Cargo Trailer Conversion - What you NEED to know

hello and welcome to those of you who are new to the channel and welcome back to those of you who followed the original series on the cargo trailer conversion and have been patiently waiting on the next installment and here we are we're finally doing it i started this project just over a year ago now and my initial intent was to take a cargo trailer and convert it into what most people would probably consider a traditional travel trailer i'm a photographer videographer so i do projects on the road from time to time and i needed a solution and a place to store my equipment charge my equipment and have the option of sleeping in this build if that's something that the project required well things changed circumstances changed and a certain pandemic hit at the beginning of 2020 and long story short i ended up using this cargo trailer as my full-time office for eight hours a day five days a week for almost six months and it's because of this experience that i believe i can provide you some really valuable information on what i would and would not recommend for a build like this okay let me stop right here and say that if you're in the process of purchasing a cargo trailer with the intent of turning it into a travel trailer go ahead and spend the extra two or three hundred dollars to have that interior ceiling height raised i believe standard they come six foot three uh one of the first decisions that i made was to pay a little bit extra and have that ceiling height raised to six foot eight and of all the things that i did in my build this is probably one of the best decisions that i made just trust me i'm not going to go into all the details of it but trust me when i say that you want that extra headroom okay but now that i got that out of the way we'll go ahead and start on my build and for the sake of this video we'll literally start from the ground up starting with the flooring so the first thing that we did was pull up the plywood flooring that came installed with the trailer we put down a quarter inch foam board insulation and then sub flooring then the plywood flooring that they had installed originally and then on top of that we installed a vinyl plank flooring and to this day i'm still very happy with this flooring it is a life proof like i said vinyl plank flooring scratch resistant water resistant it's very resilient and i still love how it looks i installed r5 insulation in the walls and our 7.5 insulation in the ceiling once we finish the insulation it was time to do the electrical work and this was certainly not an area that i was familiar with or comfortable experimenting with when it comes to like a diy project and i highly recommend that you do the same um it just so happened that my friend jacob was helping me with the project anyway and he was pretty well versed in this department so he more well not more or less he did all the electrical work himself and for that i'm very thankful because for whatever reason i personally am terrified of electricity the desk is a little makeshift i'm not gonna lie i went with a three-quarter inch birch plywood sheet i cut it to the dimensions and the shape that i wanted and then i installed it using some heavy duty but very affordable hinges that i found off amazon [Music] i paid to have these cabinets built to the dimensions that i needed and i couldn't be happier with how they turned out and at the end of the day i would say that the cabinets maybe more so than anything about the build is what really transformed it from feeling like a painted cargo trailer to feeling like a true office space or living area the countertop is just a piece of six foot baltic butcher block that i found at a local box store i imagine you could find it at home depot lowe's wherever you go to shop and i bought it planning to cut it to the dimensions of the cabinets themselves but once i got it and i took it inside the cargo trailer to kind of dry fit it i realized that this overhang section actually turned out to be really useful as kind of a little breakfast bar or additional workspace moving towards the front of the trailer we have the pallet wood wall and let me tell you if you have thirty dollars a hammer and some nails you can build a nice looking pallet wood wall it is not rocket science i still to this day love how it looks uh it actually serves pretty good functionality it hides what i have been using at least as just a storage closet kind of a catch-all for the electrical work all my junk my camera equipment and i'm still really happy with how this turned out the ac unit that i went with for this build was the dometic brisk air 2 and i've got a real love-hate relationship with this thing to give it credit it is capable of keeping the interior as cool as 69 or 70 degrees in the middle of an alabama summer on asphalt in direct sunlight but it comes at a cost that cost being that this thing is loud like not that dissimilar from a leaf blower loud i challenge anyone out there to tie their leaf blower to the ceiling above their office desk and work a 40 hour work week without going a little bit crazy but again i understand this isn't going to be the typical application for someone doing a conversion like this so if you're just planning on using it as a camper here and there a weekend here and there probably not that big of a deal in reality another note about at least this model in particular is that it's advertised to come with a built-in thermostat and while that's technically true the thermostat only controls the compressor on this model not the fan and the fan is the loud part so even when your system is not actively cooling the inside the fan is still blowing just as hard and creating just as much noise i was ultimately able to remedy this by buying a separate more traditional thermostat that i had to wire from the ac unit itself to the pallet wall and then to the marine battery because this thermostat only runs off of dc power not ac and i'll add that the instructions on it were terrible and it was a complete pain to install okay now i want to just touch on a couple things that proved to be real inconveniences or nuisances the more time that i spent in the conversion um with the first two kind of being tied together in the lack of running water and second the lack of a bathroom they're definitely they're definitely kind of luxuries that you don't really realize how much you appreciate until you don't have them anymore i do have plans of eventually converting the v-nose portion of the trailer into a small bathroom i just haven't found any plans yet that would work for me so if you have any ideas for that please do let me know in the comments below because i i'd love to see any ideas or concepts that you guys could come up with but the last negative and what proved to be in my opinion one of the biggest drawbacks of the way that i did my build was the lack of a window or any source of natural light by the end of a work day i would emerge from the trailer like some kind of hermit caveman creature and it just really got to me over time okay let me just show you what i mean it's broad daylight outside right now but if i shut this door and then turn off this light not exactly warm and inviting but that's enough harping on the negative aspects of it because in reality i'm still happy with 95 of my build i would do it again in a heartbeat it was a ton of fun to build i learned a ton and anyone out there who's maybe trying to decide between buying a pre-built camper or doing a project like this by all means do the cargo trailer conversion save the money learn some along the way and build it exactly how you want it to be because at the end of the day to me that's invaluable but i hope this was helpful to at least some of you and if i left anything out or if you have any questions for me do let me know in the comments below because i'm going to try my best to get to every single question and if you're curious about why i'm no longer using the cargo trailer as my office space it's because of this space that you see now which just a month ago was a storage shed and over the course of a month i converted it into a fully functional studio so i'll be doing a separate series on that as well so if that's something that interests you or if you're just interested in seeing the continual progression of the cargo trailer do hit the subscribe button and i'll see you next time you

Channel: Ben Seabrook

Views: 169,888

Keywords: Cargo Trailer Conversion, Van Life, DIY, Camping, Camper Conversion

Id: J2El1V4mclg

Length: 9min 33sec (573 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 13 2020