They Renovated A 1989 RV Into A Beautiful Budget Tiny House

[Music] hey guys Michael and Jenny here with you at justice and we're gonna take you on a tour of our 1989 yellowstone camino classic so this is Harvey Harvey is our classy RV and we came to named Harvey just because we started rhyming one day like Harvey the RV and it just sort of clicked and stuck yeah and then we had this weird thing with dents we really like dents because it decreases the value of things so it makes it really cheap for us to buy and so we actually we were saying oh man we love dents so much we should name this thing dent and we had already like thought about Harvey and we're like Harvey Dent and I'm a super I'm a super big nerd and so yeah Harvey Dent two-face it's kind of like on the outside it looks kind of kind of like drin G but on the inside it's like super nice so yeah that was kind of a kind of a fitting name for it come on inside we've got three doggies come on come on Sammy so first thing you'll probably notice is the floors we have pallet wood floor so it is mostly pine there are there is some redwood there is some oak in there as well but it's just kind of cool it's very rustic we didn't really know how pallet wood was actually going to hold up but for driving around for almost two years we're surprised it's not splinters yet you find in like like construction stores Ace Hardware that kind of thing yes almost stacked up and we had this crazy idea probably inspired by a lot of things I've seen on Pinterest people make all sorts of furniture and things like that out of pallets yeah we just thought we could make a floor out of this yeah so we know one that we knew had ever done it but we figured it out yeah maybe for good reason we're seeing some of the issues with like heat temperature differences and the fact that it's not a true floating floor but honestly we're just extremely happy with how it's turned out we made sure to get heat treated pallets so there was there weren't any chemicals or anything used with the actual wood we actually got access to a local shop my old high school the head shop guy is actually two years younger than me he graduated two years after me and he was like yeah come on out and use all of our equipment so we got to use a planer a jointer and we it was just a really cool learning experience he kind of like showed us all the ropes talk showed us how to do court around and everything like that and it was just like everything just kind of kind of came together we did the work got it done and we're extremely happy with how it turned out one of our things when it comes to this RV is we wanted to repurpose as much as we possibly could like just the RV in general it's like taking a 1989 RV and then turning it into a home instead of letting it go to the trash we're like really big with not buying new and just buying used just recycling stuff because it still has a lot of use in it we had more time than money at the moment so we basically you know invested a ton of time if you would actually weigh out all the time from when we started to when we finished it's the most expensive floor you can ever buy but it's it's like a great memory and and we're just super proud of it you know like we said we haven't seen anybody else who's done it in a mobile vehicle and you know we kind of wanted to be the first and how many hours do you think it probably took us total from like taking them you know we had to find the locations for the pallets ask permission to use them take them apart those are fun days eighty to a hundred hours eighty to a hundred hours of work easy and multiple multiple days over the course of you know a couple months actually learn the skills yeah I mean on our next RV if we ever do it it's gonna be we're gonna be a lot better at it but I mean like I said we're super happy with how it's turned out and we think it looks great so this is our kitchen we have a propane four burner stove we use this a lot we've never actually used the oven so we use that for storage and we use the microwave for storage as well but you know it's a great size for us we love the double sinks the stainless steel cleans really easily and these countertops actually are painted on it probably sounds really weird these were like a cream color laminate countertop and we wanted to spruce it up a bit so actually a camping world on clearance we found this countertop paint that's supposed to look like granite and so we figured we'd try it it couldn't look worse than what was already here so we're actually really happy with how it turned out it is lasted really well I mean for two plus years the only thing is it does start to chip so like you'd have to be a little bit more delicate with it and you can't let puddles of water sit on it but if you're looking for like a cheap easy way to like spruce it up without having to change the countertop or something like that it is a cool option we did so like basically this was flower wallpaper all of these were like this oranjee wood color and we repainted everything my mother-in-law made these awesome curtains that you'll see throughout yeah so we have lots of storage all these drawers are great storage we have enough room for my instant pot which is like huge for me I love that cooking in this space is definitely a challenge as far as you know if I'm making like a soup or something like that just the prep work it can be kind of challenging but after the prep work is finished like it's actually doesn't feel any different than a normal kitchen but to kind of compensate I do use the table here as like a prep surface sometimes but yeah so mostly like my cooking routine it's dim pot meals like