Tour of Couple Living in a Car Hauler Conversion

hi everyone welcome back to my next video today we're going to begin a fairly long series with my friends b and chet say hi everyone hi hi everyone and uh they have built this really amazing home out of a cargo trailer and today we're going to see the finished product um and just go over it really quickly just so you have an idea what it looks like and then in the coming videos it'll be a series i think four or five at least we shot you'll see the build from empty to uh almost finished to this is the finished product with them living in not quite you're not not quite done you're still working on the solar today yes and now and we'll get that up soon yeah and so uh i think it's it they have so many really great creative ideas i i really wanted to share them with you uh just give us uh an overview of the trailer tell us about the trailer you bought okay um this a few months ago uh we bought a 2 000 it's new it's a 2016 and it's a feather light 24 feet and it's a car hauler not a cargo haul or a car car hauler eight feet wide 24 feet long and uh our idea was that we were going to travel the country and see the national parks and we were going to live in this full time our our home base is in florida but we're going to live this full time and so we wanted to convert this to something that was for me lovely but yet comfortable and felt like home and had all the functions of home and keep it light as far as the weight and uh not spend any more money than we had to so we had a number of goals on how we were going to do it and we just drew things on paper and walk through every issue we came up with we had challenges but it was fun yes room for two so you have to have more a little bit more space yeah yeah and why not an rv i've had rvs i've had class a's class cs uh casita uh just all kinds of things uh as far as the rv family goes and um you know they have their positives but for us uh we have a building background and after a while i just felt they were too flimsy uh to live in i did not like the rubber roofs i i want my roof not to leak so uh we constantly were fixing things and did not feel uh for the money that it was safe enough and uh waterproof enough and so i wanted i wanted a battleship to live in you know basically and so by looking at the videos especially your about yours bob we just said you know for two people the van was a little small but then we thought two vans would be great you know and travel around in two vans uh but we already had a a relatively new truck so we said uh probably a a cargo trailer would be okay feather lights are exceptionally well made yes this one is all aluminum yeah and i and i understand it's a one-piece aluminum roof yes one solid piece no riveting and it's 90 95 aluminum with a steel frame just around the axles probably we're towing about 5 000 pounds you're always conscious about what's behind you how it handles on the road the lighter it is the better you know you have traction stuff so all right you'll get better gas mileage with a very light trailer i think we're getting 12 or 13. about 13 miles a gallon coming from florida leaving irma behind and getting up here so yeah it's good so yeah for towing towing your home yes that's astonishing yeah we're happy with that oh yeah definitely yeah handled well and we've done everything to keep it as stealth as possible like i said there's really no evidence that this is a a home inside here now remember folks we're not going to go into a lot of detail because we have individual videos that explain all of this stuff that you can watch in the future today we're just looking for the overview of what they did so you can visualize it when we do talk about the details so i think it'll make it work a lot better for you so why don't we take a look around all right i'm really looking forward to this so uh we have gone 18 inches in from the back uh ramp the ramp goes up and down we've gone 18 inches in uh because there's a beaver tail on the back of this and that just means that the floor is slanted down so we went 18 inches in to give us a little time of what we call garage so that when we fold this up i can put my chairs and my grill and all that well when we did that we we built a wall this is an interior wall and it has a window in it um and everything is done as you know maintenance free as we could and an rv door and then we just put a camouflage exterior on it and we have a shower here and a fantastic fan and a hot water heater and we use this out here to cook on our propane grill and have our coffee out here in the morning okay and so this is your uh porch essentially it's our little deck yes there's the propane bottle cookout it's outside because uh while the door closes so it's secured but it's essentially outside yeah well it all fits in this little avenue right here this is a echo temp we do a lot of research and everything oxygenics to increase the pressure of your water hot water heater this provides me hot water into my sink and also for a shower this shower is a pull down shower it's on a hinge so when we're ready to leave i just simply take the bungee off this drops down thank to my my brother he helped us with these made these all little custom things here with a hinge so it just simply drops down and when i get to where i'm going i bring it back up hook it up pull my shower around and there's my shower and i have a nice shower in here and when i'm done grab my towel go directly into the house because this is angled all the water sheds off that way naturally all the plumbing is done