Finished Squaredrop (not Teardrop) Camper Pod!

[Applause] all right guys you see me just pull in the driveway with the camper it is finally complete so let's take a tour all right so let's start out with the basics if you haven't followed this build as i've taken videos along this is 10 feet long five feet tall five feet wide it is slightly bigger than your typical teardrop or square drop camper would be and there's reasons for that i'll show you that in a minute another thing that makes this camper unique from other ones is that it's built to go on and off my utility trailer it is not permanently affixed to this trailer i will have to do a separate video to show you guys how i get it on and off but essentially i have the camper pod built on two skids and i'm able to use a winch on an atv to pull it on and off and then it parks on blocks wherever i put it at some wood cribbing or something so that's the gist of it additionally somewhat unique is the exterior is finished with bed liner i finished it with raptor liner and i guess that's probably the the most things that set it apart from other campers now let's take a quick look at some of the features so first things first when i watched some other youtube videos and did some research on these campers before i built mine one of the comments that i saw was get as big of a door as you can because if you're loading gear in and out of there or just yourself in and out of there the bigger the door the better so i bought 36 tall 30 wide doors are from vintage technologies i'll put a link in the description of this video for those guys but these are insulated doors with a window in them they have an integrated latch and a deadbolt which was really nice i bought two doors and then the back hatch they all have the same key so very convenient additionally i purchased the windows from vintage technologies also in the back hatch door which i'll show you in a minute all right so now i'm going to have my wife who's videoing for us actually is going to come in here and show you guys this i'm going to walk around to the other door and speak from the other side so give me just a second so having doors on both sides was one of our intentions on purpose some some campers have just one door uh but sleeping side by side if one of us has to get out just it just makes access a lot easier so we added the expense of the second door as you look in here she's showing you the mattress that we've placed in here this is a six inch thick memory foam mattress it's a tri-fold mattress and the interior of this cabin area is all finished with plywood exterior and then three quarters of an inch of foam board followed by the size i have a quarter inch plywood finish and then the top i actually took one by four pine boards and made it look like tongue and groove it's not actually tongue and groove i tried to save a little bit of cost you can see in the video we've got lighting led lights that come on and off i have a powered vent fan i have 110 volt receptacles for when we're on shore power i have some shelves for maybe a bottle of water or charging your phone and we come around here to the front you'll see a shelf on the top that's permanently fixed in here pretty heavy duty i found that you can use the edge of this shelf to brace yourself to get in and out of the camper so that's kind of nice i have additional 110 volt receptacles in the front and i have plenty of hooks for gear or clothing hats whatever we want to put in there now i'll show you the i'll set my shoes off here and i'll show you guys the mattress being a 10 foot long camper i have seven feet over seven feet in the cabin area so it's quite spacious compared to most teardrop campers and i'm going to show you right now why we did it this way so you can see in the front i have room to put some shoes or whatever just to have some gear up here the tri-fold mattress is able to fold up if i get the suction out of it like so and tuck this under and this tri-fold mattress becomes a pretty quick and easy couch so during the day or during transit if we wanted to keep some additional gear in the front so we all know when we go camping we have extra gear we have camp chairs we have cook stoves all kinds of stuff that we want to bring with us this gives me a really large area right here to put all that stuff and keep it dry and while we're camping this gives me a couch area to be able to sit change clothes put on shoes maybe dry off so i it worked out exactly how we wanted it to work out now one last thing that i'll point out is the finish in the bottom i kept this camper as simple as possible because of maintenance and cost so i do have a piece of carpet in here but it is just sitting here so the bottom has a plywood exterior then foam board and then this plywood floor and then sitting on that is a piece of indoor outdoor carpet a couple reasons i can take this out and clean it quite easily and if this deteriorates over the years we can easily replace it all right so before i come outside of the camper again i just wanted to show you this tri-fold mattress pretty slick it's uh it's a memory foam and when i originally built the cabin area of this i sized it for a queen size mattress and the queen size that i purchased it fit in here but it was a tight fit and i wanted this to fit a little bit loose so that we could easily fold it up inside of here and use it as a couch so we actually returned the queen size we bought the full size and i couldn't be happier i think i got an inch or so on each side of room and allows me to maneuver this the the mattress itself came with a carry case so there's actually a case for this thing if i want to pack it up and store it if i if i ever want to do that the other thing that i didn't show you a second ago was the storage compartment so this will lead me into showing you the back galley but for now i have a inside the cabin storage compartment that goes two feet deep it's a foot tall and it's the full width of the camper wide some of my wiring is hidden in the corners but for the most part uh blankets pillows clothes extra shoes whatever we decide to put in here it's a really quick and easy place to get it out of the way and close this door while we're camping all right coming to the back i have another door from vintage technologies now i decided to purchase this door instead of build mine that was a kind of a cost consideration i had a door designed that i thought would work and i priced out all the pieces and it was pretty comparable to just buy this door so again it's an insulated door but this part of the camper is not actually insulated so this is more for storage now your typical teardrop will have a kitchen-based galley back here some of them have sinks and cabinets and they're really fancy and nice this one is intended to be more storage for us there is a light underneath here so at night time this light would shine in the entire area you both see the same type of light that i have in