The Ultimate Cargo Trailer Conversion - Sleek, Modern and Functional 7x12

hi it's july 17th we're up in the beautiful colorado mountains and i figured i'd take a few minutes to share what i've been doing over the last few months while we've been on lockdown in coronavirus when you're on lockdown you tend to do some kind of crazy things like grow ridiculous facial hair and convert cargo trailers into what i think is the ultimate camper travel trailer from the outside you see it looks relatively stealth it looks like a pretty typical cargo trailer minus an rv style door on the side and if you look real closely from some angles you can see the solar panels on top i don't know if you can see from that angle but we can show you that later um driving down the road looks when i'm pulling it behind my tacoma it looks just like a regular cargo trailer let's go ahead and go on inside when we were building this one of the main things that i wanted to do i'm just going to latch this door here one of the main things that i wanted to do was to keep it very open and spacious inside didn't want it to feel real cramped we had a small kind of teardrop-ish um like an r-pod style camper for a while and it was great um it had a slide-out but it tends to feel a little bit cramped even still at times and so with this approach you'll see inside that we kept most the cabinetry off the walls and very open and spacious come on inside so inside we've got one upper cabinet right here which i'll show you in a second then the rest of it is open we have at the back here an elevated couch which converts into a bed i'll show you how that works in just a moment a little bit of flat surfaces to set things in addition to a large countertop with a sink and our dinette which also converts into a bed for my daughter who will maybe make a cameo at some point in this we have a window on this side which you can see obviously from the outside that's perfectly centered over this it's a really nice place to sit and eat let me give you a little bit of a tour of the different parts of the trailer we'll start with the dinette so the dinette fit seats two people very comfortably here my eight-year-old daughter can fit in this uh on a seat with us if we really need her to but we wanted to have a little more space so what we did was built a nesting stool that just pops right there and we have a third seat built right in so that we can all sit comfortably around the table and the table's quite spacious for a small small camper like this so i have not finished this stool it's going to have a routered handle stained but i just haven't quite gotten to that i just finished some of the other parts of it this last week and there's still a fair amount of fine tuning and trim work that needs to be done um on this side i don't know if you can see it i don't know if you can zoom out a little bit as you get closer but we have push to open drawers in certain parts of the trailer so this push to open drawer we tend to put lighter things in it um towels and a water or water filter thing when it's empty but it's a real nice convenient spot this table very quickly converts it just has a few clips here and we'll pop right off this comes out [Music] and this will drop right into that spot and it becomes a bed that is six feet long so an adult can sleep on it quite comfortably um my daughter sleeps here most of the time she is not six feet tall and even though she's eight she will never be six feet tall she's gonna be short like her mom so very quick and easy conversion these little um legs you'll see you can buy them online you see them in boats and rvs in certain circumstances they tend to be quite unstable um you just cramp these on but they still have a fair amount of movement and so i have some claps clasps here that are marine clasps that once this thing goes on let's see if i can do it blind here for us goes on you can still see it would move around quite a bit as soon as we clap clamp that down it's very stable it's not going to go anywhere it still rattles slightly but is very stable we lined all of the walls and the roof with cedar and we have recessed led lights they're on a dimmer switch which you don't have to you can see it controls them like that so in the evening if we just want some lighter um you know a little bit darker mood lighting or something then we can do that the um we have reading lights up top it's it's it's really great if it's raining outside and what a lot of space in here it's very convenient i don't normally wear my sandals up here but it's very convenient to just sit here flip a light on and read a book it's very comfortable you can do the same thing on the other side with your feet on the counter but we'll wash the counter before we prepare food there uh these lights also have usb plugs which is great so that we can recharge phones and tablets and things like that so usually when we go to bed we'll plug a phone in right here and we're on the end here and charge our phone overnight and it's ready to go in the morning so future improvements i do want to add a little step right here just to help get up i haven't figured that out yet when we move to the kitchen let me show you underneath first we use a seven gallon uh jerry can to contain our gray water which is easy we can just dump it anytime we want to you can see the edge of our refrigerator right here and we have the controls for the water pump and a few other things buried under there which i can show you how those work in a minute um over here we just have our utensil drawer spices things like that i don't know if i need to go through all of these miscellaneous things