through this false wall here so there are no uh puncturing into the outside skin of the trailer we called fantastic fan and found that we can mount fantastic fan vertically so we did that and of course it will allow for the airflow through the house so you'll see in the other videos later on that this this when we started was one big silver box there wasn't anything in here it even has an extruded aluminum floor so everything was aluminum sealing aluminum floors and what we did like i said the details will be in the other videos that i hope you'll watch but it has wood walls and insulation and the ceiling has two inches of insulation the first area that we made in here is our little sitting area very comfortable all it is is just a couple of rockers outdoor rockers oh uh-huh folding rockers salty rockers and then i cut up a um an old um what do you call them the comforter and put them over the chairs and it's made us you know a very nice comfortable little sitting area because i only had four and a half feet so i had to find something that would work right all right cabinets are ikea cabinets we've done led lights little the little strip lights i use verizon unlimited data to tether with the hdmi cord to the tv so uh when i you know we just tether it up and the next thing you know you've got you know tv netflix whatever you want to watch at night this is a little shelf up here with um a plastic trim it's a plastic composite so it's not a wood trim which could be a little expensive and heavy but this was uh reasonably priced but kind of dresses it up a little bit uh the ceilings are seven six and then we use these shoe boxes from ikea for our shoes and for you know paper towels extra paper towels these are extremely light they stack and they just screw to the wall extremely light and you get three of them for 30 dollars this is i think a very spacious kitchen for a lot of rvs they don't have much counter space they don't much have much of a kitchen and this is only 24 feet long so to get this size kitchen i really was happy with this this is a just a simple counter that you can get from like lowe's or home depot and a little rail system for you know different little details to you know hold your stuff uh women always ask me about these these are my magnetic um uh spices i always get that rv sink i ordered this online just a plastic sink nothing really too spectacular um we have two fresh water tanks under here and a pump underneath the sink and again more storage so i'm able to run my induction cooker here i usually probably do propane so we do all our cooking on this the only question i get from some people is like why don't you have an oven um i used to bake tremendously but now it i've kind of like i'm gonna go to panera's and just get a cupcake or something you know i'm kind of over but i may get the solar oven i've seen some videos on the solar oven i love my kitchen it's very light and spacious and beautiful at night with these lights you can change the lights to pink or yellow or purple so it's fantastic on the floor a lot of people ask me about the floor this is that simple puzzle floor that you buy lows you just put them together and um if i were to pull one up you're going to see just a aluminum floor and that aluminum floor can be very very cold it has a little give to it and if i damage one i can always take it up and put another piece down right then we ended up getting the angle refrigerators and uh compared to um your chest type that we were going to get you would have to pull that out and in we were going to actually have a pull out tray we decided against it the um the i think this is called the counter model or something but if you get this model it's not that much more expensive than the the bigger model of the chest these were seven hundred dollars for an angle that's quite expensive quite reasonable yeah it was reasonable and they're 65 quart that's very that's a good deal yeah they're very deep and they keep everything beautifully cold and i don't know how they did it but they actually have a little freezer thing that actually freezes ice but the rest of the refrigerator doesn't freeze the food i i'm not quite sure how they did that but it draws very little amperage then in this area here i'd plan to put a possible future window and we're not sure because this situation we have with this window and bob if you pan back that's a very sunny light a lot brings a lot of a lot of light into the house uh so so far we're happy with that we're not sure if we're going to cut into the rig to put a window in but if we do i've made a spot for it uh back in in this area is my uh where my solar panel items are it's our tech cabinet if you want to call it that this is a berkey uh you put basically almost any kind of water in here and when it comes out it's pretty pure drinking water and back in here in the bedroom i made a this is a just a felt curtain and then what it does is if i ever can use my air conditioner in a situation where i have city power which is right now um i can close this curtain and that that bedroom can be icy cold even with it's only a 5 000 btu air conditioner it could be icy cold in there so we made the bedroom back here this is in the nose of the trailer and it's a um it's a queen size bed nice spacious bedroom um i had a fifth wheel wasn't the bedroom one this big really really nice little lights at night it's very cozy i sit in here i do my writing and reading and have coffee in the morning we have these little boat holders over here a little touch that someone might want to do you just have