Tour of Our Tiny House Camper (Box Truck Conversion

alright so I'm gonna give you guys a tour of our box truck to tiny house conversion so we converted the box truck and finished it completely for about four thousand dollars and I paid about five for the truck so this is a nine thousand dollar project you're looking at we're gonna be traveling in this this summer and living in it for the rest of the year at least but so a little bit about the truck it's a 2006 III 50 it used to be a u-haul truck and I I wasn't gonna buy a $5,000 truck but this one has 80,000 miles on it and it's a no six so I pretty much had to super good shape everything works on it so we picked that up in January for five thousand and then immediately started to build our house into it so on the last video I did the time-lapse I got a lot of questions about removing the roll-up door here so those doors only open or they only latch from the outside so if you were to build something inside of there and it latched or if somebody latched it from the outside you would have no way to get out of there other than busting the fan out of the roof or something you could pretty much get trapped in there but also we just didn't really want to deal with too many hassles I think that spending four thousand dollars on this whole project and a thousand of that is the woodstove which you'll see in a second but that you know that was that was a hell of a budget we we built this thing as cheap and as fast as we could and it just seemed like more trouble than it was worth to leave the door in there which would also took a foot of living space out from the ceiling down because that door has to roll up into the ceiling right there so just seemed like the obvious thing to do rip it out and just frame a simple straight wall right there so it also gives it the home feel you know we actually have a door in a window it kind of feels like a house not like a box truck so this little wall was super simple we just framed it up insulated it that's an $80 window from Lowe's a $200 door from Lowe's this is the cheapest siding they sell it's t 111 siding we just sealed and stained it and yeah so that's the front of it or the back of it depending on how you're looking at it but um yeah let's go in and see it actually one thing I want to say before I move inside I got a ton of questions on the other video about why we chose a door that swings inward like this and so the first most obvious reason is that this door is about this much taller than this lip right here so that's the outside of the truck and so we could recess the wall back another two feet and take away from our living space so it would swing outward but honestly for everybody who said that we wasted a ton of space having an inward swinging door I can't imagine if I had an outward swinging door that I would want to clutter my walkway any more than I already have so that's why we chose an inward swinging door this $200 prehung super easy to install that's just the way we did it so anyway this is our tiny house and I'll give you guys a tour starting back on this wall and then we'll move our way towards the front of the truck so behind the door we have a little shoe rack all of our jackets coats and whatnot we hang our keys here as well and then on this side is our table this table is also our bed me and Terra sleep here all you have to do is pull these two pins out this leg comes off and then it's got two pins over here by the wall that hold it up right there you remove all that and you can place this board it's got these little pieces right here that fit perfectly into these little groove and so everything under that is storage I've got like tools over here our battery systems over there in the corner there's like these sleeping bags and stuff normally go right under there but on this side we've got our clothes I think the kids have some school stuff over here Tara home schools them so yeah so that's the table slash bed combo right above it is the cabinets we installed they were 60 bucks a pop so there's three of them that's 180 bucks in cabinets not too bad so yeah I had to put my guitar somewhere got to have a guitar when your road trip and so hung that over the window right there and yeah so over here this is our firewood for our cubic many wood stove and this this whole setup the stainless steel pipes just everything here was like the most expensive part of the whole truck I think we've got over 900 bucks in our wood stove system alone so I mean it was totally worth it though I would rather have heat than anything else I could have done a lot of people asked why didn't you add more windows ok we're on a super-tight budget so we're gonna stay warm as opposed to I don't know having more windows I guess but anyway that's the wood stove and this is Marley that's where he sleeps moles and yeah so take you over here to the kitchen Wow so we do a lot of cooking on the wood stove right there but we also have a propane stove pull up here we don't use it inside we'll cook outside with that but there's a propane stove our sink was like $5.00 actually let me let me go back and say I paid $50 for these cabinets on Craigslist and the lady who sold them to me knew somebody who was giving away like three free counter tops so I got to pick this white countertop and so for 50 bucks I got this whole kitchen set up and then to make a sink I just drilled some holes in a bucket I cut out a hole for that bucket and then on a shelf in here is another bucket that does not have holes so that's our sink this is our water supply right here and I've got this little hose I'm gonna attach up here with a hose clamp and that will make that a little less splashy but yeah so we put a shelf above the counter there have a little more space yeah and in these cabinets that we've got like bowls and plates and some more food there's food under here got our little trash bag set up behind the door like toothbrushes all sorts of stuff dog food whatever and then over here is our shower stall so this is called a let's see Duras stall shower standalone shower kit and it was like a hundred and sixty dollars on ACE Hardware on their website and I mean Lowe's sells the same thing for like 300 bucks so we got a pretty good deal on it but yeah it's a little shower stall we take this jug of water it has like a little lip in the back that fits perfectly on this and so it supports the weight on the back there and then we hold the front up with these bungees right here so then we have a full shower set up with that jug so I cut a hole in the floor it goes fully outside there and then yeah these are our pee jugs pee collectors I attached a funnel I like did a gnarly job with the superglue and gorilla glue but yeah so you just pee into that collect it dump it out somewhere in the woods if you got a poop and we can't find a public bathroom you use the toilet there's the actual toilet seat lid on that five-gallon bucket so put like a trash bag underneath it I know it doesn't sound very appealing to most people but that's just the way we live when we're traveling not so yeah that little shower stall allows us to have the privacy to use the restroom no matter where we are also take a shower no matter where we are so that's good up here is the kids sleeping area my son sleeps with his head over here and then my daughter her head over there and they fit up there well and underneath their mattress is where their clothes are stored it's like a little frame we built there and yeah so that's the kids room right there so I'll talk about some of the stuff on the ceiling here for one this is the cheapest rough cut pine boards I could get add it a little bit more weight but I didn't want to do this five millimeter panel up top it just would've looked tacky I mean these these dark boards that I stained they really make it feel like cozy in here so we had a white ceiling in our van that we traveled in last year and I don't know something about this dark wood makes it feel cozy I like it a lot and then I put these four LED lights they're the same ones we had in our van and they're run off of a battery that's down in here that charges off the alternator when we're driving and then when we're stopped we can run our fan and our lights without draining the starting battery so this is a max fan deluxe it's a four speed fan that just vents out the top there you can it's got like a built-in rain cover some of them you've got to get another cover besides the lid to use them in the rain but this one you don't totally totally legit just like that also put some lights under there there's one under there we've got charging ports right over here for the kids there's also some on the other side and there's some down in there for when the tables up what else oh so these walls that's not drywall that's five millimeter plywood that's the thinnest plywood I could buy I was trying to save on right behind that is a 3/4 inch foam board insulation and then there's the actual wall that came with a truck right behind that so that's all that is same with here there's just three quarter inch insulation under uh behind that and then it's just the metal roof which is pretty much like this stuff it's like sheet metal I bought this just to cover up where I had cut out the wood right here and then I've got to put like a little collar or something to make that look nice but it's not a priority so I'm not going to stress about it so one of the most common questions I got in the last video was also why we didn't have more windows in here and basically we did what we can afford with this whole thing we had to kind of decide what was a priority and how we could get on the road and travel in and do it for the least amount possible so yeah that's all I'm going to show for now I'll definitely be doing a more thorough tour in the future and we plan on making a lot of videos as we travel which we'll be doing here soon but for now that is the tiny house box truck conversion

