He built a gorgeous Tiny Home on wheels w/ panoramic windows for sight seeing

Welcome to the custom truck cabin. Living in this place on the back of this truck feels like a life of luxury compared to you know times that I've spent living off of the motorcycle so I'm very appreciative and grateful for this much space. The windows are definitely the most contentious part of people's belief and like the integrity of the build. There was no way I was going to build a custom truck cabin without incorporating these big windows. This right here is my fold down propane cooktop. This is a less than glamorous section of the custom truck cabin. Nothing pretty but it's important. It's about the aesthetics and it's about the beauty of the place right? What's up guys my name is Christopher welcome to the custom truck cabin. For pretty much all of my life I've lived relatively transiently. After I graduated university I backpacked for like nine months and then after that I transitioned to living off my motorcycle for several months. This is by far in a way a superior experience for sure. Living in this place on the back of this truck feels like a life of luxury compared to you know times that I've spent living off of the motorcycle so I'm very appreciative and grateful for this much space. I also enjoyed the nature of trying to build the whole structure. I wanted to frame. I wanted to put a roof on it myself. To me the base flatbed truck was a good platform because of the floor space and the freedom to really imagine whatever I wanted and to execute on it in the way that I wanted. So I have been living in this space for about two years. When I was looking at the general truck camper market I noticed that pretty much everything has a thin walkway down the middle and the windows are like generally fairly small and a wood fire stove is like kind of not not the normal. And so to me those were always the things that stuck out as like the big three design elements that would make the build feel like a truck cabin for myself. So to build this rig I would say it took me about four months to be pretty much what you see now. I built the exterior first because I was building in the pacific northwest. Once you know the rain comes it's going to be really difficult to make any exterior progress. So the first order of business was making sure that the siding was on, the roof was on, the solar was punched through the roof and weather tight and all of that. And that took me probably about a month and a half to two months. And then from there I did the interior with more time and a little more patience. I am taking bids for building a similar structure for other customers and my price point is starting at about a hundred thousand dollars depending on what sort of amenities, utilities and other features that people want to include. So this is a 1990 F-350. It is beefed up. It has a 12 foot by eight foot flatbed but the drivetrain, the rear axle, front suspension, rear suspension, everything is heavy duty. So I would say the overall length on this thing is probably about 25 feet if you take from the edge of the overhang all the way to the front of the nose. The overall height is just north of about 12 feet. The cabin itself weighs somewhere between 4,500 pounds and 5,000 pounds. Now it's time to check out the inside custom truck cabin. Welcome to the interior of the custom truck cabin. So keep in mind when I was building this space guys for me the highest priorities were three integrations of design right. The first being panoramic windows, the second being wood fire stove and the third being a big open floor space. The interior and how I was going to design it was based off of one of the things that one of my uncles has told me. So he told me one time when he was moving into a new place he said nothing crosses the front threshold of my house that I don't either need or love and so I use the same logic when designing this. Starting here behind the door this is a really significant place in the build for me. I believe that the front door is important because it's the last thing that I see before I head out for the day right. So I have wisdom pieces here whether it's poetry or just things from wise individuals that I look up to. I have sentimental paintings, important pictures, letters that loved ones have written me, things that I want to see and I want to have impact me before I head out. Right on the side of this cabinet is my light switch. You can maybe see the lights turning on up here. That's what I use at night obviously for lighting. Something easy to access right away as soon as I enter the truck cabin. Moving further this is my electrical cabinet. All of the appliances in here are electric with the exception of my propane cooktop but all of this is something that to me I had no idea how to design before I built the truck cabin but I knew I wanted solar. In my mind I wanted to be able to take advantage of obviously the sun so I did a lot of research. I was on YouTube University for like three days straight figuring out how to build a solar system and so I did buy a kit but I made sure that I switched it and fused it properly. I made sure all the wires are the proper gauges. This is an 80 amp charge controller for the people who find this specifics important. 