several times a week soups and just like all sorts of crazy recipes that I can find on the internet and so we use that and we plug that into the inverter and this is all powered by solar we can cook all of this off-grid live completely comfortably off-grid and have all that power supplied by the Sun for free so it's this is like an awesome off-grid machine like we've just crafted it like that and I'm so glad we thought about all those things before because there are a lot of mistakes we did make but the power situation is not one of them thankfully so I do cook about every day actually and I make pretty much everything from scratch this is like all of my kitchen utensils and it's perfect that in the instant pot that I said we do eat a hundred percent plant-based whole food plant-based so you'll see lots of fruit and vegetables and I pretty much make everything from scratch like I said yesterday I made homemade hummus it's so good and you know I don't have any problem with cooking you know as long as my space is cleared off which we sometimes have to do before we we can actually prep whoa there you go but yeah and then this is just like tea coffee stuff like that and these drawers actually my mother-in-law found at an estate sale and they did not come with with this but this is actually a spice or can rack that they sometimes use in normal kitchens and it would be surrounded by drawers like in a normal kitchen setup it actually fits perfectly here and it gave us so much space for dry goods that we use all the time to cook our meals so this gave us like a ton of storage space plus it's sort of we just like it for a decorative you know keeping the beans we think it's it's a nice look as well so something that we learned about these drawers is that they will slide when we drive so an easy solution for that was a tension rod and so this we just wedge in between here and adjust it and now they won't go anywhere so that's an easy solution oh and I cannot talk about cooking without mentioning the Berkey the Berkey I mean just like the peace of mind it's worth its weight in gold like we have found ourselves in some really shady situations water wise and this is a water filter water purification system so we pour water in the top of it and pure water comes out so that's I mean water is like the basis of all the foods we cook and obviously everyone needs to drink water and things like that so having this Joe is is great we recommend it this Berkey is actually a travel Berkey it's a one and a half gallon size so down this chamber underneath holds one and a half gallons this is about 250 dollars but like I said I mean clean water is so important and it's the basis of so much we feel like that was money well spent and so one way that we fill it up we have these water jugs so we just do it like that and it's it doesn't seem like an inconvenience really at all so we just get used to it and and we love it so one other thing I wanted to mention about the Berkey is that this actually the filtration filters on here last for 6,000 gallons so when you do the math it turns out to be about 1 and 1/2 cents per gallon which is actually really inexpensive so it was cheaper than our Brita actually so that's good to know and then if you turn around you will see our dinette here and this folds down into a bed like a lot of RVs have but this has been you know this is our office space and also like I said where I do a lot of my prep work and things like that so as you can see also with the dinette I did use the gianni countertop paint we as far as where it holds up the best water is its biggest enemy and also just like any friction so like we if you notice around these edges here there is some wearing but we don't keep a tablecloth on this or anything like that and this is how well it's held up so it's not bad but you know we maybe would have thought through some other options if we had known that it would only really last about two years so underneath here we keep extra water the dogs toys and that's about it one other thing that we did in this area is we completely rebuilt these cushions and it's kind of funny a funny story how it actually turned out so we were measuring this when it was all laid out flat into the bed we realized it was a perfect twin size bed and we were you know pricing around for upholstery and things like that and the stuffing that goes inside and it was just astronomical as soon as they you know you went to a craft store or something like that just like foam is is ridiculously high price so we got this idea of buying a twin size foam mattress just from like Walmart or something like that is a four inch mattress topper memory foam and it's funny we cut it into size like the correct size for each thing using the old cushions as a template using an electric turkey knife so it worked really really well but yeah so these are brand new cushions that we made the other ones were literally disintegrating so we needed some new ones aside from just like recovering the old ones so we love that these are nice and cushy and comfortable we do work remotely and that's really important because we spend a lot of time sitting here working around our computers and things like that so it's it's really awesome that these have held up really well also we remade or we my mother-in-law made these pillows for us so we've had a lot of love and a lot of effort go into getting Harvey to look like this and we're really happy with it so going from the dinette to the front over cab area speaking of the TLC and love that went into this it looks really nice now but I mean this entire front over cab we actually had to take out most of what was there there