Hey guys, welcome back to my channel. In today's episode of tiny house tours,
we're going to step inside one couples, gorgeously renovated Airstream.
And if you're one of my RV renovation loving fans,
you're going to want to watch this video all the way through because this home
isn't just functional and adorable.
The owners also have some great tips for living and working full time on the
road.
Okay.
Guys, let's take a tour.
I'm Josh and I'm Val and welcome to Montana. And to our beautiful tiny home.
Before we moved into our tiny house. We lived and worked in Seattle.
Our goal was to leave the city and sort of seek nature in the Pacific
Northwest.
As we transitioned out of apartments and we transitioned into our house,
we spent even less time outside.
We spent even more time in our house and we quickly realized that that was just
absolutely not what we wanted. We wanted to be outside more.
We wanted to be exploring more.
We had seen a bunch of tiny houses and RV online. And we were like,
Oh, this is a real thing that people do and can do so we can do it too.
We are initially left in a fifth wheel that we already owned and we
realized pretty soon into it that it was more than we wanted.
We liked to move every five to seven days,
and that's really hard with a really big clunky RV.
And so we started the process of really trying to evaluate what could be smaller
for us, but also work for our needs.
We traveled with three pets and they need space just like we do.
We also run a business out of this, a full time, nine to five everyday job.
And so we started really looking at what would be agile,
but also give us a lot of space. And we both loved Airstreams.
We've loved them forever.
We got really lucky about 150 miles from where we were one popped up on the
market. It was in great condition.
It was exactly what we wanted and we just drove down and we bought it on the
spot.
The total cost to buy the Airstream is about $52,000.
We ended up putting about $20,000 more into it.
And most of that went towards our solar. We have a full solar setup.
All of the updates that we did inside actually only costs us about 3000 of that
total 20,000. We put in, we were really conscious of the choices that we made.
We just didn't want to spend a ton of money.
We do travel with our three cats since being on the road.
Our cats actually love the Airstream.
I would never want to go on the road without pets.
There's always that sort of fear.
If you already have the animal that they're not going to take to it,
but they're incredibly adaptive.
And if you're caring for them and thinking about their needs,
just like you would in your home,
they are going to come right along and have a great time.
And they'll find their favorite spots in your rig.
And that will become their go to space. This is hers,
and this is why she's here right now.
We have been really conscious of making sure that we've been thoughtful about
them feeling safe and comfortable in here as well.
We're going to talk a little bit about the outside first and our setup.
So we have an Airstream flying cloud, 30 foot bunkhouse.
We're pulling our Airstream with a 40 to 50 truck front length is
52 feet.
Val does all the driving for us and she absolutely crushes it.
As you can see here, this is one of 20 windows we have on the Airstream.
This is great for cross breezes.
We hardly ever use our AC unit because we're off grid most of the time.
So we have all these windows open all the time during the day the sun's out,
but we're getting a nice breeze coming through there.
And it makes such a difference.
One of the questions we get all the time on the road is what the heck is this
pole on the back of our Airstream? So that is a,
we boost signal booster and it's on a,
we boost pole that extends up to 25 feet in length.
This is very important for us as we work from the road full time,
Monday through Friday, not only signal is important, but speed of the signal.
We can oftentimes go from one bar LTE all the way up to three or four,
depending on where we are extending to 25 feet.
That's especially important for us. We're on top of our roof now.
And two of the upgrades were really glad. We made our first,
our solar panels. We have four 190 Watts,
solar panels that provide us almost endless power.
It's really allowed us to go off grid whenever we wanted,
we've gone a month off grid solely off of our solar. It's been great.
The other upgrade we've made our vent covers over fans.
What these have allowed us to do is run them all the time in the middle of the
day, when it is close to a hundred degrees inside the Airstream,
they've made a difference. And at night that humidity really gets up.
So the fans have allowed us to have a comfortable sleep at night.
Now that you've seen the outside let's head on inside and check it out.
Welcome to the inside of our Airstream, the front entry,
while it may seem a little bit weird is one of my favorite places in all of the
Airstream while it's super functional.
And we have places to put our keys and our bags.
There's also some of our favorites momentos up here as well.
One of the most special things that we actually have in the entire trailer is
here on this wall. And it's this horseshoe for my great grandmother's wedding.
