Building an Unusual Sleeping Platform in the Back of My SUV! (DIY SUV Camper Bed Setup)

hi everyone in this video i'm going to be building a sleeping platform in the back of my new suv here this is a 2001 gmc yukon and here is our space i have removed the rear seats there was basically a bench seat right here i believe these can have a third row of seats but this particular yukon did not have that now a gmc yukon is the same thing as a chevy tahoe so if you're interested in either of those i think this video will be interesting to you and also if you are interested in building any kind of sleeping platform in an suv i think this video will be uh worth watching because i'm gonna be building a different kind of sleeping platform i've never seen anyone else build anything like this but you can see here how we have this nice about four foot long flat section in the back here and then where the seats used to be it drops off and there's a about a four or five six inch drop down right here so this section is lower than this section my platform will have to accommodate that that's one of the main reasons i'm building a platform instead of just putting a mattress down on the ground here from the side here this is what i'm working with again flat back here drops down in a couple different layers right here i'm going to be removing this floor mat that's just there temporarily i know people like to know the dimensions of these spaces i just measured and it's about 77 or 78 inches long from the back of those front seats to this plastic area right here and then as far as width it's about 49 or 49 and a half inches between the the wheel wells here this is the the narrowest section in the back here it widens up by the doors there but this is about 49 inches roughly there are a few things i'm looking for in this build so as i said before this is going to be a different kind of sleeping platform usually there's the platform here and then there are either drawers underneath the bed or it's just a platform on legs basically and you can access the space below the platform from the back of the vehicle and that's something that most of these platform builds have in common you access the stuff underneath the platform the storage areas by opening up the back of the car and then getting in that way i don't want to do that i want to be able to access my gear from inside while i'm inside and so my platform is going to be opening up like this i don't know if that makes sense right now i'll i'll show you the mock-up i have in a minute here but that's the main goal here i think that for me personally how i travel how i store my stuff and how i want to access my stuff that makes the most sense for me i also want this platform set up more or less all the time full-time for sleeping i don't want to have to get to a campsite and then unfold things and and lay the mattress out i want everything to be already set up once i get to a campsite one thing i'm going to try to do with this build is have my camp fridge my 12 volt fridge and my portable power station in my case that's the jackery explorer 1500 underneath the platform so the platform has to be tall enough to hide those underneath it i don't know if i'll get that right the first time but ultimately that is the goal here so this is going to be the overall design let's go to the frame section of it back here so this will be the rear section these are 1 by 8s and this will be the front section so basically this back here will go over the the flat part in the back and then this right here will extend out in front of that over the the seat section right here and there will be legs a few legs on this to hold that up and then these pieces of plywood will be on top of the platform folding or forming the the actual top surface of the platform and then these will all be hinged so that again i can open them up like this and so for example if i'm sleeping on this side i'll be able to open up this side of the platform to access stuff inside there so these are all one by eights these pieces of lumber here these are all two by twos and this is all i believe 3 8 inch plywood i got all of these pieces cut at home depot i didn't have to do any of this except for cutting these three pieces right here these were a little bit too long so i had to cut them down by a couple of inches these are the remnants the couple of inches that i cut off so i think the first step here and i should say this is not a how-to video because i'm not entirely sure what i'm doing i'll show you some occasional progress but this isn't a step-by-step video because i'm sure i'll have to backtrack and make changes along the way so bear with me here i'm not a carpenter not a woodworker i don't really build things but hopefully this will work out more or less like i have planned in my head here so the first step i'm going to i guess frame this up i'm going to use some screws or my screws right here i'm gonna use these screws gonna put a couple in each end here ultimately once i have this design finalized once i have it the way i want it i'll use some wood glue and i'll make it really nice and everything but for now i'm just going to tack it together with some screws so that i can easily take things apart if i need to and change things around all right let's get started [Music] got the basic frame all put together here i'm just gonna do a test fit to make sure it fits yeah that looks pretty perfect it's a good fit let's see what it looks like from the side here yeah it looks really nice i think i'm gonna ultimately have it out here a little bit more so that it's more or less even with this down here okay now let's see if these will fit on here and once they're on there if there's enough room if there's enough clearance here for me to to open them up things are starting to take shape and i think i do have enough clearance here for these to open again these are 3 8 inch thick so i just need 3 8 of an inch because once they're hinged once i open it up like this it needs a little bit of breathing room right here same on this side it'll be a tight fit but i think i think this is good enough these are the hinges i'm using again they're from home depot i've got a bunch of them here i think i'll start with putting two on each piece then i have enough to put a third one in the middle once i again have everything finalized okay got one side of a functional hinge here the problem is that these screws that come with the hinge are a little bit a little bit too thick for this thin plywood this is relatively thin plywood again it's 3 8 inch and so um my dad went out i'm at my parents house by the