This Budget Overlanding Truck Conversion is a Fraction the Cost of an Earthroamer

How's it going? My name's Andrew. I'm Ashley. And this is the Muse Roamer, our home-built expedition vehicle. This video is sponsored by Element. They are offering all of you a free sample pack, just pay for shipping. Stick around to the end of the video to hear about this great offer. I was waiting tables in Park City. I was an athlete for snowboarding, and I'd lived in a progression of different vehicles from an Astro van, Volkswagen Golf, truck camper, 4x4 van. I wanted to build the best vehicle I could with the least amount of compromise. You know, an Earth Roamer kind of seems like the ultimate vehicle, but they're half a million dollars. So I decided to build it myself. The goal was to build an Earth Roamer for 10% of the cost. So initially we set off with a $30,000 budget. We bought the truck for $12,000. I had a tool bed on the back, so we sold the tool bed for $2,000. So we're in the truck about $10,000. The box shell itself cost us around $50,000. So twice the budget I had set out for. Along the way, there were a lot of crossroads where I was like, okay, this would be a little faster, easier, cheaper. And I was like, or this would be the ultimate way to do it. So we could have probably gotten it done six months sooner. We just built it to the absolute highest level that we possibly could. You know, it's kind of like climbing a big mountain. It kind of sucks. You're like miserable. You're asking yourself, why are you doing this? Your feet hurt. Your back hurts. You're tired. But then, you know, you get to the top and two weeks later, you're telling the story and you forgot about all that. You just remember the story and the accomplishment. So I've scratched and worked, and I've made a lot of sacrifices and took a lot of really big risks to be able to build something like that. All right, so this is the Museroamer. It's a 2004 Ford F-550, four-wheel drive. And we basically pulled the bed off of it. It was a tool bed with a lift gate, and then built this entire structure. It has the 6.0 engine, which is notoriously terrible, so I've set a few components to hopefully let it run a lot longer. We swapped out the original tires and added these 41-inch Continental MPT 81s for the dually to single rear wheel conversion. This was the best option. It kind of came with a kit. The kit also came with the fender flares, four-inch lift and suspension upgrade, and the front buck stop bumper with all Baja design lights. We worked with Baja Designs to hook us up with these lights, a 16.5,000-pound winch with a synthetic cable. And then we had these custom boxes fabricated at a shop called Voreshear in Utah. Right now it houses my skateboard, a little mat for our base camp. You know, this is sort of the base camp side. In this compartment here, we've got our stairs. They work really well when we're not up against a curb. They're like perfectly flat and level. Nice awning that's battery-operated. We just hit a button, thing comes out. Three area lights just below the awning that we can flip on with the switch on the inside. And then we actually have four auxiliary backup lights that are also on a switch, so we can switch the patio lights on that side, the reverse lights on this side on, or when the truck goes into reverse, those fire up. And we had these boxes made in the rear bumper made at Voreshear as well. We've got a propane tank, some firewood, camp chairs. We have our main propane tank. This is what actually is fueling the Roamer at the moment, and an external grill that we set up. On the back here, we have two one-up bike racks. We can actually mount two bikes, rear-view camera, and then we actually have a ladder, which is currently a surfboard rack. We've got two surfboards. On the roof, we have three 175-watt solar panels, so 525 watts of potential solar, two inflatable paddle boards. We have a spare tire right here. We have a WeBoost on the corner here, which is a cell phone signal booster, two fantastic roof fans here, Penguin 2 Dometic AC unit that we have used, I think, twice. On this side of the truck, we've got our cassette toilet hatch, which we have this little insulating panel, but we also have an external shower here. We have this box here, which is kind of miscellaneous stuff, air compressor, jack, all kinds of different stuff. We also have this fresh water hose, and then if we are showering out here, it's really nice to get off the ground, this little bamboo thing to stand on. This is city water hookup, so if we were to be at an RV park, this will give us water. Two diesel tanks. They're both 16-gallon tanks, so we get about 10 miles to the gallon. This is our furnace exhaust. We have a propane furnace on the inside, our refrigerator exhaust as well. There's an intake here, and then jumper cables, roadside assistance, extra fluids, big tool bags just for whatever troubles we may inevitably run into while living on the road. All right, so this is the cockpit. The only thing that we really added was this edge controller, which gives us all of our engine temperatures with diesels. That's really important. We ended up pulling out the back seat to accommodate a little bit more storage and kicker's bed. Underneath here, we usually have a couple bags of dog food, harnesses, and then a pretty dense first aid kit in case anything happens. Yeah, it's not bad. Welcome to the inside of the Museroamer. So we've got cabinets up here that open up. This is