Hi there. Jenna here. Welcome to my channel,
where I feature alternative homes and the stories of their owners in today's
tour. You're going to meet a young man and hear about his inspiring journey,
where at one point he lost everything and found a way to rebuild not only his
life, but also an incredible adventure home on wheels
Let's meet the owner and take a tour of this alternative home.
my name's Andrew Muse
I just spent the last two years building this rig out of my friend's garage from
the ground up. I'd love to give you a tour. So let's take a look
kind of at an early age.
I just wanted to get out of my hometown moved West to park city, Utah,
right after high school. You know,
I grew up with a single mom who had some pretty serious issues and they didn't
have any money to go to college or anything that I really knew that I was
passionate about at that time.
I had just leaned into the things that I thought were going to make me happy.
That was my ultimate goal is I wanted to be in the mountains.
I wanted to snowboard started in a Volkswagen golf that I bought for 200 bucks.
And I'd lived out of that for two months. Eventually as things went on,
I decided to build out an old 1976 truck camper that I bought for 500 bucks.
And I started to just really enjoy that lifestyle.
It gave me the opportunity to travel. I didn't have very much money. So it was,
it was a great way for me to like live in all these really cool places,
experience all these things that I had interest in and just sort of progressed
throughout a couple of vehicles into what I'm living in now, which is a really,
really kind of crazy high level earth roamer custom build
that I spent the last two years building.
I'm certain people see this level of vehicle then assume that I came from some
money or this or that or that I hadn't any kind of unfair advantage,
but that couldn't be any further from the truth.
I was on my way home. After six months of the most Epic adventures,
I could have ever hoped for heading back to park city.
And I lost everything was my truck, my belongings.
I was totally financially exhausted.
I had no family safety net of any sort to, to fall back on.
And, uh, I lost Booter who was my first golden retriever
he was my soulmate, the best dog I could have ever dreamt of.
And I really thought my life was totally over after that car accident,
Somehow things slowly but surely came back together.
There was this following of people that have been inspired and they reached out
and lots of love and, and inspired me to, to rebuild
I'm a full time athlete and creator. So I'm always traveling,
seeing the earth roamer concept that sort of seemed like the ultimate as far as
compromise between capability and comfort.
When we set off on this build,
it was with the idea of doing it on a $30,000 budget over two months.
And ended up being 20 months and about $60,000 way more money than
I'd ever spent on anything.
But I kinda just got obsessed with the concept of building this thing at the
absolute highest level I possibly could.
And that was a really cool achievement for me to like have a project where I put
my heart and soul and like just did not let any details slip through the
cracks.
We pivoted towards more traditional construction methods and materials just
because they're readily available. And we have experience working with them.
Then I had my friend, Josh, he has this incredible shop.
So we ended up posting up in the shop for like price 16 months without
Josh. This whole project would have not been possible.
And without my engineer friend, it would not be at the same level.
It was one hell of a project and it wouldn't have been possible without the
friends that I had financially. It was a huge stretch for me,
but I can tell you the space,
the functionality of it has exceeded my expectations,
which I'm really happy with.
This is a 2004 Ford F550 with the six O engine.
I got it with a little over a hundred thousand miles on it.
It's a four wheel drive when we got it. It was just a tool bed,
basically pull the tool belt off of it and built this entire structure from the
frame up from the panels to the internal skeleton and everything
inside it. The box itself is 16 foot long, eight foot wide.
We're about 13 feet tall. We did some upgrades to the truck.
We have a buck stop bumper with a warn winch.
We have some continental MPT,
81 tires that gives us the load rating that we need.
And also gets us a little bit more clearance off the ground with the larger
radius tires.
We had some of these custom underbelly boxes made just to optimize as much space
as possible. And here we have our,
most of our tools and roadside assistant things.
We do have two diesel tanks about 30 gallons each,
and we get about 10 miles to the gallon.
So that's almost a 600 mile range on this thing, which is awesome.
And we have an exterior shower here and our cassette toilet slides out custom
roof rack made. We have three,
175 watt solar panels up on top. We have our spare,
a few roof penetrations for two fantastic roof fence an AC unit,
and also a ski box.
We do a lot of skiing and snowboarding and paragliding and kiting and all kinds
of things. We really built this vehicle.
So we could bring all of the toys along with all of our adventures.
Let's start at the back here.
His and hers closets, um, you know,
these kind of open up this way with some shelves and then these all slide out.
Then we have our wet bath. So it's our shower and cassette toilet.
It's all enclosed. We went with the cassette toilet.
It just seemed like kind of the easiest for our needs and everything can get
dumped into a pit toilet and or a regular toilet at anyone's house.