It's a tradition,
English weddings of the women of the family presents you with momentos to give
you good luck in your marriage. And on my wedding,
I was gifted this for my grandmother, along with others,
from the rest of my family.
And it feels really special to have that and carry that with us here.
And it gives us a little extra luck along the road.
Welcome to our bedroom.
Most people are really surprised when they find out we have a full queen sized
bedroom, actually in the Airstream. And we love this little space,
our closets on either side, create this fun little Knuck,
and we have a ton of clothing storage.
You'd be amazed at how much you can pack into a 200 square foot Airstream.
We actually have found these awesome bins that we use in all of the upper
storage's. We found these at Ikea, they fit perfectly.
You can fit as you can see way too many clothes in them.
We both have these awesome little nooks next to our bed,
which we're really thankful to have it lets us store each a few books,
charge our phones,
keep little things next to the bed that otherwise we wouldn't have access to.
One of the best places that we have for storage throughout all of the Airstream
is actually under our bed. If you come and lift it, we're really fortunate.
It's on struts so I can lift it by myself and it'll hold the mattress up.
Most importantly, we were able to tuck away our kitties litter box.
We built a wall on the side of the bed and we installed a cat door so they can
go in and out, keeps everything really clean and contained.
Also under our bed is where we store our four 100 amp hour lithium
batteries and our MPT controller.
That's really the heart of our electrical system.
We like to spend a lot of time off grid and having these four batteries means
that we can work and live without ever having to think about how much power
consumption that we have we found that we can go somewhere between six and
10 days on gray weather. And it works perfectly fine, which is great for us.
We also have a backup generator just in case we are pushing that 10 day mark and
we need to,
to get a little extra power into the batteries and we aren't ready to move yet.
When we upgraded to a solar system,
we decided to go with a 3000 watt inverter converter.
We liked this option because of all the things that it offered and it allowed us
to lay it flat.
And that was a really big deal because obviously we have a lack of height in the
Airstream.
We loved this floor plan for its size and its layout,
but we needed some changes made for it to work with our lifestyle.
One of the biggest modifications that we made,
but also one of the easiest was to turn our U shaped dinette into an L.
We really wanted to have more space where we could have community and the U
shape made it really hard.
If you were sitting on the end to talk or communicate with anyone who was
sitting on the couch,
another big thing that we did that I absolutely love is our dining room
table. Top. My sweet brother made this for us as a gift for Christmas,
and I just absolutely love it. I think it brings a lot of warmth in here.
It's also on an arm that moves around, which is really handy.
So we actually can move the table around in all kinds of different directions.
And one of my favorite things is that it actually pushes all the way against
which means we get the entire floor back.
I have done a lot of yoga on this floor because of this table.
And I'm just really thankful that we have it.
You might've noticed throughout the Airstream that there is a lot of green.
And that's one thing that I just wasn't willing to give up when we went tiny,
these are mounted onto the wall. They're double stick. They don't come down
when we travel, we actually leave them up there.
The only thing we ever put down is just this off the table on the floor.
Everything else stays where it is.
And it's just really nice to have the living plants throughout the Airstream
with us.
I think that one of our favorite things about this Airstream is the fact that it
has these 20 windows and anywhere we go,
we have an incredible view in 360 degrees around us,
when we bought the Airstream
it was in great condition because it's 2014 and the previous owners cared for it
with a lot of love, but it was really dark.
All of the fabric and here was actually a really dark leather and it made it
feel like you were in a black hole. And so we've actually gone ahead and
reupholstered all of the fabric in here. I will say that we did it ourselves.
It actually came out really nice. I love this. We chose a Sunbrella fabric. Yes,
we're crazy for white, but the benefit is we can just take it off,
throw it in the washing machine, put them back on. And they,
it great after that, when we lived in Seattle
we got really into home brewing cambucha. And so when we hit the road,
we knew we needed to kind of find a way to make it work for us on the road.
And so we have found a little spot secret storage underneath our couch,
and we have the spin here where we're able to brew a gallon of Cambucha at a
time.
And we also have a second round of fermentation going and we always kind of
recycling through from the main fermentation,
second fermentation into the fridge. And we always have homemade cambucha
which is with us where ever we go
in the center of the Airstream is our kitchen.
