building the van, the van is left hand drive which is more globally accessible and now we know that the van is fully registered as a camper van which means we won’t have any hassle if stopped by the police (which fyi happened in Croatia by undercover police!).

So if you are Italian and want to join the van life tribe, please be prepared for a long journey and lots of extra costs… but it is so worth it!

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