way my dad went out and uh both my mom and dad have been helpful with this whole build that helped me go source materials like screws and we drove around and they helped me sand these pieces yesterday so thanks to them this is possible and so my dad went to ace hardware and picked up some shorter screws i think they'll still poke through a little bit but that's not a huge deal we can file those down or or do something to blunt any any sharp tip that does poke through [Music] so [Music] okay moment of truth let's see if the whole thing can open and close yeah i think that works let's see if we can fit the other one in without creating too big of a gap here or without them being too tight up against each other cross your fingers [Music] well miraculously it fits and it works as far as i can tell pretty perfectly this opens up like this and one thing to keep in mind if you're building something like this is where the door is you might need to round this off or you know just cut off the corner i think i'll be okay but i might need to might need to trim that a little bit other side also works well so far so good so the next step is to put some support pieces in the middle here the original plan was to put this on the inside right here to give support for the middle what i think i'm going to do is cut another piece this exact length this one is about half inch too long i'll take we have a hand saw it's right here i'll take that chop half an inch half an inch off of this thing so that there are two support pieces right there and then at some point i might add one going across each section but for now i don't know exactly what i'm going to be putting back here i might be putting long things back here so i don't want to have something that cuts me off in the middle here but yeah let me go ahead and cut this to length and then i'll install both of the support pieces in the middle [Music] ah that's pretty good and i can set up on here too i think i probably will need to put oh i think i will need to put a horizontal piece in at some point it's solid but it does creak and sag a little bit so i think it would be best to to do that at some point i'm not going to do that today let's go ahead and start on the front portion the front piece so this is the frame of the front section the top of the front section there will be legs also made out of two by two that i'll be cutting from this longer piece i didn't have these cut at home depot because i didn't know exactly how long i would need them to be i'm going to join each point here each part here going to connect each junction with a couple of these screws if this will focus there we go and on top of that will be these other pieces of plywood here those will also be hinged like the back doors but they're going to be hinged in an interesting way kind of an odd way i don't know if it'll work out in the long term but i'm interested in trying it out to see if it'll work i'll go more into that in a little bit but let me first just put this part together here okay well this took some doing this took a while because well basically i i don't think that the the frame of the two by twos was square like when i close this you can see how there's no gap here then there is a gap and i just made problems with the two pieces fitting together and anyway it's kind of of a mess but i eventually fixed it so this is how it's going to be like this just you know raised so it's on the same level as the rest of the platform this opens up this way and this opens up this way basically i want to be able to access these from here from this door and from the front seat so if i'm sitting in the front seat i'll be able to lift it up like this and i'll be able to lift this up like this i'm one step further along now and i wanted to show this to you so i screwed these scrap pieces onto here and that's what this will rest on until i can screw this in to this well everyone after three and a half hours of work i think it's done more or less there's still minor things i need to do but it's mostly done so in the back here you've seen this got nice storage here there is space right here that i'm going to fill with something at some point i'm probably going to put another piece of wood that continues down from this so that whatever is in here can't slide forward can fall forward into that spot that's not a big deal i can just be screwed on whenever i get around to getting those pieces okay so you've seen that let's go around to the front this one goes up like this so i've got three legs on this some good storage here you can see the the two blocks that i screwed on there so this panel folds back this one folds to the side and so the plan is to put the fridge here the power station there in fact let's do that right now i've added one mattress to the top here i have two of these they are identical mattresses and so you can still open it up to access whatever's inside the other mattress is at home again i'm not at home right now you can easily lift it up to access the fridge this is the alpacool c20 fridge just barely fits under this thing and then on the other side this is the jackery explorer 1500 the 1500 i could probably or maybe even put that like right here or right here there's enough room here i might be able to fit the jackery there which would give me just a ton of storage space over here but that'll all be figured out as i actually use the setup and again the as far as these openings go these hatches this is the preliminary setup i might switch that one to also go the same way i might do it some other way i'm not sure yet and so if it's just me traveling without my wife i'll be here and i can just open this up from the inside while i'm sitting on that bed i'll have some kind of handles here like some webbing straps or some rope straps i can just pull i'll uh i'll add that on later again there are a few little tweaks i'm sure i'll be making in the future but overall it turned out surprisingly well in theory once i get on the road i'll figure out whether i really do like it but so i'm five foot eleven i can't sit up completely straight i can set up mostly straight and if i go back a little bit more i can sit up even more straight and if i lean up against the seat here the front driver seat basically i'm i'm sitting perfectly straight slouching maybe a little bit but i mean this is perfect i'm really really happy with this so it's been a couple of weeks let me show you some of the changes that i've made and my wife and i have used this on a trip for a couple of nights and overall it's great it works really well but like i said i have made some changes and