And I have to say that this was probably one of the most important things.
When we were doing all of the research about the different floor plans for
Airstreams, I really wanted the kitchen to be in the center.
I wanted to be able to be a part of everything I love to cook.
And so being able to stand here and prep food while everyone's hanging out was
really important to me. We did some modifications here as well.
We took out the countertop and put in a new white counter.
We also removed the sink and put it in a really nice deep sink that has a
counter that goes into it. This gives us extra prep space,
which is really helpful, added a new farmhouse style faucet,
which we love.
Another modification we made in the kitchen was to put some peel and stick real
tile back, splash up. It's really nice to have that next to the stove.
Top things often splash up. We love it. It makes the space look great.
And it's really easy to clean.
People ask us a lot about storage in the Airstream.
Airstreams aren't particularly well known for their abundance of storage,
but one of the reasons that we've loved this model so much was that it had these
six overhead storage compartments.
I love where they're placed because they're over the kitchen and over the couch.
So they're out of your way. You never have to worry about hitting them.
This one over the stove is my absolute favorite.
It fits so much stuff for cooking.
It's great when you're here and you just need to pull something down,
it's right above you. And then when you don't want to see it anymore,
just tucks away.
One of the things that we were a little bit worried about when we were
downsizing from our house into an RV was having enough food storage.
We're really lucky.
We have this 110 amp propane refrigerator freezer,
seven cubic feet. So it's just a little bit smaller than an apartment size.
And it has plenty of space.
And we found that we can easily fit two weeks worth of food in here for us
without a problem.
It used to be our bunk house and is now the best place we have for standing
desk.
We opted to keep the upper bunk here because it offered us a ton of storage,
awesome place for our cats to hang out and look out the window.
And most importantly,
for me to install a standing desk so I can work on my desktop,
Josh and I run our digital agency from the road.
And so we need space separate from each other, to be able to take calls,
to be able to work and not get in each other's hair while we need to get things
done. This area here was already cut out.
This is the space that you're intended to kind of climb into the bunk from.
And it actually works out absolutely perfectly.
I can stand here on my desktop with my keyboard and my mouse and I have
no obstruction and we didn't have to modify anything at all.
Welcome to our office meditation record playing hangout space.
This area actually used to be a queen bed.
We ripped that out and put down some peel and stick flooring from Home Depot and
ended up with the best spot in the Airstream.
And it also gained us back 25 square feet of living space.
I think our favorite thing in all of the Airstream that we brought from our life
before was our record player. This was a wedding gift from my grandmother.
It's one of our favorite things and something we love to do when we travel is
stop at local record shops.
It gives us a chance to meet people who are from the community,
ask them their favorite places to go favorite things,
to see something we would just never find on the internet when we're doing
research. And it also just reminds us a little bit of home in our family.
And while we're on the road.
We have a tiny bathroom.
One of the things I loved most about it was how white that it already was,
and it really has made it feel very open when you're in here,
we added some personal touches to it.
So it just felt a little bit more like home, including a mat for
the bottom basin of the shower.
It really kind of makes it feel like a little bit of a spa when you're inside it
with also mounted shampoo,
conditioner and soap onto the wall just makes it easier on travel days.
We don't have to move anything it's already just there and ready to go.
We do have kind of a small vanity area, but underneath it has a ton of storage.
Another thing that we did was we got rid of the silly,
tiny little mirror that was mounted on the wall and we replaced it with a huge
mirror,
which fills up almost the entire wall space and actually makes getting ready
really easy in the morning.
In our 10 months on the road, we've traveled almost 25,000 miles.
We've been from the high mountains of the Pacific Northwest to the beaches of
Florida and everything in between, and not only us,
but our cats have really loved being able to just see new things.
One of the things we probably get the most is when are we going to stop?
When is the end date?
A lot of people probably just thought we were going to do this for a year or six
months as right now,
we have no plans of stopping and just looking forward to seeing more and more.
You do it for as long as it's right for you.
And if six months is right for you or a year is right for you or one loop around
the country is right for you. However long that takes them.
That's the right answer. You know, there's no perfect way to be a nomad.
It's just, what's perfect for you
Thanks for watching this week's video,
make sure to like share and subscribe and check back next Friday for an all new
video.