was only a small amount of frame work I mean to the point where if you stood on here and put your full weight on there you'd pretty much go through so we pretty much had to rebuild all of the base here we've rebuilt some of the corner back over there and just use a 3/4 inch plywood it's actually a lot lighter than the pressboard that they previously used because with pressboard and stuff they'll use glues and adhesives that are just extremely heavy so there's a this is actually lighter than what was originally there and then before we came out here to the southwest we didn't have these wooden storage chests up here but basically the top comes off just it's not hinged or anything like that it's just a completely removable top and we just did that in the freezing cold when we were up in the Midwest whipped it up in about three hours and my parents had this extra you know pre treated wood and stuff like that that actually really matched well with this which we liked because these kind of by themselves didn't really match the whole aesthetics of the other of the rest of the RV but once we got these you know vine color storage chests in there it worked so well we threw a few pillows in there got some planters I call them Potter's Jenny gets on me about that these plants are just awesome they help freshen the air we just like the natural feel it gives it just makes this place a lot more cozy and less industrial in a sense of what they're really for it's just for storage yeah so this is mainly just so when it comes to the use of this that we mainly just use this for just this is all just for aesthetics just to make it look and kind of like tie in to the rest of the rig but as far as the actual use we definitely just use it for storage and for the plants it's a really sunny area we don't have any blinds up in the front windows so it gets a lot a lot of Sun and then as far as one thing I forgot to mention was we did in Florida we ended up having to take out this entire front window so we did take that off cleaned it up resealed it because as you guys know or will learn most older RVs that have these windows it's made from a lot of really flimsy material and leaking up there that's why there was all the water damage in the first place so if you do buy an older class c-2 things to look out for the roof on it make sure if you can buy one that has a pitched roof ours is a flat roof and we never even thought about it when we purchased it we had no idea what we were doing when we purchased it but we've learned a lot just going through this experience so one number one see if you can't get something with a pitched roof and then number two with that over cab window if you can get something that doesn't have that that's ideal but yeah I mean if you do they're pretty easy to take the windows off it's just there screws on the inside and this it's just a little frame it just pulls right off and then you put some new kind of tar tape type stuff to reseal it and then just put some caulking around it so it's actually really basic when you when it all boils down but something well worth doing so if you guys have one or looking to buy one it's definitely something worth doing so let's jump down here to the little over cap or the driver cab area so we got a couple doggies here but yeah so as far as everything goes in here we just kept it all original we like that it's kind of like the vintage 1980s - and everything like that one thing we did do was when we ripped out the carpet to do the flooring we actually ripped out the carpet in the cab area and honestly if we were to go back and do it again we would leave the carpet in the front cab area even though the carpet was kind of nasty we should have just probably done a shampoo or something like that to clean it up and leave it there because one thing we didn't realize is that in two really well not number one from noise and number two from the heat this engine runs pretty hot it's a Ford 460 engine so the exhaust underneath it gets pretty hot luckily we found some just runner carpets from Walmart and we just cut them out to fit where the chairs were and it kind of all worked out and then as you can see we did flip the passenger seat around like you'll find out that RV can't tow the car so we don't we just had this for a dog seat and also if we have guests over this is my seat so uh but other than that that's kind of takes care of that front area so you might have noticed that there's some PVC piping running down from the ceiling or the roof what this is is it's actually holding it's kind of a conduit that we're using to hold the electrical wires coming from the solar panels so up top we do have four 150 watt panels they go from the front vent here all the way to the AC unit back there and it's you know pretty much as wide as it is tall so it's a lot of solar up there the wires come down here through the PVC pipe we just wanted to kind of consolidate them make them look less noticeable and then we've got the positive negative and ground coming down and that shoots right down back behind our little entertainment center and it goes right through the floor into our sub bay down below that has our charge controller in this front sub bay and then we have our battery sitting in the second sub bay here so everything kind of is wired all throughout here and it just kind of worked out that way because on the roof of the RV there was no real place to put the solar in the back ideally we would have wanted to do that but this RV is obviously not meant to have solar power we kind of just retrofitted it so you kind of just have to work with what you have so far it's worked out amazing and like jenny was