these little latches work pretty well this is where we keep our fruits and vegetables that don't need to be refrigerated and lots of tortilla chips as we go down more chips we're eating a lot of chips on this trip okay um the cabinets up top have hidden hinges which i may not do again if i do this i kind of like some of the more exposed hinges just for the stability and ease of installation that we found but you know we each got our own color-coded yeti mugs plates and bowls where we keep our bread um this side is our tea kettle the most important thing that comes with you is your coffee so coffee and an aeropod for making our coffee uh we use a brittle bread or i guess this is a pure brand water filter in just from the sink which is right here just put water in and we always have fresh good tasting water all right i'm cutting this in real quick because i realized i forgot to show you the entirety of the kitchen the refrigerator and our other cabinets over here which are kind of important up in the front here we have a few push to open drawer slides the first one is just kind of a catch-all drawer it it has miscellaneous things and it's not particularly well organized because this has been under construction basically since i started and so it just has miscellaneous things i store stuff in there down below is pretty important this is the burner um and stove i originally had a uh burner or a stovetop that i had purchased that was going to be installed right here and as i was building it i realized i'd much rather be outside cooking than locked to doing it inside and so i switched to to using this gas one portable butane burner it just uses these little butane canisters and is easy to switch out and indeed i spend about 90 of my use of this outside when you're using it outside you got to have a windscreen we learned that the hard way um with this because it just the the wind made it super inefficient but with this it's fantastic so um that slides in there that sits there and then we have our sunscreen and things like that right here and then down below is a push to open now these won't slide open when we're driving they stay closed same with the other pushed open ones i've shown obviously the refrigerator with its weight would be different so before i open it i'll show you that you may not be able to see it but that's okay there's a small little eye hook right here that we just latch when we're driving down the road and it doesn't go anywhere and i wanted to push it open for this because once i push it i don't have to hold onto a little handle i don't have a handle sticking out and i can just pull this thing all the way out and that's our refrigerator um it's chest style which is very efficient it's a little less convenient than a cabinet style refrigerator but way more efficient this thing just sucks electricity and i could have bought a dometic or an arb um refrigerator and everything i've heard about them is great i wasn't really sure i needed that in this so i went ahead and went with this it's i think a costway brand i bought it on amazon and we've been really happy with it in fact when the coronavirus started stuff started we uh we weren't going to the store so we made a couple of big orders of food so we didn't have to keep doing it and i took this inside and put it in our living room and it worked as a freezer for us for um almost three months i think maybe at least two and it was great and once we kind of got things worked out we had our systems down we emptied it out and i brought it back out here so that is everything i think so at this point i'm gonna take you back to the regular scheduled programming and continue the tour let me show you next let's show you the let's switch places here go ahead and go so in the front i just finished this this weekend and i'm not super happy with it i got some pretty warped plywood this is you know the expensive baltic birch plywood and i had tried two sheets ended up with two warped pieces and i just decided because i already cut the pieces and tried to make it work to leave it for now and i'm gonna eventually replace these but um let me show you what i did here we didn't i didn't really want a wall here of just solid wall so i i created this open cubby again just finished this the other day we haven't quite figured out how what we're going to put here regularly and organize it but i'm really happy with this it just gives us quick access to dogs leash a blanket my hats we keep a extra fan up here that we can plug in if we have the inverter on but these little bungees are are really well um installed so that they won't come out um they're held in with a loop strip of aluminum on each side and just real convenient to get in here we have just a coat closet you know it's it's summer here in colorado so we've just got our really lightweight jackets and rain jackets because it rains most afternoons here down below is a gear closet just a place to hang backpacks my camelback for mountain biking i've got my camera gear down in the bottom if i want to go do some photography if we were going on a climbing trip we could hang climbing here and things like this or just pull it out and stow anything we want inside so uh on this side tip out garbage can if you've ever had a trailer you know that the garbage can be kind of a pain and this was a i'm really happy with this a super convenient easy to access place to put your trash and with it closed it contains any kind of smell that might develop or anything else when we open this let me turn the light on you're going to see that we've got a porta potty a little cassette toilet which has worked really well