Storage is the part of a van build people plan last and regret first. The garage under a fixed bed, the cabinet run over the counter and the small things that have no home are three separate problems, and only one of them is about space. The other two are about weight and about what you can reach with wet hands in the dark.
The short answer
- The garage under a fixed rear bed is the only storage in a van shaped for things that are long, dirty and heavy, and it is the main reason buyers accept a permanent bed.
- Storage runs out of weight before it runs out of volume. Mercedes publishes 3,450 to 3,814 lbs of payload on the 170 inch high roof Sprinter 2500, and a four-season conversion uses most of it empty.
- Water is the heaviest thing most vans carry: 40 gallons weighs 334 lbs, more than two adults.
- Removable storage is a real category with real prices. Z2Overland sells cabinet kits from $18,000 that come out with no permanent modification, and Cardiff Campervan builds modular from $6,000.
- Heavy gear belongs low and between the axles. Overhead cabinets are for clothing, bedding and light dry goods, whatever the drawings imply.
What a camper van garage actually is
The garage is the enclosed space under a raised rear bed, reached through the back doors. In most conversions it is the largest single piece of storage in the vehicle and the only one shaped for things that are long, dirty and heavy. Bikes, skis, a folding table, recovery boards, a wet dry bag, a spare propane bottle. Nothing above the floor line does that job, and no amount of clever cabinetry substitutes for it.
It exists because the bed is fixed. That is the trade sitting under every van interior: a permanent platform across the back surrenders that floor to sleeping around the clock and hands you a sealed hold underneath in exchange. Which archetype you pick decides how much of that hold you get, and a convertible dinette bed gives up the garage entirely in return for a wider daytime living space.
How high the bed has to sit
Two numbers decide the garage, and they are not the same number. The first is the clear height under the bed slats. The second is the height of the rear door opening you have to slide everything through, which is smaller, because the sill and the frame take some of it. The figure is set by one object rather than by an average, and for most buyers that object is a bicycle. A 29 inch mountain bike wheel stands 29 inches before the tire, so a garage that takes a bike upright has to be designed for it from the first sketch. The alternatives are pulling both wheels and laying the frame flat, or building a tray that slides the bike out of the doors instead of lifting it over the sill.
Every inch of garage comes off the headroom above the mattress, and money does not buy a way around that. Two American shops answer it structurally instead. Brooklyn Campervans raises the bed electrically on the Elevate v4, so the garage is tall while you load and the ceiling is high while you sit, and that van is $292,000. Rossmönster builds hard-sided pop-tops at $130,000 to $250,000, putting the second berth in the roof and leaving the back of the van to gear. Both are genuine answers. Both start well into six figures, which is the catch worth knowing before you fall for either.
Measure these before the bed height is fixed
- The tallest thing that has to live in the garage, measured the way it will actually sit: upright, on its side, or with the wheels off
- The rear door opening, floor to the top of the frame, which is not the interior ceiling height
- Your own sitting height on the mattress, in the clothes you wear in winter
- The longest object you own, so you know whether it travels across the van or along it
- The heaviest single item, and where it lands relative to the rear axle
- The outside width of the storage bins you plan to buy, doubled, plus clearance at each side
Rear doors, side door, or both
A garage you can only reach by crawling over the bed stops getting used somewhere around the second week. Rear access is the default for that reason. You stand outside, open two doors, and the whole hold is in front of you at waist height, which is also the only way two people load a van without arguing.
Side access changes what the garage is for. A hatch through the bulkhead or under the bed on the sliding-door side means the things you want at a trailhead come out without opening the back in the rain. It costs you cabinet width on that wall, and that is the whole economy of a van interior: every foot of floor and every foot of wall has exactly one owner. A garage deep enough for two bikes and a shower cubicle you can stand in are competing for the same floor length in a 144 inch van, which is why buyers who want both end up on the 170.
Storage is a weight problem before it is a space problem
Volume runs out later than weight does, and almost nobody plans for the one that runs out first. Mercedes publishes a payload figure for every Sprinter configuration, and the 170 inch high roof 2500, the platform most American conversions are built on, is rated at 3,450 to 3,814 lbs depending on drivetrain. That number is everything the van carries: the conversion itself, the water, the batteries, the people and every object you load into it.