saying she does cook a lot of instant pot meals so how we have it hooked up is we do have our inverter here another thing with the inverter it didn't come with mounting brackets on it again things that you learn is you just do things so I had to kind of build this custom box and we painted it so you can actually I actually had my ps3 up here I you know in this fantasy world I thought I was going to be playing a lot of video games and having a lot of free time out here but I honestly we work a lot and we just absolutely love that so we actually got rid of the ps3 and yeah so there's the inverter there and you can take it out and you know service it if you need to or clean in there if you need to but yeah so all of our power basically comes from this little power strip right here what I did was I just snipped off the end of a 1875 watt power strip and I just wired it into the output side of the inverter and so we've got about 1875 watts which will power a full-on hairdryer honestly it's it's so easy you just plug stuff in this is like our sole power station when we're dry camping and boondocking so we don't have to fuss with short power or generator issues like that it's just a completely separate system that's in and of itself that's accessible and way way more powerful than we could ever need when it comes to the battery bank that's underneath the inverter we have a 450 amp hour battery bank they all lead acid batteries so we only get 225 powers of usable energy but honestly after being out here in the southwest 600 watts and 450 amp hours and batteries is far more than you would ever need we very rarely get below 90% on our battery bank and it's just phenomenal we cook all the time we run our hair dryer teakettle blender everything off of this thing and it's just awesome and like I mentioned we were running pretty high powered appliances off of this this is a 2500 watt inverter so we can only access eighteen hundred and seventy-five watch through this surge protector but we can access those built-in AC outlets that are on the inverter as well so you can bulk charge things while you're you know running an insipid we can bulk charge camera batteries or you know a little trimmer for my beard and hair and stuff like that and then it also comes with a built-in 12 volts for some reason I don't understand why newer RVs don't have 12 volt outlets they are so so handy for off-grid living I will never go home without a 12-volt outlet I will if I'm build my own I will wire one in we look for an RV it will have to be a must have or a wire one in because these are so handy like we said this is like a our power station we can charge USB appliances we can charge you know our computer we actually have a DC charger for our computer so this is actually nice because it's close to the dinette but what's cool about the older RV that we have and we've only seen this on you know older RVs really newer ones don't really come with them but the 12 volt outlets we have one underneath the dinette we also have one in the back bedroom so when we're sitting at the dinette we actually had this you know 12 volt MacBook Pro charger which bought off Amazon and we Jenny and I both have computers and we just you know swap swap the charger when we need it and it's it saves you so much energy because you're not converting it from DC and the batteries to AC and the inverter back to DC for their laptops so it's a really huge advantage and we love the fact that it was pre-wired with it we did put new outlets we just went to Camping World bought $6.00 out 12 volt outlets but no one's in and it's like amazing so when it comes to the dinette area like I mentioned we do have the charger underneath so this is our workstation basically everything about the dinette is is a hundred percent original all we did was take everything off repaint it you know we just repainted this wood part to kind of make it look nice underneath here we have a propane heater another thing Jenny had mentioned that my mom helped out with the upholstery and all that stuff to say thank you to my uncle who helped us he's an HVAC guy he helped us get this propane heater up and running which has been super helpful even though we're in the southwest it still goes does get a little cold in the wintertime so it still gets down to into the mid 30s at times and so this thing has been super helpful it's not the most efficient thing in the world but it's great having on the road so another thing to look for when you're buying an older RV make sure all your appliances work well so something we didn't do and it does add up over time like I mentioned if you're gonna be buying an older RV definitely either get it inspected before you buy one Jenny and I the way that we did it is we found it on Craigslist we drove out to about two hours away from where home town in Columbia Missouri so we went out to Kansas City and met a really nice older couple they had already winterized the RV it was in October and they didn't want to demonize the RV we absolutely had no idea how RVs worked he kind of the guy walked us through everything he told us all the faults but I'm sure we couldn't even like understand it or digest it so we just kind of bought it it was $4,000 when we first purchased it so we thought it was a great great deal they had originally posted for I think 5500 we just told them hey we'll do 4,000 you know and drove it off we actually did drive it to a trans America truck truck / RV repair shop the guy went over it for about 45 minutes he looked it over he said alright everything looks great for your drive home he did not test any of the interior like home stuff but just as far as the engine and stuff