Tour this family’s 4X4 luxury RV! Their full time home!

Hi there. Welcome to my channel where I take you on tours of unique homes and showcase stories of people living alternatively. Have you ever dreamt of traveling the world without the hassle of planes, trains, and hotel rooms? What if you could actually take your home with you wherever you went? Well, in today's episode, we're meeting a family who does exactly that. They're going to show us around their expedition vehicle and explain how they've optimized their rig for both worldwide adventure and raising kids full time on the road. But before we jump right in and take a tour, if you like videos like this one where we showcase stories of people living alternatively, make sure that you subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you know every single time we publish a new episode. Hi, I'm Michael. This is Given. I'm Fleur and this is our daughter, Julie. And this is our tiny home on wheels, Manfred. We are from the Netherlands. We are driving in this expedition truck. It's a Mercedes. It's a four by four V6 diesel engine with 220 horsepower. I always liked the idea of having a truck, but then I actually got to know these expedition trucks and I was like, wow, that's something I could do like a long term. I always say that life is too short to dream. Then we decided, yes, let's go for it. I was searching on the internet and there we found this Mercedes and I worked for one year on the truck. I convert a lot of things. And then we found a company who built on the living unit. It took us a long time to decide how we do it. I think we changed the layout like a 10 times or something. We didn't know what it was like to live tiny with kids. So we actually put like tape on the floor in the shed and like, Oh, what if we do the beds here and the cupboards there? But yeah, we're still happy with the end result. So it took us from 2017 till end of 2019 to the whole building process. We started traveling full time in our truck in 2020, right before COVID hit. This is our overland wreck. It's a Mercedes Benz. It's a 1722. It means 17 tons, 220 horsepower. We run around when we drive on the highway a hundred kilometer on 25 liters. So it's pretty expensive. Unfortunately, I did a lot of conversions on the truck itself. When we bought it, I worked for one year on it. We put a roof rack on. It's all custom made. A friend of mine welded it. So it was before a blow truck, what we bought in Germany. After one year working on it by myself, we found a company who built, who can build the living unit. That was Twiga Travel Cars in Holland. Together, we designed the whole box, the whole structure and the whole design inside. The box is built on the chassis and between the box and the chassis, there's a torsion free subframe. So with off-road driving the chassis of the truck can torque like this and the box is still stiff. The box is made out of six centimeters isolation material, what they use also in the semi-trailer industry. Our living unit is inside five meters, 20 long by two meters, 30 by two meters high. So we have four solar panels on top of Montferrat, each of 300 Watts. So we have four AGM batteries. They got a charge by the sun and when we are driving inside, we have 350 liters fresh water, two gray water tanks. Over here, we have our outside shower. Open it like this, put the hose in with the shower head and you have a nice warm shower. Over here, we have two big boxes. One box with all the outdoor kitchen equipment, other box with the tables, the chairs. We extended the wheelbase with 60 centimeters. So the wheelbase is at the moment four meters. Over here, we have the windows. Those are real glass windows from the brand Outbound with the mosquito nets, which are really handy. And when you do it the other way, it's a blind. So now we came on the back of the truck. Here are the spare tires. It's pretty easy to take them off. We have an arm that you put in the squares over there and with ropes, you pull it off. It's pretty nice to see it. Over here, we have the bumper, what can flip up with off-road driving. It's pretty easy that you don't drag a lot of sand with you. Over here are the sand ladders. We use them when we are stuck in the mud or in the sand. We've been using them already many times. You can see it. It's all bent. Now you've seen the outside. Let's come in and I'll show you the inside. All right, so this is where the kids sleep. They have bunk beds. Given sleeps here. And this is Julie's bed. The kids have little cupboards where they store their toys and they have little doors because when we first went away with Manfred, they were only like one and two years old. So we didn't want them to fall out. So they had like little cages. They don't really need it anymore now, but they just like it. There's a lot of storage here. It's like our junk food. And this is like school books for the kids and bread and herbs. This is the bathroom. We have a little three kilo washing machine, which we use very often. We have a separate toilet, which we're very happy about. It's new. We have it since a year, but it's pretty ideal. And we have a shower in the corner. So we each have one closet for our clothes. This is mine. I'll show you. It's messy, but yeah, it's enough, really. It's all we get, which makes life easy. So this is our kitchen. We cook on LPG. We have a big tank underneath the truck. We don't have a microwave or an oven because we think we don't really need it. We have a lot of storage space here. And this is where we store our plates. And we keep everything in the same place now so things don't get lost. More storage here. We have quite a big sink. When the kids were little, we actually washed them in here. That doesn't really fit anymore. But that's why we picked like a really big sink. They really loved it. They had like their little bed and stuff. Yeah, so it's good memories. All right, that's all for the kitchen. Let's move to our living area. We have a big rounded seat here. This is where we eat, where we do schoolwork. Also where we hang out and watch movies. It's really nice to have a big table because we can fit all our books on there and a computer if needed. So we're really happy with this big living space. Underneath the table is the water tank. It's inside so the water can get frozen. And we have a lot of storage underneath all of these benches. So this is where we have shoes and Michael stores his tools there. And that's all the way around. They're pretty deep, so you can store a lot of stuff in here, too. So we have a pass-through there, which just gives us a safe feeling in case there are bears around or weird people. It actually never happened, but it just feels nice to have it. We can open it and then hook it onto that thing there. We only used it once when there was a snowstorm. It was nice. But yeah, it gives us a nice feeling to have it. This is our fridge. Very important. We picked quite a big one for us Europeans, but it's just nice to have a lot of storage. This is our freezer. This is our control panel, which tells us how many power we have, how much water and all that kind of stuff. There's all the electricity in it. This is our our rooftop window, which is very nice. It gets a lot of light in and air and airflow when it's warm. We have mosquito nets, too, and blinds. You can make it totally dark, which is great when you're in areas where the midnight sun is. This is where we sleep. We can move the pillows down and we can lower the table and then the bed will end right underneath the windows. We can lower the beds electrically so we can move it all the way down. And this is really ideal because we don't have to make our bed every day. So we're happy with it. And we just have to go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time. It's pretty funny, like the Americans are really like outgoing, which is sometimes like, wow, this thing is goddamn sexy and everyone should have one. What is it? It looks like you can go to war with this. Yeah, stuff like that. We get positive reactions. People drive by like this. Yeah, that's really funny. Thanks for watching this week's episode. If you'd like to see more tours of Overlander tiny homes, make sure you check out the playlist we have linked in the description. And I will see you soon with another unique home tour.