That was that. First big step was removing the bed
of the truck and that was when it sunk in
for both of us that like,
we're doing this because the truck without the bed on
is not very useful anymore until you finish the project.
I think for us, our travel,
our desire to travel is what fueled the build of
the camper especially.
We knew we wanted to do a lot of winter
travel and there's just not a lot of RV's that
are built for cold weather where everything still works like
the shower and the toilet.
We've had a lot of slide in truck campers where
you leave the truck bed,
but you compromise a lot of space by doing that.
And so we knew that we wanted a camper that
mounted directly to the frame of the truck.
The subframe of the camper is also aluminum.
So it started with just square tubing,
kind of starting with a very simple frame and then
mounting that and then building off of that.
Initially, I thought we were actually going to build it
all out of fiberglass.
Frankly, I didn't know very much about building out of
fiberglass or composites,
but we did know a lot about fabrication and working
with aluminum.
And so Courtney's kind of like,
well, why don't we build it the way that we
know how to build things.
You know, from there it's like,
well, we didn't want it to just look like this
box.
We wanted it to look cool.
We wanted it to look in factory built,
intentional. And so trying to play with designs of how
do we make it look like that.
And so we we knew that we were going to
need a metal break,
some way to bend metal.
We found one used on Craigslist nearby.
Like that day, most of the camper is built out
of just large flat sheets of aluminum.
And we needed to be able to cut them precisely
and then bend them precisely.
So we already owned a computer controlled plasma table.
What that is, is you can go into the computer
and you can design the shape that you want to
be cut and then you send that out to this
table and that there's actually a computer that's running it
to cut the shapes.
And I sort of made a combination of other people's
ideas into our own composite panel of aluminum foam core
and then plywood on the inside which those were materials
that we could get at our local building supply store
and our local metal yard.
So it was nothing special ordered.
A couple of things that we had to take in
consideration when we were mounting the camper is that we
wanted it removable,
but we also wanted to be able to easily go
from the camper into the cab of the truck,
but we didn't want to cut the back of the
truck out.
So we actually just removed the glass back window and
made a relatively small pass through in that back window
space.
And then it also allowed us to make a special
place that's only for our dogs.
We took the back seat of the truck out entirely,
built the dogs a special bed with storage underneath.
We call it the dog bucket.
And it's like they and they love it in there,
which is nice because they kind of have their own
comfortable space that's always dedicated for them.
So of our $20,000 budget for building the camper,
a significant portion of that went to our electrical system.
You know there's a a big 3000 Watt inverter,
300 amp hours of lithium batteries,
300 watts of solar on the roof and then we
also have ADCDC charging.
So whenever we drive the truck,
we also charge our battery bank.
And so the reason we went with this huge electrical
system is that it allows us to be fully
self-contained, fully off grid. We can be,
we can park, we can camp for extended amounts of
time wherever we want without having to worry about where
we're going to plug in or where we're going to
charge. We started documenting the build and it was just
maybe like for friends and family to follow along
and pretty quickly, like strangers were watching our videos and
commenting and like invested in this journey.
And I think it kind of inspired both of us
of like,
maybe we don't need to get this done quite as
soon and maybe we could squeeze a little more out
of the budget.
And so things like definitely the hidden staircase.
That was because we realized,
like, we could make a whole video about just our
hidden staircase.
So features like the like the bike storage and the
hidden staircase and the big ski locker on the back,
those were ideas that sort of evolved as time went
on and we started
getting to know the camper better,
thinking about how we were going to use it,
getting excited about about using those features on a trip
and being able to share them on our YouTube channel.
Yeah, and the staircase and the deck have been amazing,
like winter mud, the dogs,
the outdoor shower where you can stand on the deck.
I like. I'm so glad that we took the time
to do those things.
I think the sliding fridge was probably one of the
more difficult interior components.
I think probably the shower wet bath was the most
difficult component because it needed to be
100% watertight and so most R VS are like a
single molded plastic piece.
But we didn't have the tools or the skills to
make something like that.
So we made this sort of stainless steel and
waterproof flooring. We had to make our own shower pan
because there weren't any shower pans that were the right
size.
We had to get all the plumbing to get in
there somehow with a shower head and a toilet and
there's just a lot of different pieces that all had
to come together into the bathroom.
One of the non negotiables in the camper was a
king size bed and so
a king mattress was kind of going to fit,
but it needed some shaping for the round nose of
the camper and those kind of his and hers cabinets
we have up there.
And so I've cut up mattresses before to fit in
a van.
We had, I think, to make a little cut.
And I learned that an electric Turkey Carver knife works
super well on foam.
So it was a bit terrifying to take our brand
new mattress and uncover it and cut it up.
But we did and it fit,
so
we love it. It's been a game changer for traveling.
You know the ability to we can crush Rd.
miles, we can drive for a long,
long time. And then because it's so comfortable to drive,
we have all our stuff with us.
We can stop and make lunch
and with the dogs, Traveling with the dogs is so
much easier now.
And they love the camper,
which I think is part of why we love it
so much.
But like, I could never imagine not having it now,
or I could never imagine going back to just like
a store bought one because this is so tailored to
us.