Box Truck to RV!! Was it worth it??

hey everybody what's going on one of the big questions we had when we threw up the video of the hr rv was people were asking us what it was like on the inside was like to build because a lot of people come back and saying oh i wanted to build one of these and and that's exactly what we wanted to build and i kind of want to go through and let people know what it kind of took to build this rv because when we first did it it seems really easy and affordable on paper but you really need to know what you're looking at so i'm gonna quickly go over to the rv here and let you guys see what it was that we started with uh what sort of things we kind of had to tackle what kind of costs were involved um to let you really kind of get a indication of is this something you want to do or do you want to just go buy an rv uh that being said when we were down in arizona we were looking at buying another rv on instead of buying a house right away so we were looking at a lot of rvs and i have to admit after building my rv and walking through ones that were 100 to 150 000 there wasn't one that stood out and said oh i'd rather have that one than my truck and i'm gonna let you know now i probably have about 50 60 000 into this rig so to give you a price comparison so to me it's not worth it uh i would rather build my own but it does take a lot of thought expertise and a lot of forefront to think ahead and a lot of people don't understand i think they're going to buy a cube truck and just turn it into one and there's a lot of planning that has to go through it to really make sure that you're um getting every aspect in because all of a sudden you'll get to three quarters of the way and go oh i should have done this or i should have done that even us even though i planned on playing and playing there's still things that i should have done before that i didn't do to the end so if i was to build another one uh there's a lot of things that i would kind of do before getting to the end which would have made a lot easier but it wasn't too hard because we could kind of work around them so first off what we did was bought a 2003 freightliner m2 business class which was called an expedite truck because they had the bunk on it as well as having the box it's a 24 foot box um it did have the side compartments except for all the lowers underneath the whole box so it was just wide open we'll show you a picture of that of how the truck started when we first got it just pure white now when we first got it we didn't know if we were going to do it right away and the first things we decided to do was build the shell or the boxes underneath because i i really hated the look of the wide open frame so it was let's kind of hide that make it look more like a hauler than just looking like a cube truck so i went around i got quotes on this i i had some guys that were in the welding and said how much would it cost me to have you build these lower boxes and they would quote me around anywhere from 15 to 20 thousand dollars and i was like holy cow i'll end up trying to do it myself my one son cody is a welder so we thought okay let's uh buy some metal and do it i have to say at the end of the day they weren't far off because by the time we bought all the metal all the handles all the hinges um all the plywood inside the waterproof plywoods all kinds of we were probably in around i'm gonna say six seven thousand dollars even before our labor and it is an extreme amount of labor to figure out how they're going on going around the wheel wells and and mounting and so forth it took many many hours this was probably one of the biggest jobs even more so than building the inside of the truck these boxes were huge and you're trying to get them as big as they can so they can hold all the stuff that you need to hold whether it's being the water tanks or the gray waters or black waters and we didn't even have them on the time so again it's one of those things that you should really look at okay what size of holding tanks am i going to get where can i get the holding tanks so on and so forth i'm going to kind of get back to that so that was the first thing we did was build the boxes with shelves with no plywood in them just just to basically um shell them in now we were deciding okay we had about 60 days left before we had to go down to arizona and we were like we are not going to be able to afford hotel rooms to stay down there for any length of time it's just too expensive so we have the cube truck what will it take us to do the inside like let's just try to get the inside done but me being me i want everything to be done right the first time so i sat down with a pen and paper looking okay what's the cost going to be and we figured we could do the whole inside for about 9 000 in material we well over doubled that it's amazing on things you don't think about uh the cost of materials so many things are just ads and ads and ads and ads and ads so let me go and show you exactly what we did so the first things first was we cut out the back so this truck was all wrapped on everything so we had to be very careful when we were cutting this not to damage the wrap we used a plasma collar uh sorry plasma cutter and really took pride and care of protecting the wrap to cut out the door and then once we cut the door out we had to cut out the floor and weld all the plates and metal in for the stairs uh we got the door from a wreckers and again a lot of the stuff we did get for this rv when it came to rv parts which was really great about an hour down the road from us we have an rv