2000 watt inverter. I have a 200 amp hour 12.8 volt battery and I have four 200 watt solar panels wired up on the roof all in parallel. Up here is a couple guitars. Not to disappoint anyone but I'm definitely not a good guitar player. I won't be playing guitar for you guys anytime soon but I am learning the craft. I'm working on it. I think it's important like as a lover of many arts myself to keep a few in my life that I'm not very good at. Not only does it keep me humble but it keeps that beginner's mind. It keeps me recognizing like what it takes to take the first steps in any craft that you care about. So yeah there's a couple guitars. So go ahead and come down here. I'm gonna go ahead and show you this area. This is a less than glamorous section of the custom truck cabin. This is where I keep my battery. My battery is behind these spare sets of shoes and I have my trash can and my collapsible toilet. The collapsible toilet guys is definitely one of the main topics. When I look through like my my comment sections and stuff like that on my social media pages when you look at the size of the space in here overall it did not seem worth it to me to sacrifice the space just to put in a toilet. So yeah I have a simple collapsible toilet. It's nothing pretty but it's important. And then yes I put in bags. Moving away from that area here we have my collapsible table. I generally pull this collapsible table out and I'll usually actually sit on this bench over here work off the collapsible table. It doesn't come out when I'm driving but when I unlatch it here I can go ahead and pull my table out. I can put it up if that's what I'm doing but if I'm accessing what's in the dresser area I have to remove the table. This is my clothes. So in here is where I have pants, shirt, socks. This dresser was definitely designed as far as the spacing to fit these toolboxes. The reason being because by trade I'm a carpenter. I build saunas professionally so I enjoy having my tools about me not only to fix issues with the custom truck cabin if something comes up but also so that way I can work on the road. This is my cooking situation. So this is where I keep the burner top, the gas diffusers. I keep my seasonings, my oils, my storage bags, stuff like that for food. This right here is my fold down propane cooktop. So as you can tell I do not have the gas diffusers on here nor do I have the burner top because obviously when I'm driving I jumbles around and I don't want that when I'm driving so I latch this up and I store the components underneath it right here. There is a access to the five gallon propane tank underneath this storage section here I can turn the nozzle on so I can get gas to the lines. Above the propane cooktop is my water spigot. This is attached to a 30 gallon fresh water tank on the exterior of the truck. In order to bring the water up into the space this is my water pump. This is also another thing to mention and this is my clothesline. So if I am again backpacking or hiking or something like that and I get my clothes wet. I was born in the Pacific Northwest. I was raised in Pacific Northwest so to me rain and wet clothes is a super common thing. I go ahead and pull this clothesline all the way across the build and I can crank my wood fire stove up and dry my clothes out. I can also dry sleeping bags out or whatever I may need to. I don't use it all that often but you know it's nice to have if I do want to. I'll touch on real quickly the space the cab over section. This is a full mattress. I think a queen is a little excessive and I think a twin is not quite sufficient. That's just my own personal belief and yes it is just barely the width to support a full bed but that's all I needed. I have a little bit of storage space on either end for things that I want to access quickly at night. I have a dartboard of course as a fun game. One more thing to touch on in this area in general is the television. I don't use it that often but it is kind of nice to be able to drop it down and watch it but again it stays stored up for most of the time. This right here guys is one of the highlight pieces of the build and this is my wood stove. This for me was a non-negotiable when I was designing this space. It's about the aesthetics and it's about the beauty of the place. I remember so many times growing up looking at something beautiful past a bonfire and so to me I have all these panoramic windows right here and I wanted the wood fire stove to also be something that could look straight past and when I'm looking at a beautiful sunset or something I can also see the fire at the same time. And so I built that into the vertical framing here. It is properly heat shielded up against the wall. I do have insulated pipe going through the roof. And obviously the main thing about this build that makes it unique is the big windows guys. There was no way I was going to build a custom truck cabin without incorporating these big windows. I looked at Facebook Marketplace to find the largest windows that I could for you know cheap because I didn't want to pay for them you know brand new. And then I designed the framing dimensions around the windows that I found. The windows are definitely the most contentious part of like people's belief and like the integrity of the build and stuff like this. Like I remember the first day I drove it down the road I definitely was thinking like I wonder if when I hop out I'm gonna see a crack you know. It's been thousands of miles over about two years of driving all over the country and it's been fine. The principal idea is do not butt your windows up against the framing and you'll be able to avoid a lot of the twisting and tension that comes from the framing shifting. There is a lot of attention to detail that goes into installing these and have these last but to me I mean there's there's no other way to do it. One of the most significant design elements here is this cantilevered cab over portion. As you can see it's very close to the top of the cab. I wanted the maximum amount of space there. There is significant framing strategy involved in making this whole situation supported right. There is a lot of intricate overlap framing work that happens right here guys. That is the most difficult part of designing the build overall is making sure that cab over is supported with the windows. Coming at you from the back over here I'm going to describe like the overall length of some of these windows for you just so you can get a scope of the size. This is over 100 inches long so this is a super big window