i will probably continue to make some changes in the future but let me show you the changes i've made since the last part of this video so the first change is that i screwed some grab handles on here so there's one for each side this is just webbing and i used some short screws to go through the webbing into the the top surface here the second thing i did was that i wanted some supports to keep to prop these open when i was putting stuff in or taking stuff out so that i didn't have to use one hand to hold it up while putting stuff in so that's what i did and that works really well so this is made just out of one by two and so are these and then down here there's just a carriage bolt with some some washers and a lock nut on the other side here to hold everything in place and so it just swings up and down you'll notice that on this side there are two pieces and let me show you what that's for i can open it up even wider so that i can put big bulky things in here so for example i recently got an electric folding bike a company sent that to me and you'll see a video about that in the future but if i want to take that with me on a trip i can now put that here and having these supports here will will prop this open now i could just remove this could just remove um you know one of the sides unscrew the hinges and just remove the top thing but the plan is to just do what i showed you i have one support here on this side then i don't know if you can see it there's another one in the in the back right there and so it'll hold this side up pretty well and so again i can't put big bulky things back here when my wife isn't with me on a trip and the reason i have these two blocks here like the two the two notches instead of just one is that when there's a mattress on this this won't go vertical because there's you know a few inches of mattress going up against here so it'll only go to a certain point it won't go straight vertical and so in that case i put it in this notch but if there were no mattress i could move this up further and then notch it here and that's what i've done on this side so a closer look at the little hinge part here just like i said a carriage bolt and a few washers and a lock nut another thing i did another change i made was that i anchored this down with some cargo straps here so there are some tie down points in the back one right here one right there and so i just used these cheap tie-down straps from harbor freight to go around the tie down and then around the the frame here and it is i mean it is solid it it can't go anywhere so so that's really nice it'll cut down on on this just moving when i'm driving down a bumpy road and also it helps position it exactly where i want forwards and backwards it needs to be forwards enough that that the corner here doesn't stick out so that i can close the rear door here but it also needs to be back far enough that i can still open up the hatches and not hit the front seats there if that makes sense one other thing i did was add this piece this is a one by six of 48 inch wide one by six that i just screwed into the existing frame and again if you remember that was just to stop things from going forward into that that forward section i mean it's still open a little bit on the corners but that's not a big a big deal i'm just trying to keep big things from from moving forward there and then in general i strengthened it quite a bit so i i think in the first part of this video i had just two hinges on each side now there are three over here and over here and then i i put l brackets in just a bunch of different places i'll probably be adding more in the future because hey why not but in every corner on the inside here i have l brackets and then on the legs in the front here let me go show you let's see yeah like right there you can see the l bracket and right here on this front section you can see some l brackets so again just to strengthen everything make it tough make it more rigid i added more screws in general and then also added more l brackets and again here's a better look at that front piece that i that i just screwed on here as far as things that i want to do to this i'd like to add some some screw in u-bolts along the inside here so that if i do have a bike a folding bike or if i have you know anything here that i need to secure i can use ratchet straps to uh to secure that there by using the u-bolts i i've got some ordered but it'll be another week or so until they arrive so those aren't going to be in this video but picture that in your mind's eye and then one thing i'll probably change in the future is that these are already starting to bow a little bit and i i knew that was a possibility but i wanted to go with the the lighter weight surface here again i think this is 3 8 inch i think half inch or 3 4 inch would definitely be better i certainly could add a support in the middle here let me see if i can do this one-handed okay i certainly could add like a leg right here to go down and support the middle section to keep it from sagging i could add a cross member here a piece of wood going across this way but i want to keep this open so that i can put like long things here and having a piece of wood crosswise would get in the way of that so i think for now this is fine for the short term you know it'll work just fine i think that uh maybe next year i'll work on that but for the rest of this season this will this will get us through here and that's it thanks for watching hope that was helpful i hope that was interesting i'm not gonna give exact blueprints or dimensions or anything like that you're gonna have to figure that out on your own but i hope this was helpful just to get some ideas flowing to show you the kind of thing that you could build in your rig again this was built for my needs and what i wanted in a platform your needs and your vehicle will likely be different but still thanks for watching and again i hope this was helpful i'll see you guys in the next video be sure to check out adventure know-how my new site where you can gain access to a map of all of my free campsites plus monthly bonus videos that you won't find anywhere else learn more at adventureknowhow.com and for links to everything else suv rving related visit suvrving.com links to these sites and more will be in the video description

Channel: SUV RVing

Views: 238,571

Keywords: suv rving, car camping, suv camping, road trip, camping, camper, rv, vanlife, vandwelling, adventure, travel, suv dwelling, rav4, toyota, sleeping

Id: 3CD16-29bJ4

Length: 25min 49sec (1549 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 21 2021