for us it'll last a couple days without really any extra precautions and if we're you know extra careful up in the mountains and and use the trees more it'll last a little bit longer i wanted to keep the storage on the inside which is where we keep our clothes and things very simple so up top we have just sleeping bag for my daughter her pillows any kind of extra blankets and then we use um we just use some of these storage cubes and each one of us gets a storage cube that's mine cycling shorts t-shirts things like that and this can just be easily taken out and gone through right here because we know this is a little bit of a tight space um and then you know toiletry bags uh in the back we've got one of these it's got games and things my daughter's been learning how to play settlers of catan if there's any fans out there and and we like doing that if it's going to be a bad weather day our table is big enough to be able to handle that these nets were a labor of love a little bit i was gonna buy some pre-made ones that you can cut down but in the middle of the uh covid 19 uh craziness the suppliers that normally that i could find that provided them were shut down they weren't even shipping so i just bought some bungee and learned how to tie them so this just goes back in there clips in all of the electrical is down here i have 190 amp hour lithium iron phosphate battery with an all-in-one charging solar shore power and inverter under here the controller is right here so if you want to change anything turn the inverter on it's just a flip of a switch right there and the inverter is zone there is currently 400 watts of solar on top and you can stay in here real quick um and we've never even come close to using any of it when we don't really use the inverter that much and with that much battery power and the solar powers we have on top it's always pretty much full even in a place like this where it's a little cloudy and we're under some trees we'll be fine for a few days so let me show you what i think is one of the best features of the trailer this is how we convert the bed i just simply pull this forward my wife can do this just fine pull the bed forward on slides and then i have a switch under here and this is going to lower down and we actually end up leaving the bed down quite a bit because as you can see all we really lose is some counter space and it's really nice that we still have this little bit because say a speaker it can sit here or when we're sleeping we can set our books and things right under here and they can tuck under our computer or something can still stay on this shelf but the only thing that was a little awkward to get to is this drawer where we keep utensils but it's still very manageable and so we'll come back in here after i show you the trunk and you'll see why we leave this bed down a fair amount so um this is just a lightweight comforter with this fan this is a fantastic fan we turn it on and it pulls enough air through that it stays pretty darn comfortable in here if we were going on a big road trip down to the south where it's really hot and humid i might have to try to figure out a way to install an air conditioner and i think a mini split could be installed right here quite easily with the compressor out on the out of the tongue there's just enough room at the right basket to do that we've talked about it it's not a problem here in colorado where we've been using this the most let's go around back and we're gonna show you the trunk so i had um barn doors installed when i ordered this i ordered this trailer from r r trailers they're in michigan i drove from colorado all the way out there specifically to get it because it was a custom order they're the manufacturer and it's all aluminum and the fact that it's all aluminum even though we're not on the east coast where we deal with as much salt on the roads and rust it's just gonna last longer and i i could do another video on some of the i'll probably do a few more videos on this if people are interested but we can talk more about the trailer um there's on the whole i'm quite happy with it there's a few little kind of minor uh things that that came up as i was building and working with it but on the whole i'm really happy with the manufacturer so shout out to rnr trailers so we open it let me go ahead and swing these all the way around the trunk area is not completely finished you'll notice i have cedar down to here i'm going to be putting a trim piece in here and then finishing this in in the rubber coin flooring material that's just really durable and mounting a bike rack a bike work stand to the side here same thing for covering these boxes i built these boxes um the outsides will be covered in that same stuff with aluminum trim around it it just wasn't real critical in the short term and just trying to save money in the short term what we have we have a bike we have a bike tray um i could do another video specifically on the bike tray because i think it's somewhat unique what i've done um i have a friend's bike who's going to be coming up to visit us and my bike in here but i have the mounts the fork mounts on i have some extra pieces in here because i hadn't figured out where i wanted to put the last t-track but i have the fork mounts on t-tracks so that i can just unscrew them and rearrange this and i've got a mount at the back as well and so when i'm not bringing my friend's bike and it's just my wife and daughter i can fit two adult bikes and a kid's bike on this rack back in here i do have a paddleboard paddle that gets on the way a little bit there we go all the way in the back there maybe i should