these little boat put your cup in there your water you don't need a big nightstand just have your water here maybe a little clock or something up in here some reading um it will keep your space narrow but it's functional and it gives you you know enough room where you can get into the bed right we do you can get around and make the bed very oh easily and then of course under the bed it's tremendous storage right uh we took uh let's see wanted six coffee tables side tables little side tables and we took electrical ties and strapped them all together and that's the base of the bed and that allowed me all under those legs to put all kinds of storage on here and that's where we have our hanging dress clothes that's our closet you don't really need a closet no if you do it creatively right um more shoe boxes for some linens and these for you know just i got some purging to do bob no we all do yeah uh but i've got my reading and writing in here and um i sit here chet and i sit here and have coffee in the morning and plan our day and then we open up the door so you have this really nice to sit here and have this from your bedroom who has that yeah right right so we have two escape routes we can go out if there's any uh problems fire whatever we can go out that door or out this door so we have two full-size doors ventilation as soon as i open this did you feel that oh man amazing yeah because you've got the other end open and there's a slight breeze today i don't have one fan on yet yeah if you open turn some fans on it it's beautiful yeah it has a little uh toilet area in here and we have a cassette toilet um all the toiletries and more hanging clothes and uh it has a drop it has a false floor so it has a lot of deep storage underneath that we built so underneath here yeah we just raised it it's on a hinge these are hinged this this part comes up the other part comes up there's just deep storage then this if i want air conditioner i just throw this in the back like this okay and next thing i know you know i've got the air no the air is on right now yep i'm not going to keep it on because of the video right but yeah it's all strapped in we came up to florida didn't have one problem and uh it's just one of those rolling portable air conditioners yeah just uh cheap yeah not real expensive you don't have to put a hole in the rig or anything you say you haven't vented it's uh one that does vented through the floor there's a hole there it is vented through the floor makes them far superior they work much better when they're busy right and just lots of nice storage in here nice boat fan 12-volt boat fan here you can get and pick up we found that at the west marine west marine has a lot of really creative good things if you want to have a little ventilation it doesn't mean you have to have fans on the floor we tried to keep things up off the floor that will give you a feeling of spaciousness if you keep your surfaces not cluttered and your floor not cluttered because we have a lot of storage in these shoe boxes yeah a lot they're inconspicuous but a lot of storage i got to be honest when i first saw the shoe boxes i thought i don't know about that but yeah man you've got an amazing amount of stuff on yes winter storage chats stuff by his bed his glasses is reading and they don't open up when you travel when you move around that kind of surprises they've got a counter balance to them because they're shoe boxes yeah so this is this is our home and um the cost there's you know we have you know we have moved many times in our life so this has to be the most inexpensive home we've built and you own it outright i'm yeah you can a person can if they have a little money exactly and have it solid where you're not going to have leaks and you can move it when hurricane irma came everybody was so upset in florida about their homes and i looked at chet and said let's go and we just picked up our home and left i really have to give a shout out to my family because they've been very supportive my brother said something to me the other day he said you know you're the only one of the kids at this point that did one thing that our father wanted my father i didn't know wanted to go out and see the world he wanted to go out and see the united states and his kids just haven't had a chance to do that so he said you're going to be the one that can go out because your home can go with you and you can do it now so they've been very supportive like i said they've let us finish our build here offered all kinds of help if we needed it just very loving and supportive and i want to i want to thank them on film for that so we're looking forward to join the nomad you know community and help where we can and be be good members good good good well b thank you so much for sharing your home with us in your build everyone stay tuned there'll be a series of building uh videos coming out where we see go inside from an empty shell to framed in walls and every step of the way so everyone i hope you enjoyed this and the future series that is coming out soon uh if you do like us on youtube subscribe to the channel and remember there is a way out for you and b can be your inspiration thank you so we'll talk to you later [Music]

Channel: CheapRVliving

Views: 123,280

Keywords: live, living, car, van, RV, Full-time, nomad, gypsy, camper, camp, boondock, travel, snowbird, caravan, tiny, house, tribe, RTR, adventure, Featherlight, hauler, Tiny Home, conversion, trailer, engle

Id: slnUTp78iRY

Length: 19min 19sec (1159 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 24 2018