to get us home it was good so all that stuff does add up as far as the repairs and mechanical work and everything like that so if you are thinking about buying an older RV please please please get it inspected if unless you know what you're talking about if Jenny and I were to go out and buy another RV now we know everything that's wrong with an RV and what to test but that's only after living it living in it for about two years so unless you're a full-timer or you are really savvy with RVs the $250 will save you so much headache and so much money in the long run even if you have to walk away from the RV it's just a good peace of mind it seems like a lot up front but even if you're spending it on like a four thousand dollar RV or a hundred thousand dollar RV make sure to do it because number one it's a peace of mind number two you can either negotiate the price down and get a better deal on it so you're actually saving yourself money in the long run or number three you can just walk away and just say you don't want it because it's too much hassle would we change anything about how we did it no it's a great learning experience but learn from us and if you're going to buy a older RV definitely get it inspected so now we're just going to jump up here this is our little camera station it's got all of our gear and stuff like that we also have some camera gear and lights sitting underneath the dinette there is storage at one side of the dinette does have the heater the other side is a storage compartment so it does have ductwork and stuff but it has a little bit of storage where we have our lights and tripod and stuff like that and some blankets right in here we just have our dry goods you know our vinegars and stuff like that and then we also have our spices and a Water Pik got to keep your teeth clean so this is our fridge and our freezer it's chock full at the moment of things but it's actually a great size for us and the freezer as well we actually make smoothies about every day in the morning and we have lots of like frozen vegetables and stuff like that and we find that is the perfect size for us and one other thing I wanted to mention we had thought that this was broken at one point and it turns out it was just the thermostat so that's one thing the thermostat was broken the little let me see if I can get it this little thing about five dollars was broken and we were we were starting to get worried but we felt like it was cold enough but it was reading 37 but anyway so just double check that if you think it's broken before you have someone come and repair it or anything like that just basics you know so yeah and one other thing too about all of these appliances is you know with older RVs there's good and there's bad things like every valve in this entire RV as far as the engine goes I had to be replaced but the appliances really seemed to hold up maybe they didn't nail down the planned obsolescence time frame just right but they seemed to make everything just really good quality and we we love that so that's a perk of older RVs for sure so this can run off of electric or propane we always when we're dry camping run it off of propane but it is very efficient I think most of our usage comes from the stovetop and from the heater at night when we need to use that but I think it could run for months and months and months off of our propane that we have if we were just running the fridge and with our 16.9 gallon propane tank that's fixed underneath the RV if we were just running that off of or using that to run the fridge it would last for months and months and months we do make it about two months using the heater as much as we want the stove as much as we want in the fridge all the time so it's pretty sweet setup and no complaints so back here we have our bathroom we actually this had a vanity and a sink and everything we completely gutted that a hundred percent and we just decided you know when you could reach both sinks with your hands stretched out it was kind of is something we didn't really need we ripped out the toilet and everything like that and actually installed a composting toilet that has a bunch of storage underneath so we keep all of like toilet paper and the drying agent that we use for the composting toilet all stays tucked nice in there and then we just actually got this this little storage thing from Walmart and that is everything we need as far as storage goes and we installed these two hooks in there for our towels that was really helpful because when we moved in we didn't really have anywhere to put our towels so you're just like hanging them all over and laying them on beds and the hooks again it sometimes it's the simple things that cost just a few dollars that really change the quality of the living space and yeah so we repainted everything again just like aesthetics and then we have little medicine cabinet kind of thing up here so it's just everything that we need so it's kind of funny but for our drying agent we actually whose pet bedding that you would use for like a hamster or a gerbil it's really cheap it comes in like this huge brick and it's about six dollars and it probably lasts us about five months so you can't beat that and so it's kind of funny but when we checkout at Walmart or wherever we are if they knew it we are using it for it'd be really funny but yeah so that's what we use and we we keep it all in there so yeah let's move on to the shower does our shower it's a stand-up shower it was really important to me when we were looking at RVs to have the shower and the toilet separated just a mental thing for me but I just wanted them separate so this actually had a glass door