records so by having that rv records that was affordable we could get all the tanks the electrical the the doors the um fittings the switches on the walls like there was a lot of things that we get at a really reasonable price so that's something you might want to look into is how close is an rv record to you and and sourcing a lot of those parts out for the rv before you get into it now once we got into the rv we've had a lot of trucks and a lot of um rvs that we've converted and we've had a lot that we've lived in just normal campers one of the biggest pet peeves we hear from a lot of people is the bathroom the reason why you don't want to stay in an rv for any length of time is because of a bathroom you they give you these massive living rooms and that's another reason why we didn't like any of the rvs that we were looking at 100 150 000 because their bathrooms were still like trying to stand in like a sardine to have a shower or have um the toilet or trying to get dressed they're just so small they have this big bedroom they you're only only going in there to sleep and then you have your big living room to kind of entertain in your kitchen but the bathroom is what everybody really really thinks about when they're in the rv to use it always goes my god this thing is too small so i want to build my rv around my bathroom so we'll go in and show you what we did first we sheltered the whole truck pulled everything out of all the walls everything to get back to this bare metal and then we put in one inch foam on all the walls to try to keep it as tight to the walls as we could so we're not adding into the rv to lose any space and going across the ceiling now we had a ceiling down in this cube truck that was a see-through ceiling to allow light in during the day so we covered that but eventually when we got back we had to insulate that as well because the sun even hitting that one inch foam was heating up really bad in here so now we have six inch rocks all inside but what we did was i first took tape and i designed my bathroom in my rv to make sure that i could have full size shower three foot vanity toilet was on the side no hallway so what we did was we created ourselves pocket doors so you're not taking off any room and no rvs even have this so now we can close ourselves in on both sides lock the doors have ourselves a shower but get dressed everything and feel like you're still in a house you don't feel like you're in an rv this was amazing everybody comments on this bathroom when they walk in and one of the funny stories is the people beside us that had a beautiful big rv once they realized what we had and saw what we had asked if they could have a shower here because they have another big thing to look at that i think every rv should have and they don't is hot water on demand most rvs or campers come with a basically a hot water heater that is like your house but it's really small it's about this big uh bug so it gives you about five minutes of hot water so you have to get in lather turn it off and then turn it back on and rinse it and you got to do your shower really quickly and it's a really big pet peeve but they actually have a hot water on demand system that plugs into the existing one and we bought that one was pretty much the same size at on amazon we get for 600 and some dollars which allowed us to have our full control so if you look on the wall here you can see we have a full control panel for hot water on demand when we turn on our on board pumps whether run 12 volt and turn on our tap it automatically kicks on our propane and turns on our hot water and instantly we have hot water so and we never run out so we can have showers back to back to back to back to back as long as we have water to have an hour shower if you want which was wonderful so there could be five of us having a shower and they would come over in the morning they started using our rv every morning for showers and the every time they did they came in the comments going i just can't believe that we can have a full shower in an rv and the size of it the size is crucial so we built this whole rv around my shower which putting a bedroom on this site which allowed us to first off we had a couch here that dropped into a bed when we first went down there so i built this actually when we were down in arizona so we built i went and got an entertainment unit base which gave us all of our pockets and all of our drawers to have more storage and if you pick up the bed halfway through we have another board that flips up that has all of our linens and on a whole nother storage compartment probably about two feet or foot and a half wide by the whole length of the bed as well so it added a lot of storage and a thousand times more comfortable because this is a a bed that we a mattress we purchased from from i think it was walmart that uh 12 inch pad so it memory foam is amazing put in our big tv full-size house dresser so we have lots of stuff for our for our clothing as well as we put in an optional bunk so we went to another rockers to a transport rockers and i picked up another bunk for this site so if there's more people in the rv you need more bedding turn this handle and i'll show you here i take this one off because that is pulled but i drop the handle and automatically we come down and we have a whole nother bed up on here and we have this mattress custom made in arizona for like 175 dollars uh and it's full memory foam four inch beautiful beautiful pad so again great option now we can have two people stay in this side then just one and then when you're traveling or you