his junk drawer with random books and everything, and then these are all drawers that slide out. So this is his sock and underwear drawer. And then down at the bottom, we have shoes. So he has his shoes all down here, and then mine are next to there. And then over here, we have our shower. This is what I begged for the most in this rig. So big shower, we have a wet bath. In the winter, it's our snowboarding equipment storage, so all of our wet gear. And then in the summer, it's all of our wetsuits from surfing and kiting and everything like that. Shower head that comes down so you can do a nice shower. We have one fan in here to help circulate the hot air and everything while we're showering and as well as a window. Next over here, we have our fridge. This fridge is actually bigger than the one that we had in our apartment before we moved in here. This is a freezer compartment. You can choose whether you want it or not, but I like ice cream, so we're going to keep that in. And then up here, we have just some dry food storage as well as seasonings and more dry food down here. Moving over here, we have our thermostat for our propane furnace that we have. The furnace lives down in this box down here. So these just come down, and it is dog food, dog treats, and then the furnace lives below. So it's perfect for us to be able to put Kicker's dog food hidden away and not have to walk over it every day. These windows were super important to Andrew and I, so they open up like this. That way, if it's raining, you can keep the windows open and have airflow going through. And then my favorite part, I get eaten alive by mosquitoes, so I needed screens. And these come down and clip together. And then if you want, at night, you can push this up and you have shades as well. We also have custom shades that we made, so if we're parking somewhere and we're trying to be discreet, we made these custom black shades that you can put on the windows. This isn't the one for this window, but you get the idea. You attach them. We have Velcro on the sides. We did the raw slabs for the dining table and also for our countertop. When we built the table, we made a little sneaky drawer down here that pops out for just random things like Andrew's chess game and some cards and everything like that. So it's a sneaky little hiding spot. This is our electrical bay. It is a beast and I don't even try to understand how it works, but we have four Lion Energy lithium ion batteries that are 150 amp hours each, 3000 watt pure sine wave inverter, which is really important. The pure sine waves protect electronics like a computer or anything like that when you're charging it. So that was definitely a must for us. Honestly, we didn't know what to do with the electrical, so we had Camper Reparadise help us organize it because before it looked like this, it was a giant ball of wires and it was terrifying. So we really appreciate the help in organizing, making this thing look the way that it does. So off of our electrical bank, we have all these switches. This one is our water pump, so that lets the water and the pump go through there. This checks our electrical, shows us we're doing good right now. Our solar is pumping all of the energy that we need. And then this is our inverter, how to switch it on and off. And then this is just our fuse box over here. And then this powers our switches. So the key element for us in here is the pass through. This just pulls out and then you can get directly into the truck from in here. We'll typically have this closed if we're driving, especially just if we're running the AC in the car, that way it's not blowing back here. Another favorite part of the rig is the shishigi bond that Andrew did in here. So the Japanese technique of burning wood. So it honestly helps protect them against water and fire. And it turns out this beautiful color. And I think that kind of pulls the whole space in here together and makes it feel really homey. And then up here we have our queen size bed. Our mattress is just a three inch foam topper from Tempur-Pedic. And then below we've got some hypervent here, which is just basically like a little squiggly that helps the air get through there. And then here we have the Froli system. This thing has been great for the moisture. It lets you pick the angle that you want, the firmness that you want. So I have shoulder support on my side, Andrew doesn't. And they just latch into the exact size that you need. So they're really great springy for the bed. Another fun thing that we get asked about a lot is these little lights. We found them on Amazon and just Velcroed them to the wall and they just turn on by a touch. They can be charged just in a USB charging port. And they have three brightness levels, so they're perfect just for in bed reading. Over here we have Andrew's guitar. Underneath that we have some storage boxes. We've got some laundry in here. That was really important to have a space to hide our laundry, although it is a little overflowing at the moment. And then here we just have another box for a bunch of camera equipment storage and odds and ends of Andrew's. Port windows on either side. It's great for at night just to get some airflow in here. We actually have a little mini fan that we can put up there if it gets too hot and it circulates the air up here. We don't have a generator for the AC right now, so fans have been our best friend. Andrew's favorite part of this whole thing probably has to be the editing bay that