that would swing out and take up the entire hallway so we actually just took that out and put like a regular shower curtain and what's really cool about it too is that we can just fix it up like that when we you know just gives you elbow space and it just feels more open and roomy in here and then we also keep the dog's water in here so when they you know drink and splash and stuff like that it's not going on the floor and this actually is kind of funny but sometimes we stand in this Brown bucket here when we take a shower because it saves us space in our gray water tank so we don't have to fill that up we use all biodegradable soaps and actually we use vinegar for conditioner for hair so it's like all things that can just go out side and not harm the environment or anything like that so that that's one like little hack it's not glamorous by any means but it works so yeah that's our shower oh one other thing I wanted to mention too is that there were these accordion style dividers here and they smelled really weird and were brittle because they were like some sort of plastic so we actually installed these dowel rods here and then these curtains we got we found these at a yard sale for $2 for both of them and I had actually we had been using these in our house before we moved into this and it matches perfectly with the paint and we did not plan that so we were really excited about that but this is just like a you know easy solution for us you can have privacy when you're in the bathroom because we do have one on each side so those are kind of our bathroom doors sweet now we're gonna go ahead and head into the bedroom so we did somehow fit our queen-size bed in here this is only designed for a full size but we were able to kind of just squeeze this thing in here and kind of utilize our previous bed that we had in our old apartment so another thing we did was we use the granite countertop paint to paint these two little countertops nightstand type things so everything looks great we just we have a down comforter super important when you're out dry camping and living off-grid in an RV down comforters are hands down something to have so keep that in mind far as the aesthetics in here we actually had to rebuilt it build this entire back wall so we had an enormous amount of water damage back here on the driver's side of the bedroom and again I have to thank my dad he came in and helped us but we spliced in wood and we actually used a recycled wood from Home Depot to reframe the back part here which was really awesome saved money on that really the only cost back here was just a little bit in material and just a lot of blood sweat and tears sometimes so yeah it was it was just really good we're really happy with how it turns out and you almost yeah when you look at the videos on our channel I mean it's almost hard to look at this and believe that it was gutted to the to the basically to the vinyl that's on the outside so and you know we look at and we we just it's such great memories and just it's good knowing that you know we did it and without knowing how to do anything really so it's kind of cool so one of the reasons you'll realize these older RVs are so cheap is because often times they have water damage which is kind of a double-edged sword in its own way number one when you see water damage we could notice the water damage there was you know some soft spots there was actually a place where it had started to kind of break through in the ceiling what we didn't realize was how much work it was actually going to be so a lot of times surface water damage can really be pervasive a lot more pervasive than you actually think and not having experience with it we just kind of bought it thinking oh we can you know we can just cut this out real quick put a little a new little square up there I mean it turned out being like going down to the wires and and seriously like marrying boards in there and try to trying to create something that's sturdy enough to actually like hold your weight while you're walking up on the roof of the RV if you need to do do anything up there so like I said it's a double-edged sword you do get negotiating power when it comes to buying older RVs but also beware that it's a lot more work than you already think even if you're thinking it's a lot of work it's more of trust me definitely keep that in mind when you're buying an older RV a few other things I want to mention back here we do have storage underneath the bed so our water tank actually fresh water tank sits underneath the bed it is a 50 gallon freshwater tank which is actually surprising for an older RV I think it's probably because of the size but if you're looking to do any boondocking or camping out there we are very conservative with our water and we still have we have 10 extra gallons that we do hold or about two by two more so we can have 20 extra gallons and that will last us generally about mmm maybe a little under two weeks sometimes a little over two weeks depending on how we use it and that's not showering everyday showering every other day maybe every three days but you realize you don't have to do it that often when you're out here so one of the things about this RV too was it was top-of-the-line back in 1989 I don't know how much that's actually saying but it was it has full wooden cabinetry so it's actually really nice it doesn't have the little laminate stuff that's over the pressboard so it's actually like legitimate wood and so all we had to do really was just do new hinges and new handles so it's just new hardware we wanted to kind of be brushed nickel it's definitely more modern looking we do have a mirror back here that used