it's over 50 inches tall as well. So this is like clearly the most difficult part of the build. I had to use a transmission jack to lift this thing up. For me the idea was having the panoramic window view so I wanted to be able to see all the way from the back door all the way wrapped around. From this corner here past the door there's only one, two, three sections of vertical framing supporting this entire half from kitty corner to kitty corner of the framing. This is my lift gate. Some people have said things like dude why don't you convert that into a porch. First of all it can still serve as a porch. I have foldable chairs that I bring out and put on here if I want to sit outside and enjoy the view. I also have an overhang section so if it's lightly rainy or something like that or super sunny I can get some cover. But the real reason is I put my motorcycles on the back. Right now I'm traveling with my dual sport motorcycles so I can enjoy areas off-road like we're in southern Utah right now. An automatic lift gate that I can lower and lift up that's already installed on the truck when I bought it was an obvious you know thing to be psyched about. Another design element is the swing of the door. Outward swinging doors are easier to seal than inward swinging doors but for myself that was a long process to figure out how to get that sealed properly because I wanted to be able to walk into my truck cabin even if I had the motorcycle up on the back. And obviously if I have the motorcycle up on the back and I need to open my door outward that wouldn't have worked. So I made the door myself. Another fun thing for myself is the pull-up bar. I like to work out like everywhere I go. If there's a gym around I'll definitely go to the gym but if there's not I'll use the truck cabin. I have this perfect overhang why would I not use it and put a pull-up bar in there? This is the other side probably the less flashy side of the custom truck cabin but it is important. On the inside this is where I have all my utilities, my storage, all the stuff that isn't you know the beautiful windows. I did design jacking location so I welded up some swivel jack mounts to some steel and bolted it through all of the framing. That's how I take the truck cabin on and off so these are significant and yeah definitely essential guys. So I can take this on and off put on a different build down the line if I wanted to. I have two fuel tanks here so they're each about 17 to 18 gallons. Unfortunately it doesn't get amazing gas mileage. That's part of it right I mean like the purpose isn't exactly fuel efficiency. If that's the goal at the time then this is the rig to be driving. This is for me largely used as my home base when I travel. I'll drive this like a beautiful place set up and then this is where I really get all of my actual exploring done. I can go more ambitious places tighter spots and stuff like that with the motorcycle. Not to mention it's more fun to drive that although it is more fun to sleep in this you know. As we walk over here this is my water inlet so this is a 30 gallon fresh water tank. Looks dirty on the outside but the water's clean on the inside. I go through 30 gallons maybe like once a week myself. I don't really use water for much other than cooking and drinking. This up here is my AC vent. It's lightly raining right now and in situations like this I don't want the water to be able to go in but also I need to be able to have the air pushed out so I just made that 45 degree little vent space for the AC. So when it comes to the front of the build I sometimes get comments hey man maybe you should have designed that a little more aerodynamic or whatever. In my mind the idea was to create a comfortable and cozy living space on the inside. That was my primary concern. Does it give me some wind drag? For sure but it drives completely fine. I've never had an issue. I do highway speeds no problem. It just doesn't get amazing gas mileage but 460 engines never do so that's just part of the game. So as far as the roof of the build goes it is a metal roof. The reason why it's a metal roof is because I have a wood fire stove. If there ever is embers or something like that that came out I didn't want an asphalt roof or anything like that a shingled roof. That's why the material choice for metal made the most sense. As you can also see there are four 200 watt solar panels on the roof. They're wired in parallel and they go down inside to an electric management closet that I have set up. I would be lying if I said I don't think that I've gotten like a little softer. You know what I mean? Like when I was in my early 20s living just straight off the bike for like many many weeks at a time was something that I like adored and like found no discomfort in whatsoever and I think as I grow a little bit older I appreciate the ability to also like host people. I'm very much dependent on the generosity and support of the outside world and I've received so much of that throughout the course of my life that it feels good to at least in some form or fashion offer something of a little more substance. There's a certain freedom to like living on the road and having no debt that's like very hard to beat. Whether it's on a motorcycle, pedal bicycle, in a truck cabin. And guys if you've enjoyed this tour I greatly appreciate if you go check out my YouTube channel because I am building another custom truck cabin and I will be walking you guys through the details of how to construct some of these ambitious design elements that make this what it is. So I appreciate all the support guys. Thank you for checking out the rig. If you like this week's episode please make sure to like, share, and subscribe and check back soon because we have new Unique Home Tours publishing all the time. And if you'd like to join our team and get access to members-only content and unique perks make sure you click on the join button below.