31 Useful Packing Hacks for Camping "The Easy Way" To Organize a Small Camper

so if i was to guess why people stop camping my guess my number one thought would be packing unpacking and a lack of a system of organization so today we're going to give you our tips to help you reduce that stress eliminate most of the time taking up with packing and organizing and get you out here as fast as you can so you can leave those stressors behind and enjoy this beautiful world [Music] so like most things we're not experts in this we're learning every day but what's really pushed us to become a lot more organized is we currently own two trailers a 4x8 teardrop and a 13 foot vintage trailer and going back and forth between the two if you don't want a lot of stress and a lot of wasted time you have to be organized so today we're going to share those tips with you so before i go and get myself some breakfast this morning i'm just going to start with my first tip and it's one you might find wasteful and that is you need dedicated gear just for your camper alone i'm talking clothing kitchen items outdoor gear that never leaves this little camper and the easiest way to do that is just take a walk down to your local thrift store you will find so many great things there and if you think you're not going to find matching sets and quality items you might be surprised oh and i should mention with these tips i'm going to start off with some broad items like this and then get more down into the details of what we actually have in the camper i think both of them will help you have a more holistic approach to organization so once you get your items purchased for your camper the first thing you're going to do is create a master inventory and this inventory is going to help you identify if you have redundant items you know some of the best campers we know what they do is they look at an item and they determine does it have multiple uses so let me give you an example of one we have so most people have matching countertop a piece that sticks in here like cork board with laminate on top of it and that allows you to prep and do some extra work well this allows you to do all that and then some so now i can prep i can do work it's even tested to a heat level where you can move hot pans onto this but i can also use it as a drying rack and then we can still use this half for like washing our hands or pouring water over now they have these all over online on amazon tons of different sizes so you can find something that fits yours we have found when you label your bins your bags your containers you pretty much eliminate that stress of wondering do i have everything i need what needs to go back in the camper what goes where so i'm just going to show you an example of how we label items inside this camper so this is where we store our clothes the simplest advice i can give you is give a dedicated spot to each person so down here is the kids they are as you can see in a see-through tote this is how i would do it if i only had one trailer this is may's spot but because we have two we're actually using these compression sacks and the totes are best because they're see-through they pull in and out very nicely so i can set this here on the table you know kind of go through my stuff put them back in here really easy so i have to say our setup is not very pretty it actually borders on tacky and what we've found over time we've done the pretty we've done the nice aesthetic layout but it isn't as functional and it's not as affordable let me give you an example so these plastic bins they're see-through so you're able to see how much inventory you have if it's food you're able to see which items are in there if it's clothes if you have some nice non-see-through setup you're not able to do simple things like this and the plastic bins being affordable and coming in so many different sizes you can mix and match to make the perfect setup or if you're trying to get a nice little pretty set what you find is each cabinet and drawer they're all kind of different sizes and to find a set that has all the perfect sizes to make up one nice functional system it's pretty hard to do so i'm not going to steer you away from it we went that route as well but i'm just warning you before we go in there's something about functionality over feng shui in a camper that we will choose any day but our second trailer is a 4x8 teardrop and we have maxed it out with four of us so we need these small compression sacks these are the compression sacks from tripped travel gear they can really be wrenched down to fit on airplanes and motorcycles but we've been using them just to go back and forth between the two trailers now what this is here labeling the items really helps you know where things belong and it has two two purposes purpose number one once i wash the clothes and come back in here i know exactly this one for may needs raid pants rain jacket down jacket this one's a little more specific so drew's needs four underwear long socks three pairs so i know exactly how many needs to be in them and where they go but the other benefit i really like for me is that when may says hey grab east blah blah blah i can run in here look at east area and go is it in this one is it in this one this way i'm not rummaging through items quick plug here guys we have shirts out and they go on sale today this is a limited edition run of three weeks these are for you small camper enthusiasts if you want to know more check out the description below and i have more details of why we're doing this in the community tab and it's kind of neat to divide the bags into different sections because then you end up seeing what you use and what you don't use so like this as you can tell it gets very thin by the end of the trip because i use a lot of underwear and long socks and shorts but this one is t-shirts long sleeves and jeans i find that i'm going like two days in the same clothes maybe even sometimes three days so this kind of gives me a hint that i'm probably over packing for most of my trips next step and this is a big one after you get done with your camping trip you are going to wash your clothes individually meaning you're not going to mix them with your regular wash now this isn't the most environmentally friendly thing you should wait to fill up a load but this is the part of the system where it can really fall apart because if you mix your camping clothes with your regular clothes somebody can wash the clothes and somebody else could dry them and you never know where they're going to get put back and here's where that inventory and that labeling really comes in handy because now when you bring those clean clothes back to the camper everything is perfectly