to be in the bathroom so we can have kind of place to kind of get ready and see ourselves and then all up there is my clothes are in that and that been right there Jenny's clothes are kind of in these two right here and then we also have TRX bands for working out so I actually work out off the back of the RV I hang these off of the ladder rack it's a great way to work out do mobile work work out they're kind of expensive but honestly they're so worth it if you if you don't want to pay for like a gym membership or anything like that so yeah we do have a closet storage back here as well not a whole lot so that's the one thing about this RV it's like it doesn't have a whole lot of closet space so we have and we had to kind of limit what we actually hung up we actually show you how we store our clothes so we fold them kind of really compact and we put them in these plastic containers just because for some reason in this older RV we realized that there's like sediment and stuff like that that will get all over things dust oftentimes we have dogs which it's hard to kind of like keep things hair free and dust free but we just got these storage bins and it really works out well so great alright now we're gonna go to the outside I'm going to walk you guys through some of the stuff I did outside and I will see you out there sweet alright we're here at the RV at the outside of it it kind of lined III 50s so the brand of the RV is actually Yellowstone but it's a Ford chassis it does have a Ford 460 in it it's a v8 engine in it it's a big Hoss of an engine 7.5 liter and it gets on average since we've been traveling for the last couple years up the mountains and down on average it gets about seven miles to the gallon so it's not great but eat no matter how much weight you put on this thing that engine pretty much gets the same gas mileage no matter what so just a pretty trusty engine it's got a three gear transmission in it so at about 55 miles an hour it's it's slowing down so that's the one thing about older RVs but the cool thing is is it it is just you know straight mechanical stuff there's not a whole lot of computer stuff in it so we've taken it to mechanics and they've actually actually really loved it for that fact now I do have to mention we bought this for 4000 but we've also put in about north of six thousand dollars in mechanical work on it as we've been traveling some of it was kind of like spiraling issues that happen just from like fuel pump issue that was underneath so our catalytic converter went out because the engine was running hot I could go into lots of details on that but you probably don't I don't want to bore you with that so but we did do a lot of mechanical work but another thing we did we got new up caps for the RV it makes it look so much better putting new shoes on your RV and makes it look way better did get seven brand new tires so six on the RV and then we do have a spare in the back so we got Cooper HT three tires and they are light truck tires I think they're G rated and they basically they cost us about a thousand bucks so that's one thing about this RV is like kind of the surrounding cost factors they're very low so getting a brand new set of tires is only about a thousand bucks which is great for an RV that can travel around and do that so we're gonna move in here in here we just have our little Levellers so that just those little stacking levelers that's kind of a cool thing to have we have two sets of it because we sometimes find ourselves in really kind of slanted areas and with the refrigerator you need to make sure that the RV is level so with those propane off-grid refrigerators they definitely need to be level when you're using them in here we've got this is the kind of like our gas oil all of our like Auto stuff if we want to do oil changes and stuff like that in here we do have kind of outdoors type stuff we have waterproof containers we also have a dog dog gate and just kind of some extra stuff like extra chairs and stools and stuff that we use if we ever sit around a campfire one thing I wanted to mention was this is a new city water hookup it's kind of a funny story we were at a campground doing a video job for somebody in Cape Cod Massachusetts I did have to drill into the RV the old city water hookup that we had was completely the valve on it broke like like Jenny had mentioned we've replaced almost every single valve so I had to actually just drill into the side of that and luckily one of the only spare parts that we had at the time was we bought this on clearance for like a buck 25 at Camping World we had no idea what it was when we bought it we just bought it and then sure enough we just I just had to make the hole bigger put it in there but one of the cool things about doing DIY stuff in an RV you don't ask yourself if you can do it you ask yourself how fast you can get it done so anything that I can do I just like jump right in and get it done a few hours later that thing was all in there and we were back on the road doing our thing so down here we have our LPG like Jenny had mentioned we do have a 16 point 9 gallon cylinder tank there we've put about seven hundred dollars of work into that mainly because we paid labor for Camping World so if you can do it yourself it saves you a lot of money but with propane stuff we tend to leave that the experts just because it's something I don't know a whole lot about but in here we have our gray water tank so that's about a thirty if I'm if I'm not mistaken about a 30 gallon gray water tank I actually had to rebuild the gray water drain we had an issue where we were almost about to fall off the side of a Mesa long story for that