want it gone it just falls right back up there and that's it if you walk through the cut through to the pump or the cab of the truck the nice thing that we have about this is our sitting area this used to be a bump back here so it was a double bunk and your lower bumps and it had your top bunk we pulled this out and we ended up putting in two rv chairs sorry uh van chairs from a record i think we paid 15 for the pair of them and they were like never sat in there like brand new so we made our own bases so they can clip in and clip out and put in the hardwood floors but all these cabinets were in the truck so it was nice we have a little fridge that if we're on the road we have our own little fridge a microwave everything right in the cab so we can do everything here and four people can drive in the truck but the beauty side of it this becomes a bedroom just by simple pulling down this bunk and now we have another bedroom on this side somebody can stay in the whole cab of the truck get shower get ready as well as all your cabinets for all their clothing and everything so we essentially have two bedrooms which most rvs do not have two bedrooms so that's why people are really blown away that we utilized every part of this and we had to cut in this hole which was probably one of the next hardest things that we had to do was cutting the bunk into the back and getting in the rubber membrane for around on on a site found in the states took us forever to get it but that worked out beautifully so now we can have a full walk through once we did that and had our bathroom done and our bedroom done then we went to dropping all of our ceilings we have two by six and thought ply sorry two by six uh spruce ceiling which is very very strong makes the truck very rigid and that's one thing i love about building a truck versus buying an rv is it is built like a house construction so everything is two by four walls and it's two by six ceiling and roxul insulation and the whole underside of the truck we rocks all insulated all of the bottoms uh sheeted it all in with with uh sheeting to hold it up makes it quieter as well as um strength we don't have things falling apart coming down loosening uh again you've got more of a host construction than just that paneling and small stuff that rvs they start to fall apart really quickly then when we did decide to do the living room we decided to do something um small we didn't want windows that's probably one of our biggest things we get commented on is when we pull into rv park and i love it we pull in people look at the truck and they go i can't believe you're staying in that and we're like yeah yeah yeah they're like there's no windows or you know what he's just staying in the bunk we're like no the whole thing is an rv and they're like they just shake their head but when we go to set up it's funny we always draw a crowd and everybody wants to walk through and then they walk through they're like oh my god this is nicer to my house but then they're like i can't believe you don't have windows but if you look at all the rvs around i always laugh because everybody that has an rv or a camper all their shades are drawn and their their windows are covered in the front of their truck and i said you guys don't have windows either you have windows but you don't use them they're like yeah we never thought of it that way and the best part is i don't get waking up every morning from the sun so we get to sleep in or you know if we have a late night we don't have to worry about you know waking up too early one of the beautiful sides of this truck that we decided to do was by keeping the back swing open doors we can load stuff in the back if we have to we bring our little jeep with us and rolls right up in here in the living room but as well as we have a full balcony that drops out and you'll see that in the one video where you'll see the the balcony open up so once it opens up this becomes really big and we could and i actually have a screen that we custom made that went over the top and the screen shuts in place of this or in front of this so we can have our privacy or open it up with screen so the bugs don't come in but we can go sit out on the balcony and have our coffee or tea or whatever in the morning and with having a kitchen we have everything minus a sink and and i didn't want to sink because a lot of stuff we're washing outside and a lot of people don't realize when you're washing all that junk i didn't want the inside the rv to smell like you know dirty food or any of that stuff as well as our holding tanks i didn't want the gray holding tank being filled with grease and sludge so all of our barbecuing everything we do outside so every camper i have a 38 foot fifth wheel camper i've had uh rv campers we never ever ever use the stove and we never ever really use the sink um if we need a sink we use the bathroom sink to just rinse out cups or do small little dishes but really we don't need a big sink in our living room we want to keep it more open to be able to have people come up here once the balcony was open use it more as a show hauler type site feel so if we want to do a meeting or business meeting we could in the rv and that's kind of what we built this thing for was to be a show hall or business meeting uh when we went to shows open it up let people come up sit down relax or put up our stereo or our speakers of the back and have it almost like a concert at the back of our rv so it worked out really really well so i just wanted people to really see what it takes to build an rv it the money is what you want to put into it