he built for himself. I know before when he was working in his van, it was hard for him to sit hunched over and not have all the space he needed. This is his fancy swivel editing chair. It fits exactly under the countertop so when we're driving we don't have to tie it down and it won't worry about it falling over. It just stays in its spot. And then this is our WeBoost antenna on his workspace. It's nice because that kind of being closer to it, it boosts the most. So he sets his phone here while he works and it helps a lot. And then he has a 32 inch monitor up here that he can connect to his laptop so then he can use both screens to edit. And then up here we have a Sonos soundbar so that helps him when he's editing to hear things and play music when we're just hanging out. It's really, really nice. And then down here we just kind of have a shelf that we built that holds our computer bags, our camera bags, drones. And then up here we have his camera bay. We've got all of his GoPro attachments, charging banks. These latches have been really great so we can pop this up and it'll stay open. Before we had that, we had to hold them up and get everything out with one hand. So those have been really nice to add just to keep things up and they're really easy to install from Home Depot. When you open these cabinets, they don't block the light and that's the smallest thing, but it makes a huge difference. We have a three burner stove from Dometic. These all run off of the propane. We have a full oven, which has been incredible. A big brownies, cookies, pizza, everything like that in there. Below the oven, we have our water heater hidden behind that panel and then just kind of extra kitchen storage down there. And then a stainless steel sink. The guy who helped us with our countertop from Redpoint Woodworks was a little cautious about wanting to do a sink just because of the raw slab and the water touching it, but it's worked out great. We just make sure to wipe it down every time. So these are the dimmers. These are the light switches. We also have, if we wanted to add more charging here. This is our awning switch, so that's just screwed into the wall there. And this is for our fans, our Dometic fans. We have the one in the bathroom and then one over the main area here. We have our water tanks in the subfloor here. There's about six inches in the subfloor between the steel frames. Two freshwater tanks that equal 66 gallons. And then we have one gray water tank that equals 22 gallons. Because we had all the extra room from our water tanks, we didn't want it to go to waste underneath everything else. We have a trap door that will open and we just have climbing gear, backpacks, things that we don't use every day stored down there to have every inch in here utilized. So much of this project, we just kept hitting walls on simple things. We just hit a roadblock. Something would just waste our time. Everything took so much, so much longer than we expected, but I've built out a couple other vehicles from when I first started five years ago with a $500 truck camper to the 4x4 van. It's always felt like that. It's always been more expensive than I expected. It's always felt like I was stretching myself, but once it was done, I always felt really fulfilled and glad I'd spent that money. Even though this thing was far larger than anything I'd done in the past, I was a little bit more confident that it would work out and that we would be sitting here actually enjoying it and really grateful that we put in the work, the effort, and the risk. There's so much negativity, I think, right now in the world, so we try to be as positive as we can and inspire others to kind of live the best life that they can. I know a lot of women watch us and they're like, I could never do the things that you're out there doing. I'm like, just push yourself. You never know until you try, so there's so many women like, oh, I don't know how you jump off a cliff. I'm like, I don't like doing it, but I push myself and it's awesome, so you can do it too, you know? If you're an active person and you sweat or you practice any type of fasting or you're on a low-carb diet, then it's very important that you get your electrolytes. Now, it sounds simple, but it can actually be really difficult to get enough electrolytes. For example, with fasting, you might be put off by some of the potential side effects, which are hunger, cramping, dizziness, and feeling tired, but surprisingly, all of those can be mitigated if you keep up a proper intake of water and electrolytes, and Element is perfect for this because there's no sugar and it's low in carbohydrates, but it's tasty and provides you with the proper amount of sodium, potassium, and magnesium to keep electrolytes in balance. Element works. It's used by US Olympians, NBA athletes, and everyday people like me to stay properly hydrated and balanced. Co-founder Rob Wolf wanted to elevate his performance on the mat. His coaches were like, hey, you need electrolytes. He tried it, and boom, they started Element. Element is offering a risk-free way for you to try it out. If you don't like Element, then you can just share it with your friends and they'll give you your money back, no questions asked. Element is offering you a free sample pack. Just pay for shipping. If you use the link in the description and go to drinklement.com forward slash florb, you can try it out risk-free and order your sample pack today. Thank you for watching. Have a great week.