one but basically the the drain pipe that goes underneath the RV completely got sheared off so I had to just go to Home Depot customize this this new fitting and so now we have a new kind of gray water drain that is not connected to the black water tank so it's kind of unfortunate that we can't utilize the black water tank because we do have the composting toilet but it works out for what it is and and we're happy with it in here we just have our hose we have our stuff for all of our water fill up stuff and we do have a little extra filter that we put on to the spout when we do fill our tank there's our fill tank that's a long story - I accidentally drove drove off of the RV still plugged in to shore power and RV life that's all I can say you'll find yourself learning all these things but I couldn't find a replacement door so I had to just kind of duct tape it and work with what we have I know it doesn't look great but it's kind of a burglar deterrent if you think about it another thing I wanted to mention while we're over here you'll notice we do have it caught basically every single steal that's on the outside we have recaulk this RV it's not the greatest looking thing in the world but for the last three years it is not had a leak and that was our main goal with it so we're all about functionality instead of looks and we didn't know what we were doing with caulking thank you - thanks to some of our subscribers they gave given us a lot of tips and tricks on how to actually do it the right way so if we ever do this again in the future we'll definitely know how to do it but again it's not leaked so we absolutely love that this RV did come with awnings that went over this bedroom window here which we actually did take this bedroom window out as well and resealed it that's where that all that water damage was with the back bedroom so we did have to take that window out along with that front over cab window so those were two windows we took out and again it's a lot easier than you think it is it's just taking it out you know resealing it you know putting steel sealant tape and then just smashing it back together and it'll be good to go so we did have those two awnings on there but we decided to take them off it was older it was rusted out and we just decided we just didn't want to have to deal with it so we just put some kind of roofing sealant in the holes where the actual awning was and they've held up so far so we just didn't want to have more stuff that would actually break in the back here we do have a 4000 watt generator we've actually never used the generator it did come with an exhaust underneath but again older RV that exhaust was ended up dragging on the highway and yeah we ended up throwing it away in a Taco Bell dumpster in Kentucky so we don't have an exhaust for that generator anymore but we've never had to use it with the Solar that we have on board so we do have that I guess worst case scenario we do have some sort of Energy Forum another thing I wanted to mention is because this does have a back bedroom this RV actually sits on a 22-foot chassis there's a six-foot extension on the back where that is our bedroom and so this has a 2,000 pound tow limit on that extension so we actually can't tow our car Genny drives behind and it is kind of a time we only move the RV about once every couple of weeks so it's kind of a nice time that we can get our own own space even though most of the time we're calling each other or like brainstorming with walkie-talkies and things like that but she gets about 50 miles to a gallon streaming behind this thing so it's a huge wind protector and she gets great gas mileage in the Civic so when we first started out RV trip we went up to the Northeast and we actually didn't have a tow car or caught an extra car to drive around we actually had a moped hitch on the back of this and we just had a little 50 cc scooter that we put on there and so we had that scooter we used it about twice the entire time we were up there and it just wasn't handy at all it added a lot of extra weight into the back of the RV and not having this was so hard at least for us and when we're trying to like create a mobile income moving this RV is just not as easy as you would think even though I can drive it around in a parking lot now just getting in and out of places it's just not practical so we we drove back down to Missouri picked up our car that my parents were watching and Jenny's been driving behind me ever since and it's been working out perfect so if you can't tow the car even if you can't tow it we would highly recommend having a tow car if you do it full-time because it comes in way more handy than you could possibly think this thing is expensive to move thank you guys so much for stopping by and if you want to learn more or check us out we do have a youtube channel it's called duet justice and that is d ue t like do it like a violin do it yeah and justice is our last name so that spelled kind of different too it's jus t us and we'd love to have you stop on by and check us out yeah the links will be in the video description below so definitely stop by check us out and thanks so much for taking the tour of our tiny home on wheels [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Tiny Home Tours

Views: 1,898,682

Keywords: tiny home, tiny house, tiny home on wheels, van life, camper van, shipping container, design, tiny houses, tiny homes, tiny house tour, diy tiny house, budget build, budget tiny house, vintage tiny house, vintage rv, rv build, rv renovation, budget rv, budget rv build

Id: XEcNjq1D9Ak

Length: 42min 47sec (2567 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 26 2018