A four-season build eats most of it before you pack a bag. Here is where it goes on a van doing nothing unusual.
| What is on board | Typical weight | Where it sits |
|---|---|---|
| Conversion in timber: insulation, floor, walls, cabinetry, bed | 1,200 to 1,800 lbs | Spread, but heaviest at the back |
| Fresh water, 40 gallons | 334 lbs | Wherever the tank went, which decides the axle split |
| Lithium bank at 400Ah, inverter and charger | 130 to 180 lbs | Usually under the bed or a bench |
| Two adults | 300 to 400 lbs | Front axle while driving, rear while sleeping |
| Two mountain bikes in the garage | 60 to 80 lbs | Behind the rear axle, the worst place for weight |
| Food, clothing, bedding, tools, recovery gear | 150 to 250 lbs | Everywhere, and it grows every trip |
| Total against a published 3,450 to 3,814 lbs | 2,174 to 3,044 lbs | Leaves less headroom than any brochure suggests |
Costs money to get wrong
An overloaded van fails at the axle, not at the shelf
Past the rear axle rating the failures are boring and expensive rather than dramatic: tires and brakes at a fraction of their normal life, then springs and bearings, then a claim an insurer can decline because the vehicle was over its rated weight when it happened. A truck stop scale ticket costs about $15 and takes ten minutes. Weigh the van loaded for a real trip, axle by axle, and read it against the loading label in the driver's door before you add a drawer full of tools.
That table is why a construction decision is really a storage decision. Off Highway Van in Salt Lake City builds in aluminum rather than timber at $165,000 to $245,000, which takes several hundred pounds out of the conversion. Read those pounds as gear you are allowed to carry and the price of the build starts to look like the price of the payload, which is a strange way to shop for a van and a useful one.
The other way to buy payload is to buy it at the dealer. Mercedes rates the same 170 inch high roof at 6,382 lbs on the 4500 against 3,450 to 3,814 lbs on the 2500, and the published Sprinter range runs $48,990 to $75,830 across every configuration. A 4500 is a different vehicle to park and to service, and most buyers do not need one. For a heavy four-season van with a full garage it is the honest fix, and it is almost never raised before the order goes in.
The cabinet run, and what belongs in it
Above the counter, storage is the same weight problem wearing a different hat. Anything you put over head height sits high and usually behind the rear axle, which is the worst combination in the vehicle. The rule that survives contact with a real trip is dull: heavy and low and between the axles, light and high, nothing loose above a sleeping head.
Overhead cabinets and what they can carry
Uppers are for clothing, bedding, dry goods and the things you reach daily. They are not for tools, tinned food, spare water or a second battery, whatever the drawings imply by drawing them big. A shallow cabinet run down one wall with positive latches beats a deep one on magnets, because deep cabinets get loaded until the door barely closes and van doors open on washboard road. Ask what the latches are. They are the cheapest hardware in the van and the ones you notice failing.
Drawers, slides and the hardware that fails first
Drawers are the difference between storage you use and storage you excavate. They are also the most expensive linear foot in the interior, because full-extension slides rated for real weight cost real money and have to land in structure rather than in a plywood skin. Ask what the slides are rated for in pounds, and whether they lock closed. A drawer that opens on a corner is a projectile with your kitchen in it.
Most of a van interior is held together with small stainless truss head screws and structural adhesive tape, which is right for a shoe pocket and wrong for a 60 lb drawer. The mounting question is worth more of your attention than the finish question, and it is the one subject a good shop will happily talk your ear off about.
From the desk
Everybody asks for more drawers and nobody asks what they weigh full. A 24 inch drawer packed with tools and tinned food runs 60 to 80 lbs, and four of them is an extra passenger riding behind the rear axle. The vans we would call genuinely well organized all had fewer spaces than the buyer first asked for, each one bigger, each one labeled on the front.
The small things, and where they actually live
The failure mode in a finished van is not that there is no room. It is that small objects have no address, so they migrate to the counter and the bed, and by day three the van feels half the size it is. Nothing about that is fixed by more cubic feet.
The fix is unglamorous. Every object gets one place, that place sits within reach of where the object gets used, and it is closed or strapped so it stays there when the van moves. Vertical surfaces do most of the work, because the floor is spoken for and the counter has to stay clear to be a counter.
- Rear doors: the most wasted surface in most vans. A shoe organizer or a shallow pocket panel holds a week of small gear at eye level.
- The wall beside the bed: a phone, a light, a book and a bottle need a home you can find in the dark without sitting up.
- Ceiling and headliner: a shallow shelf over the cab takes bedding and soft bags, which is the one place high storage is genuinely harmless.
- Inside cabinet doors: spice racks, pan lids, cutting boards, all the flat things that refuse to stack.