pull this back out let me pull this back out if you look all the way back there you're going to see i have a small diesel heater and that tank that 10 liter tank of diesel will keep this place warm for a very long period of time in the dead of winter i'm not sure how long it would last but certainly for warming it up on cold nights in the spring and fall it's barely used any and that thing's super quiet it heats this thing up in a in a matter of minutes and then is is is very efficient just sips the diesel so that goes there i've added airline aluminum tracks here down here and there's one on the other side and what this allows me to do is strap anything i want down right now i'm just using these um adjustable bungee um hooks so that i can strap this is our little barbecue that we use all of our chairs and our little aluminum table which is already set up and my fishing pole slide right under here and then we have a large easy to organize drawer we keep bike helmets those are my mountain biking shoes and court guns with us apparently on this trip um just different fun stuff there this is my inflatable stand-up paddleboard this is an original one i bought that thing when they first started coming out uh we've got extra propane bottles some bubbly water pump for the paddle board life jackets we when i'm not really utilizing the space super efficiently a lot of times if we're going someplace that we can do a fire then this will be filled with firewood but in colorado right now because we have a bit of a drought there is a fire ban pretty much everywhere i do have a water heater it's right here this is designed for use indoors i just fixed this i need to fix this cable because it's been hanging down a little bit and and so that it can adjust and not not hang right over this though it actually isn't too bad it probably wouldn't hurt anything but not ideal and we're not really planning on using it this weekend i run everything off of one pound canisters and so i built this net and hunk it so that it sits at an angle and um and so that it can properly vent and the and the regulator can work and then i can just switch these out as needed i didn't want a big propane canister just to run this and they're the same canisters i run for my little barbecue it works fantastic super happy with using this um i have not installed the outdoor shower but eventually i will attach a shower rod that'll snap in to the two side doors a shower rod and a little shower here but in all honesty i hate plumbing and not being able to go to the hardware store because we're an at-risk family and still pretty much in isolation it it just got frustrating doing plumbing so it wasn't that important we usually try to camp near some sort of water that we can jump in and if we can't we we just sponge down it works fine for now but eventually there will be a little shower here so that we can do a quick outdoor shower 24 gallons of water back here um and uh that'll last us for quite a while especially for careful that about covers it i think let's go around back inside real quick and i think you'll see why we leave the bed down i'm going to take my shoes off climbing back up on the bed because they're of course my feet aren't that clean either when we find a beautiful spot like this it actually just started to rain so we come inside with this open and just enjoy a beautiful view relaxing on the bed and this is proven to be one of our favorite parts you see a lot of van conversions that have a bed at the back with the doors open and i feel like we improved on that because we still have that but we have the advantage of turning it into an elevated couch and being able to relax inside with more space when we don't want the back open maybe we're camping in a place where we're somewhat stealth we don't really want to be you know spread out everywhere we're staying self-contained then we can still be comfortable inside so i think that about covers it um there's still a lot of small details and trim work that i hope to do and a few improvements that i've made but uh we're pretty happy with it i i um i'd be curious to hear what other people say and if they have suggestions let me know um if enough people are interested and enough people subscribed to the to the page then i would uh i would be happy to go through and do detailed breakdowns of how and why i did certain things and um what i would do different because there's there's quite a few things i would do different in the trailer um if i did it again and um yeah so i hope you've enjoyed the trailer we haven't come up with a name with for the trailer yet we feel like we've we've built this thing as outcasts of society during coronavirus um and and we're not sure what level of naming to give to that if it's our skate vehicle or our opportunity to get away um or if it's our little zen zen trailer that we get away from the confines of our home and we're looking forward to better days but this has been a lifesaver for us as we've been able to get away relax and it's given me something to focus on so thank you for uh thank you for watching and like i said if you subscribe and like the page and enough people requested i'd be happy to to go through a little more detail about how i've done certain things thank you

Channel: TrailerLife

Views: 755,589

Keywords: Cargo Trailer conversion, cargo trailer camper, Trailer, enclosed trailer travel trailer, enclosed trailer camper trailer, cargo trailer camper conversion, cargo trailer toy hauler, custom cargo trailer sleeper, van conversion

Id: YaqGEqUjkBo

Length: 25min 52sec (1552 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 21 2020