like how far do you want to go with it even these wood panels that are on the walls are fifty dollars a panel so you have to look at you could we have done it cheaper absolutely we could but again i wanted to make sure everything i did i only did it once and what i meant by things that we would have done before was i didn't put in a furnace in this rv and you know we're actually going to be showing videos of how we put the furnace in and trying to we had to pull cabinets back out drill holes try to go through the bottom membranes put in the furnace little things like that we didn't do just for the simple fact of trying to put in this thermostat trying to put in a thermostat into a wall that's already built that has three layers on it was really tough to drill that hole probably took me two hours with a to try to fish that wire down even though i had electrical fission it was hard because of the foam barrier it was trying to get caught in the foam barrier dropping down so we had to drill a big hole here where once we put the baseboard back you won't see it but that was one of the hard things so little things that you can think of beforehand you really have to plot things out you really have to know how wide your beds are for when you're building your bedroom you have to know how big your um your bathroom is going to be for your showers or your vanities because you don't want to just start building that thing and try to go out and try to find things that will fit those spaces you almost have to buy all the stuff that you need that you want in your rv and then build the spaces around all the stuff that you want that's probably one of my biggest things that i can explain and then even before all that takes place where you put your first screw in or your first nail in you have to really think about the plumbing the plumbing and your holding tanks where you're going to vent through the roof where you're going to drop your black water gray waters and we'll go outside and kind of show you that a little bit um what we had to do on that right blind so when we went to the wreckers we bought because it was a lot cheaper they were 500 for your average bladder block for hot water sorry your water your sewer were around 500 for new ones where i could go the wreckers and pull them out i think i paid 150 for like five of them so all different sizes to figure out which one you're reporting in so when we had to figure out where we were putting all of our drain lines you have to drop through the floor and you will notice here on this side we have our black water that drops down from our toilet into our black water that we have a fresh water underneath we have a fresh water if you saw in the beginning on the other side of the truck which we'll go over there and show you so we have two fresh waters most rvs or campers only come in with one i want to make sure we have lots of water sorry for the train have lots of water that we could run both sides and you know be able to have two three showers with the hot water on demand so we put in two tanks of water so allowed us to have one on each side um as well as under here we have where our fresh water comes in from shore or from i always say shorts that had a boat so from the rv campsite or whatever your fresh water in your fill up to fill up your both tanks it he's often fills up both tanks and we have our pullout for our black water our gray underneath and we've actually bellied the gray water underneath the truck was a lot thinner of a tank so we could span the two sides and put it through now up in here it's going to be hard to see we have all of our electrical panels so inside of our electrical panel here we have our 12 volt our 110 volt and we were able to purchase all of this from a wreckers for like you said 150 175 which saved huge huge money so again trying to figure out what you're running where you're running it how your lines are going to drop down to to be able to do your drains that was the hardest part of building building an rv was really thinking 20 30 steps ahead because the last thing you want to do is put a shower and drill through and all of a sudden you're hitting a joist or you're coming down through where a wheel is or you can't get a vent through the through the ceiling so when your doors are open because we have the pocket doors which side were our vents going for our tanks to go out the ceiling of the rv so that is probably the hardest thing that we had to overcome was where everything was on this side here we have our batteries for our two batteries that run the truck and our three batteries for the rv and we got a switch actually coming in we haven't put it in yet to be able to turn it on and off to when we're going we can run all the batteries to charge these batteries or we can turn it off and isolate and allow us to run the batteries if they die we don't actually kill the truck batteries so that's going to be our next thing that we do um if we come around this side you will see that we just finished this and if you watch the next video or the next couple videos we're going to show you how we put this in but we have our furnace so we just finished this so this is our um exhaust and our intake for our furnace our furnace is directly in behind here you can see it from this side and we have our dock work one running up into our bunk of our truck one running into the bedroom one running under the vanity of the bathroom and out into the bathroom and one running out the other bottom cabinet out into the living room so we're really excited about this because i'll tell you last year there was