- Today I'm turning the back of my SUV into a camper and I'm bringing you guys along with me. (upbeat music) Like many other people right now, I'm trying to brainstorm ways to get out and go see something while avoiding all people. And I started looking into all of the vehicles you can use for road trips, to camp on the road and kind of keep to yourself. I looked at everything. I looked at camper vans, Airstreams, trailers you can tow. But ultimately, I didn't really wanna spend a lot of time or
money on this project. I just wanna get it done and get on the road and go somewhere. So when I started to
come across blog posts where people had just
built a sleeping platform in the back of their SUV, I was like, this looks pretty easy. And it's relatively very inexpensive. So the car that I have is
a 2018 Subaru Forester. I absolutely love this car. And the build that I've decided to go with for the back is actually one that I found on a blog. I will link the post down below of another solo traveler who built out her 2017 Subaru Forester. So it was really helpful to find a design that will work with my specific vehicle. If you're doing this, the first thing you're gonna wanna do is figure out the design that you want to build. I recommend just going on Google and searching for SUV campers and looking at different ideas. I would recommend finding something that's in a vehicle similar to yours, that takes kind of the same things into consideration. For example, in this vehicle, I have seats that are laid down flat, but maybe in your car, you'll be taking the seats out completely. And then obviously you'll want to measure your car. Measure it several times to make sure you have the numbers right. Also, the back of your vehicle might not be level. This definitely isn't,
there's a slight slope here. There's obviously a huge jump here and then it continues to slope up here. So if I build a platform that's the same height all the way around, it's going to be sloping. So definitely get out a level and find out what the
difference is in the slope so that you can accommodate for that. And then also, you'll want to decide how much space you want underneath your platform for storage, and how much space you want above your platform for headroom. Obviously, the higher the platform, the more you can fit underneath it, but the less space you'll have to actually be on top of it. So to get started, I headed to the hardware store to buy supplies. I'm using three quarter inch plywood to build this platform, which is pretty heavy. If you have someone
that can help carry it, I highly recommend it. The total materials I ended up using for this project are two, four foot by eight foot sheets of three quarter inch plywood, some one and a half inch wood screws, a 30 inch piano hinge, some Gorilla Glue wood glue, and a one inch by two
inch by eight foot board. I also bought a cordless circular saw to do all of the cuts, but a lot of hardware stores will cut your wood for you for free. I also had some clamps already at home that I was going to use. I've done a rough sketch of the design I'm building, which consists of three main pieces, which I'll be referring to as piece one, which will sit in the
trunk area of the vehicle, piece two, which will sit on top of the folded down back seats, and piece three, which is a hinged piece that will flip over to extend the platform when I'm ready to go to sleep. First, we cut the plywood into the pieces we needed, and you don't necessarily need two people to do this part if you have clamps to
hold the wood in place. But there were a couple of cuts that were helpful to have an extra set of hands to steady the wood. After making all the cuts, I got started on building piece one. This piece is 42 inches long and 31 inches wide, with 28 inch long spines, the taper from eight and a half inches to seven and a half inches to accommodate for the slope in that part of the trunk. First, I'm using some
Gorilla Glue and clamps to set them in place. This Gorilla Glue is amazing. It's so strong and it dries super fast. After these have all been glued and dried, I'm drilling some one
and a half inch screws every five to six inches along the spines to lock them in place. Moving on to piece two, this piece is 42 inches
long and 27 inches wide, and it will have two spines running the opposite direction of the spines in piece one. And I'm using the same process with the glue and screws
for this piece as well, making sure to place the spines at points on the board that won't conflict with any hardware or unstable parts of the backseats. After piece two is done, I'm attaching piece three to piece two using a 30 inch hinge. Piece three is 42 inches
long and 15 inches wide, and it's going to be attached to the end of piece two that has the five inch spine. And this hinge was super simple. Just drill some pilot holes and screw in the attached
screws on each piece. (upbeat music) Okay. So the platform is all built and in the car. It fits perfectly. When you look across the top, it looks like this second piece is a little bit too high. It's sitting on the back
of those folded seats, so when weight gets put on it, those seats compress down a little bit and it levels out. And as you can see, there's lots of room to slide things in for storage under here.
It's about 40 inches deep. And I'll show you guys
what this looks like from this side. As you can see, tons
of room to slide stuff underneath there for storage, storage on the floor. And then the hinged
piece came out so well. It completely clears
the backs of the seats. This is definitely an
essential part of the design because in order to have the full length of the sleeping platform that I needed, this is 73 inches total, which is six foot one, I'm five foot six, which might sound like
it's a lot of extra room, but we sleep taller than we are because when we're measuring our height, we're standing with our
feet flexed like this, but when we lay down, our feet kind of stretch out like this. And so I needed the
platform to be this long, but in order to fit that in here, the front seats have to be pushed all the way forward, which is a way too far forward for me to be able drive. So the nice thing about the hinge is I can flip this back during the day when I'm driving around or going places. And then when I get to where
I'm staying for the night, I just move the seats forward and then I flip this back. And then the hinge piece
is supported underneath by two legs that I made out of scrap wood. I think these are one by two inch boards. I really didn't put
much thought into this, I just found this piece
of wood in the garage and cut two, 23 inch legs, and then a bunch of little blocks that I glued on to kind of create a socket so that this can't fall out. So when I want to put it up, I just flip this back, like so. You can see these little
glued sockets here. And then I just have the two legs that will be really easy to store like underneath here or something, wherever when I don't need them. Then the next thing I'm going to do is add some carpet to the top surface of the platform just to make it a little bit softer, less likely to snag anything on the wood. I found these adhesive carpet squares that I'm going to cut to size and apply right on top of the wood. (upbeat music) Then last but not least, I bought a four-inch twin
size folding mattress because I want to be
legitimately comfortable in this sleep setup. And I loved the idea of a folding mattress because it's easy to
flip back during the day when I'm driving and need to push my front seats back. Okay, this is awesome. You know how sometimes when you follow DIY projects online, you get finished with them and you realize they
aren't actually that great, and it just looked better on Pinterest than it actually is? This is not that. I am so impressed with how comfortable this is, how sturdy it feels, how well this entire thing has turned out. This mattress is so comfortable. I climbed up here and I was like, I could
sleep on this every night. Like it is that level of comfort. It does not feel like a makeshift camping, sleeping setup. It also feels pretty spacious, especially for just one person sleeping in here. I knew right away when I started doing the measurements for this project that my husband was not
going to fit in this car, he's six foot three. But for just me, this
feels like a lot of space. If it's you and your dog, I think the size set up
would also work really well, or if you have a small child. But oh my gosh, I am so impressed, and I am so excited now to take this out. And something that is really cool about this is right up here, I can open this up to do some stargazing. I've bought a mesh covering so that I can actually
leave this open at night to get the fresh air. So that's it for the base setup of turning my SUV into a camper. Stay tuned for more videos though, because I have some ideas for some really cool accessories to add to the setup, like power, and things to make it very livable off the grid. And I'm going to be taking you guys along on a couple of road trips to scenic places I've never
been to in the region. So to see all of that when it gets posted, be sure to hit the subscribe button if you haven't already. And if you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up. Thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring today's video. No matter what type of website you need, whether it's a store to sell things or a portfolio to show
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