the cab area i integrated a dorm style refrigerator pardon me there's a block in there to keep it from holding moisture but there's a plenty of room in the refrigerator now this will obviously run off of 110 not the 12 volt power so we need shore power to run this but most of the camping that we do is at state parks in michigan anyway and we have shore power everywhere we go a quick bungee cord to hold the door in place i did screw this down so it doesn't move the first time i took it for a ride it kind of fell off the shelf i have storage room for plenty of propane bottles that we would use for our cook stove which apparently has a tight fit in there but we got our cook stove here we've got plenty of room for a full-size cooler on this side if we want to take it so we can put some bins in here uh pails a cooler whatever we want to put in here there's nothing in this one but i just want i have it here to show you the size uh we like to take a couple of pails with us this one has some other things to be able to show there's some matches in here uh tablecloths for the tables at the campground i have a storage bin here it doesn't have anything in it now but this would be for uh i don't know paper plates uh silverware plastic silverware cooking utensils whatever we can fit in here also bolt it down so it's not gonna shift during transit all of my utilities i'll show you the plug-in in a minute but all my utilities come up this corner you can see a few cords in the back they come up and i hide them with this little piece of quarter-inch plywood but the way this is powered i have 110 volt coming in to a surge protector power strip and all of my receptacles and my refrigerator and that stuff all operate off of that surge protector additionally i have a transformer that plugs into that surge protector that transforms my 110 power down to 12 volt power 12 volt power feeds a small distribution block with some fuses and then that turns around and goes to all of my light circuits so i'll have lights inside lights outside and the fan so before we keep going around i want to show you where the power plugs in it's very simple instead of using an rv twist lock style i purchased the style that you can use just a regular plain extension cord easy to find if we end up out somewhere and i forgot my extension cord pretty much buy one of those at any hardware or any store almost so i did put in some exterior receptacles for the outside i do have a porch light on each side and i put one of these smittybilt awnings on each side at the end of this video i'll throw a clip in there showing you how these things go up they're pretty slick coming to the front of the trailer in the front of the camper i've added a tool box here uh the purpose of the toolbox is just to hold i have some wheel chocks in here some extra string you know maybe this is where our extension cord goes i do throw sorry i throw a level in here and what i can do with this level is put the level on the side and then i can adjust my level of the camper front to back there side to side we would use uh just a little bit of dirt take it away from each side so we'd use the two tires and the the tongue jack to level us out now i did not put additional jack stands or you know leveling stands or any of that on here i just didn't think it was necessary for us for what we're using a lot of a lot of campers have that and it's pretty slick for us just decided to leave that off okay so now i want to explain to you guys how this is attached to the trailer the ones that i've seen online where they put a camper that would go onto a trailer they end up screwing lag bolts through the bottom into the the bottom of the camper so mine i chose not to do that this camper sits on two four by sixes one on this side and one on that side and that allows it to almost act like skids on and off this trailer if you come over here you'll see i have a hole drilled through the the two by six there four by six and a piece of cable that goes through the other side comes underneath here if you get underneath you'll be able to see on this side there's a turn buckle you have to move your camera over here but you can see the turn buckles right here and that basically tightens this cable down there's one of these setups in the front and one of them in the back and that's what holds this camper onto this trailer and what that does it keeps me from having to put a whole bunch of extra holes in the deck of the trailer and it keeps me from having to have it in the exact same position every single time so monica and i are going to show you right now how easy it is to set up one of these smittybilt tents or awnings i guess it would be so watch this so this piece of video is going to run at two times normal speed in an effort to save some time i've seen several youtube videos that claimed that you could set this type of tent sorry awning up in 30 seconds by yourself and i've watched the videos and you know guys are pretty good at it but you know i'm not going to say 30 seconds but in just a minute or two you know you can set this thing up it's very sturdy and you can adjust the the ends there for whatever height your elevation you want and it seems to go on pretty easy it seems to ride well and we're very pleased with it on the side of our camper and i'm actually glad that we put one on each side also so you can see this goes up actually pretty quickly now i just have it sitting here on the poles and if you caught in the video real quick there when i extended this pole the bottom of it actually came out there is a twist lock mechanism in there all you got to do is stick it back up in there and tighten it up and it'll basically tighten wherever you want it to the corners of this have some strings on here and when you buy one of these they come with an additional string that goes down with a tent stake so you would pull these corners down and secure them to the ground and that you know if you did get any wind it would keep it from pulling this up and uh one thing that i did read on these if you know you're gonna have a lot of rain you should probably lower one side so all that rain wants to come off of one corner instead of building up somewhere in the center there and wanting to pull it all in i think it would be okay as long as you had enough of an angle away from your camper but dropping one corner will force all that rain to come down to this one side well there you have it that's the summary of my i call it the square drop camper pod build hope you enjoyed this video if you have any questions on this build leave me a note in the comments and i check my comments quite often and i'll get back with you i guess that's it time to go camping thanks for watching this video we'll see you on the next one

Channel: Living Our American Dream

Views: 352,912

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Id: xusYi_N1mbo

Length: 17min 6sec (1026 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 12 2021