nights that we were running small little micro heaters and it was really cold this would be so nice we actually can turn it on to a furnace timer and turn it on whenever it gets down below different temperatures like your house now this shows you our other um water tank or fresh water tank and that is what fills up to run and over in this corner you'll see here is the hot water on demand as you can see the size of it it is designed to go in place of any rv hot water tank that you have in and they have the face coverings you can order two that match your trailer so great option if you ever want to switch your rv to is switching into a hot water system um did you show them that part there okay so so it allows you to be able to turn it on you can adjust your temperature of water never run out and i i can't say enough about it because when i was looking into them nobody seemed to really have uh oh does it work is it any good nobody could tell me that a lot of rv places for some reason they downplay them and i don't know why i don't know if it's because they have a brand company that they want to talk about and try to sell you into the small tanks and make more money on them but they really kind of downplay them and i finally brought the bullet and said i'm gonna put it in and it was the best decision i i cannot stress to anybody enough if you have an rv or you are building an rv don't even hesitate um the like they were charging sixteen hundred seventeen hundred dollars at rv stores for this system amazon i bought it for like 678 dollars or something around there um and i'm telling you it was the best thing i ever purchased and it's very easy gas line water in and the hot water comes out as and it runs off a three three amp system so even driving down the road if we have all the tanks filled we can turn it on and have a shower driving down the road and it will fire and run us for hot water so that's pretty pretty good but the biggest thing is not running out of hot water and you we lived in this for seven and a half months and never once felt claustrophobic in the shower or in the bathroom or felt like oh i just can't wait to get home to have a real shower reel house because it feels like you're in a real house and that was the biggest key for us was to make it feel like as if we're going to spend a lot of time in here we got to make sure that we don't feel like we're we're on top of each other in the truck by having two bedrooms all this stuff and it serves so many purposes um so i can't stress enough if if building an rv is something you want to do i believe it's one of the best options out there somebody doesn't have a lot of money like we didn't have a lot of money to build this yes it does add up so you have to be prepared for that but the other big side of the coin is to really know if i get into this it is going to be um i want to say it's going to be an endeavor so you have to have the space you have to have the time to or you're not going to get it done and we by setting us a time frame of us saying we had 60 days to have this on the road to leave for a show in california it was two to three or four of us non-stop 60 days flat out doing everything which was kind of a good thing because it allows me to say we have to get this done so you really work to it if we could have said oh i i'll build it when i build it it would never have gotten done but now that we've gotten back uh you'll see there's going to be a couple of videos to follow um little things that i want to change on it one being the furnace you'll be able to see a furnace video how we put in and install that video or that furnace so there was really nothing on youtube to really show you that so i hope we we help you out by showing you what the uh furnace setup is as well as one of the coolest features that we did on the rv was trying to find a place to wash it um was really tough in any place that we found i mean you're charging 150 to wash the rv so being black this truck was destroyed every time a little bit of rain came it looked terrible so when we go to show we'd have to try to locate an rv or a transport truck wash and go there before a show which really was a pain so we got back one of the first things we did you know and we put the full video together and i think you'll you'll enjoy it was we put in two holding tanks underneath the back end and we put 250 foot reels on each side and gas powered pressure washer in the rig so now anywhere we go we can pull out our 50 foot reel go all the way to the front of the truck and 50 foot behind and pressure wash the whole truck ourselves no matter where we are including like our cars or whatever we bring with us so we have two other holding tanks and again watch the next video and we'll show you how we did that but this is probably one of my favorite things that we've done on the truck so far so i hope you liked the video if you could try to subscribe to us we're going to be putting a lot more videos on we're going to be doing some giveaways with hr where we're pretty excited to get ready to start going down to the states hopefully be there in the new year that's what our goal is to have our new new shop open so if you feel free to to subscribe and like our stuff i'd appreciate it thank you

Channel: HR Headlight Restoration

Views: 525,662

Keywords: freight liner, box truck, rv, show hauler, headlights, restoration, transformation, before and after, headlight restoration, walkthrough, dealership, franchise, become a dealer

Id: Rq3bpJdTQ1Y

Length: 29min 12sec (1752 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 14 2020