Channel: Cole Webb

Views: 1,583,798

Rating: 4.6472859 out of 5

Keywords: tiny house, box truck conversion, box van conversion, box truck camper, box van camper, tiny house tour, box truck tiny house, box truck conversion tour

Id: NfzWWGw6QXs

Length: 12min 37sec (757 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 25 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/RocServ15]

I don’t understand why he built the new wall like 8-12” off the back of the truck? I guess so u don’t open door and fall out?

Seems pretty fucked up to just be dumping grey water into the street or where you are parked

[u/dirtymoney]

I was looking at compact washing machines on youtube and saw this video suggested for me. That's how I ran across the video.

This'd be perfect for me (a single person). However I'd have to have a solar power setup, a better water system and a fridge.

Edit: another one I like. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZOlWc2ueGo

[u/borednerds]

I dont understand how you budget for 4k, spend 20% on a vanity heater, but don't have running water? After my bed, that's the most used thing in my van.

[u/revnhoj]

I would have left the sliding door in addition to building a 'nice' entrance like this. When you need to leave the van for a long time just close the sliding door and have far more security.

[u/FeelTheWrath79]

I remember when I first found out about this kind of thing was when some kid got a job at google, but when he found out how much it costs to live there, he bought a box truck and just kept it parked in the employee parking lot. I'm glad you can really do much more. Did this guy have an AC on top, tho? Or just a vent?

[u/scubastevette]

Love this idea! I wonder if it would be possible to add windows into the sides or if the truck material is too thin 🤔

[u/chadlumanthehuman]

They are going to need a lot more water for three people to shower, wash, and cook. The grey water is thing is also a deal breaker for me. Also, there is hardly any ventilation. If you’re burning wood it will smoke pretty hard, even with the chimney, vent, and window. It sounds like it’s just him and the two kids so I’m assuming they will ride up front, but this build is extremely careless and dangerous. You can buy a class C mobile for 10k easily.

[u/time2van]

I've been tempted to get a box truck, bit I've been city dwelling again lately. Not sure how that would work fiting into parking spots ..

[u/eintnohick]

If it were just me, i would overlook the lack of a safety exit. Considering theres a family in there, i would say its borderline reckless. Other than that... nice build