labeled so you know where to put it and even better than that the next time you go out you don't even have to think you know how many pairs of socks do i need because you've kind of worked this out like a science and the bin tells you how many of each item probably not the right trail to be walking on huh he's what's that um who got it um a baby a bear so this is the trail you do not want to walk at night oh man this is what number look at that the seventh dish i think so my goodness i just went back and reviewed the audio to make sure it worked and i noticed the side table here and i probably should talk about it i've been using it for what four or five trips now this was sent to us charles mullman had it sent to our house uh if you guys don't know charles he's a great guy in the community he's all about runaway camper trailers and doing modifications uh check out his youtube channel but it was kind of funny when charles sent this to us our original thought was like wow that's super sweet and awesome but we don't actually want one of these tailgater tire tables because why would i want to eat next to my gassy car and why would i want to carry this huge heavy metal thing with me everywhere and i was so wrong about this table why this table is loved by the overland community is it's the largest table i think you can get at the lowest weight this table comes in at like four pounds it's powder coated super tough table and i love it because really it helps with our organization so as you see here what we do is we take items out of the roof box and take items out of the car and we use this table as a staging area before moving everything to camp and then once everything's set up we've now been using this as our water storage because it's nice to have the little muddy pool away from the camp area it's strong and it allows us to use our new low water table for actually what it's designed for and that's next to our camp chairs so charles thank you so much sweetest darn dude ever i cannot believe you had this scent to us but yeah if anybody's looking at this tailgater i would say go check out charles's videos because he has way more details on how to fit it if it doesn't quite fit right let's say your wheel whales are too tight for it he has ways of getting it in there but for us it's a pretty good overall table and if we were over landing this would probably be the only table we'd bring if we had you know a jeep and a rooftop tent so i've used this for a few weeks more now and you can see the powder coating is starting to come off if this even is powder coating so either i have a bad batch and the conditions weren't right when they powder coated it but you know me i treat my gear hard and i honestly did not treat this table hard and it's starting to come off everywhere is it a big deal not really um but just thought you guys should know so now it's about packing the trailer organization plays a big key into how your trailer is going to tow based on where the weight is placed i would just start off by saying i wouldn't buy the specific bins you need because you don't know where you're going to place the items yet until you do a few trips to know what rides best in your trailer so for an example our little oh i gotta show you this look at this school of fish going by can i get this can i get it no oh i missed them try to place that weight over the axles that's usually the best for most trailers but that's not always the case so for the 13 foot scamp trailer we were kind of struggling towing it and we found over time so instead of large heavy areas trying to place it over the axles it was taking the weight into small spots but all over the camper now the teardrop i don't know why just the the build of it where the center point of it is it wants all its weight in the back and both the scamp and the teardrop once we got the weight distributed right our gas mileage increased and so did our towing power you got one before entering the trailer in alaska we take these shoes and just throw them under the trailer for storage we don't have those snakes and those spiders like you all do in the lower 48 so most people just take a rubbermaid under here put their shoes in it i've even seen people put brackets under here and then the rubbermaid can slide in and out with the shoes so i told you this wasn't going to be pretty as you can see we do not do two layers of stacking we like to keep our cabinets open so we can easily get things in and out this is one of the cabinets we use often so these are the things we're grabbing all the time so bear spray we put them in multiple places so they're easy to find same thing with these headlamps you know back in the day a headlamp was like 40 bucks now you can go to places like costco and get three for ten dollars so it's easy to just place them everywhere all our pots and pans again not pretty but very easy to grab i think you've seen before we used to use the really small cutting mats one of our biggest tips is don't use backpacking items out here use full size gear it makes it so much easier remember how i told you a couple videos back i was going to show you how these nest well i forgot so here we go they just nest in like this the cups you can put this on and then this folds right over so this is great for boiling water for coffee we use it to get the hot water so we found the best way to stay organized is to use drawers so if you can find a camper that has drawers we would highly recommend it many of you have asked how these drawers stay shut there's a catch here they built a wooden lip so you slightly raise it and pull it over also a great feature if you can't afford or find nice things that have rubber backings to keep things from moving around one easy tip is to just put rubber bands around things so like your silverware here you can wrap all your silverware up in a rubber band it keeps them together and keeps them from moving around so we have just enough for our family just enough for our coffee in the morning these little plastic plates here i think many of you are thinking why do they carry plastic around we love the really high rims on these i can't even tell you how many times i've lost full meals i've cooked out here and great things to the elements because they slid off my plate it's not like at home the way you're moving food at the campsite is so much different than the house so find yourself something with large rims and you're going to be a happy camper the next drawer what we use to separate this is just little plastic separators because you need a little separation of space keeps things organized and keeps them from moving around but this is kind of nice so you don't need to purchase because these are expensive these