- Under the seats and in the step well: wet, dirty and rarely used, close to the door it came in through.
- Restraints instead of containers: hook and loop straps, cargo nets and clamps turn an awkward object into a fixed one for a few dollars.
Then label the outside of everything, which sounds like advice for other people until you live in a van. Two adults who have owned the same vehicle for a year will still open the wrong drawer looking for a headlamp, and a roll of tape ends that.
Storage you can take out again
Storage is usually treated as joinery, which is to say permanent. A whole section of the American market disagrees. Z2Overland in Portland sells removable cabinet kits from $18,000 that drop into a Sprinter, Transit or ProMaster with no permanent modification, and the van goes back to being a van in an afternoon. VanDOit builds a modular interior on a rail system, on the Transit and nothing else, at $58,000 to $108,000, in marine grade materials that come out on the rails they went in on. Ford lists the Transit in several roof heights and body lengths, which is what lets a rail system be sold as one product instead of a custom fit.
| Route | Price | Who builds it |
|---|---|---|
| Removable cabinet kit | From $18,000 | Z2Overland, Portland OR. Sprinter, Transit or ProMaster, no permanent modification |
| Modular interior on rails | $58,000 to $108,000 | VanDOit, Blue Springs MO. Transit only, marine grade components |
| Modular build, fast turnaround | $45,000 to $130,000 | Contravans, Arvada CO. Modular builds from 4 to 6 days |
| Modular on a smaller budget | $6,000 to $40,000 | Cardiff Campervan, Encinitas CA |
| Storage fitted to a van you own | From $5,000 | Blue Ridge Adventure Vehicles, Fairview NC. Partial systems work |
Reversibility is worth real money and it is almost never priced into the conversation. A van whose interior lifts out sells into a wider market, keeps its cargo van resale, and stays a cargo van on paper, which sidesteps retitling the van as a recreational vehicle altogether. That cuts both ways. It is the right answer if the van also works for a living, and the wrong one if you wanted an RV title and the insurance that comes with it.
Permanent joinery earns its keep in the opposite case. Built-in structure is stronger, it uses the awkward corners a kit cannot reach, and it is what an inspection is looking at. DM Vans at $97,000 to $105,000 and Storyteller Overland at $160,000 to $220,000 are the two shops on our rankings built to the industry's electrical, propane and egress standards under inspection rather than self-attestation. A storage wall that blocks a door is the sort of thing that gets caught there and nowhere else.
Storage as a line inside a mid-range build
Total$7,200 to $13,900
The slide-out tray is the line that surprises people. Rated slides at that length are hardware rather than joinery, and the price tracks the weight rating instead of the size, so a 500 lb tray and a 250 lb tray of identical dimensions are not close on price. Get the rating in pounds before you compare two quotes on this line.
Who builds the storage you want
Shops differ more on storage than on almost anything else in a van, because it is the part of the interior that gets drawn rather than bought. Compare them on how the storage is built rather than on how it photographs. The 10 American builders we rank fall into four camps on this question, and the camps tell you more than the price order does.
Single-chassis specialists design components that fit one van exactly: Glampervan builds on the ProMaster 136 inch high roof only, $30,000 to $65,000, and the parts fit because nothing is being adapted from another platform. Modular shops sell storage as a product, which is VanDOit on rails and Contravans turning modular builds around in 4 to 6 days at $45,000 to $130,000. Weight-first shops treat the whole van as a payload budget, which is Off Highway Van's entire position at $165,000 to $245,000. And a fourth group will fit storage to a van you already own and leave the rest alone: Blue Ridge Adventure Vehicles from $5,000, Cardiff Campervan at $6,000 to $40,000.
Before you approve the drawings
Storage is the cheapest thing in a van to change on paper and one of the most expensive to change in plywood. The drawings are where the argument is worth having, and the shop that resents the questions has told you something about the next nine months.
Settle these before the drawings are approved
- Clear garage height and rear opening height, both in inches, both written on the drawing
- The finished weight of the van as specified, and the payload it leaves against the manufacturer's published figure
- Where the water tank sits relative to the rear axle, full
- The load rating of every drawer slide, in pounds
- Which storage comes out again without a saw, and what that does to the title
- One named place for every item on your own gear list, checked off item by item
- Who fixes it if a drawer lets go on a forest road in year two
A shop that answers all seven in writing has drawn a van before and knows what breaks. A shop that says storage is flexible and can be worked out later is telling you it will be worked out with a jigsaw, in your van, at the end of the build when the budget is gone.