dividers for the whole thing sometimes just take up half the space or three-quarter and then use the other half as its own divider this is my catch-all as you saw the gloves were the first thing to flip out highly suggest the first thing you do at camp is get yourself a pair of dedicated gloves nothing special here this is where we keep the diapers and wipes which i just wiped east and forgot to put one back but it's easy to tell right because i have a system i can tell something is missing here and then this last drawer these are all our field guides wherever you're at in whatever country you're in it is great to have guides for the berries guides for the edible plants guides for the animals you're seeing guides for the highways make these as handy as you can because for one thing you're going to need them all the time you're always asking questions but they also really enhance the educational component to what you're doing and you'd be surprised how much you learn when you're actually out here connecting these books to what you're seeing this is the closet everybody loves on these vintage trailers and that's because you can put a compact toilet in here some people even plumb this space for us we're kind of embarrassed we haven't even utilized it yet so like i talked about you're going to want to take many trips out here and determine how you're going to use your space before purchasing storage bins so we've done this a lot we've kept fishing poles in here speaking of fishing gear i have a ton of pointers on how to carry fishing gear everything under your trailer inside your trailer in our teardrop fishing video i'll link that one in the description below but what i found i think what i want to do here is go vertical so i want storage like this that can be pulled out and then this is kind of again our catch-all this is our stove our fire pit and things like that so down here same concept what we're doing is we're using again these nice little clear bins and what's nice about these clear bastic bins here is they're low so this way i can see my books and just thumb through them as i'm looking for stuff so this year we've added large ziploc bags to our organizational system and this is to store all our dirty clothes they go in the ziploc bag that smell does not come back into our camper and then the other thing we're doing we have a separate bag just for dirty rags we used to bring like three or four rags out and they got soiled and they were gross and we ended up using paper towels at the end of the trip now we bring more than 10 rags out there just basic shop rags bring them home when you're done and you can wash them and then you're ready to go again this is the cabinet we probably use the most the one right inside the door and what we're keeping in here is our wash kit for our dishes if you guys have seen our low water dishwashing solution that's what this is for uh this is a clear ziploc bag so we can see how much is here so at the end of the trip i can see if i need to refill anything now if space is limited a really easy tip is to just add lids onto these plastic bins and now you can stack them up and we like to get the ones that have grooves on the lids so they easily stack and don't move as much around they're basically designed to be nested on top of each other so the next thing we're going to do is add tie downs to the floor we're starting to grow as a family and it would be really nice to carry the cooler in here and to carry some larger gear during transport like the bikes that are instantly going to come out so putting some nice little tie downs especially the kinds that can be adjusted the adjustable um they're on a rack system then you can move things around and keep them secure not worrying about them destroying your cabinets or your trailer while in transit so this wall right here would be great for a shoe organizer you could add even a little shoe organizer here and then as you know most people on their inside of their closets add shoe organizers a great way to carry little things light things i wouldn't carry heavy stuff we've done the organizers too that are the cubes that hook by a hanger on here we had one this summer and we broke it because we carried too heavy of items so they work just make sure your items are lighter many of these spaces are really dark and you can't even see what's here like this kite i just found today an easy fix for this is to put those led puck lights in many cabinet and spaces like this to help you find things now this may seem just like a waste of space and maybe it is all we have here is a bucket uh we need to maybe think this through but this bucket has multiple purposes and that's what i'm trying to show you really think through what you have so this bucket can be a catch-all for the water if for some reason this faucet was to go out and this stops me from having an issue with the subfloor with water leaking that i don't know about this bucket stores all these plants so when i'm in transit these plants come in this bucket for safe keeping this bucket is our nighttime emergency p bucket as you can see there's bags in here you line it up and that's what we're currently using it for look at this we have a fly fishing family out here i love it so if you guys have a window like this that doesn't have a screen on it you can put those bathroom caddies on there with the suction cups for additional storage so you guys know we have driven a toyota matrix most our time with this channel and it has amazing space in the back you know hatchback wagons this jeep is much narrower so we picked up these plano trunk boxes made in america built tough these things are great and they have little patterns on them here so they can stack on each other and not move around another great addition and why we love this it allows us to shut this door and easily pull it out where other rubber maids that are wider we were not able to shut the door and unfortunately with this shasta we can't even open the jeep door so we need to come through this window easily this allows us to do that

Channel: Playing with Sticks

Views: 78,454

Rating: 4.9340768 out of 5

Keywords: camp organization, how to pack for camping, camping hacks for beginners, how to pack for camping in a trailer, rv storage, best camping hacks and tips, storage, packing, Camp packing, camping gear, camping essentials, camping checklist, camping hacks, camp packing, vintage trailer, small camper trailer, teardrop camper, camping tips, camping for beginners, camping organization, camp packing hacks, playing with sticks, camping, alaska, rv storage ideas, packing hacks, camper

Id: AyNfKG0qRoQ

Length: 20min 9sec (1209 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 17 2020