Shower is also our drying area. So when we're in the middle of winter,
we dry our ski clothes, towels, everything kind of just wetsuits.
All go in here to dry off.
I've got a light and a fantastic vent in there as well as a window.
So it doesn't get too steamy in here.
We have this nice big dramatic refrigerator.
This is a huge upgrade and we love it. And it's always stocked with great food.
Ashley, my girlfriend is an amazing cook,
so super grateful for her and for our fridge.
So we have a sink here. It's just Amazon parts,
a under mounted stainless steel sink, nice and big be able to do dishes,
whatever else we need.
We worked with red point woodworks to have our countertops made.
These are made out of Sycamore.
So we have our Dometic stove and oven here.
It's actually a three burner stove
And a little oven. Ashley likes to bake things.
These upper cabinets,
we set up these little resistant stays so that we can work from them before we
actually didn't have these.
It was a pain in the butt trying to grab anything that was in these cabinets.
We went with these kind of flush Mount led lights that are on three different
zones. So we have the under the cabinet zone.
We have sort of the main cabin zone and then our bed zone.
They're all on dimmers. So we can kind of get that mood lighting just right.
One of the things I like most and actually most people tell me is the ceiling
here. We did a ceiling, It's awesome. I'm really,
really happy with it. We also have that penguin two Dometic AC unit,
which I think we've turned on once since we've had it,
we need the generator to really run it.
So unless we're plugged into somebody's house, we haven't quite used it yet.
So this is my desk
I do a lot of photo and video editing work from the road. So I wanted a nice,
big, highly functional space to work from. I just added this soundbar.
I had some speakers on the desk and it really freed up a lot of space.
So I just kind of wired it up through the compartment up above there.
I have where charged all of my batteries and everything.
So I tried to keep my workspace very, very efficient, very compact,
and very functional.
And that's sort of what this whole build is about is functionality and
optimizing comfort and output while being able to go as many places as
we want.
I'm really happy with the actual functionality of living in here with my dog and
my girlfriend.
We really liked the layout of everything and it seems to function really well.
This is kicker's bed. He likes to sleep underneath my feet while I work.
We also just added an extra shelf just to add some stuff for computer gear and
camera gear and stuff like that.
Kicker just really likes his little bed space here.
And as you can tell, he's a pretty cozy.
He also does have a bed in the back of the roamer as well.
Kicker's comfort is one of our top priorities, definitely his safety.
He's pretty cozy and content. He's got a good life. We have a dinette.
Initially this was designed to drop down into a second bed.
As we started building as wall construction grew,
we actually had to make our shower a little bit bigger so it can drop down
to a bed,
but it might just be like kickers third bed, in this bed
we keep kickers dog food and treats. And we also have our furnace inside there.
And this box underneath this bench here is sort of our electrical brains of
the operation.
We have a four energy lithium ion batteries.
So we designed all of this.
We actually used that box to bring everything up because I wanted to be able to
sit here,
my elbow out the window and enjoy the beautiful scenery that we're here for.
These screens are awesome. They slide down so we can open up the window.
They also slide up to a shade.
So one of the big things that differentiates the Muse from just a truck
camper from a
custom built truck camper is actually we built a pass through a lot
like the earth roamer style build to the cab of the truck.
If we wake up and it's freezing cold outside, I can fire up the truck,
let it warm up. And then we can take off
as far for the bed area here,
we have a three inch Tempurpedic foam topper here.
It's actually super comfortable,
but we were getting a lot of moisture issues under the bed. We tried mats,
yoga mats combination of things. We tried this stuff called hyper event,
which we actually kept. It's actually pretty cool.
It allows a little bit of air flow, but it wasn't enough.
So we actually just got the Frawley system a few weeks ago,
as far as the air flow and not feeling like our mattress was getting moldy and
gross has been a huge improvement in overall comfort and
mindfulness since Ashley and I are pretty short,
I shortened the bed only by about three inches to allow this kind of Footlocker
here. Far side is dirty clothes. This side's like camera gear, tripods,
that kind of thing.
Right now,
I'm in the mindset of wanting to enjoy what we built
really lean into the whole reason.
Cause that kind of got lost at one point and 2 years into this build.
And the whole point of it was to be able to lean into these things that I love
to do. I love to create, you know,
stunning photo and video and then snowboard and adventure and bring my dog on
these things. But I had to sacrifice pretty much all of that for two years.
And I was like, why am I doing this?
Why did I build this throughout my adult life post high school life,
I've made a few decisions that felt really risky without much of a
safety net of any sort. When I really decided to go for it,
even though it may have not seen like the safest or the smartest bet,
it's just sort of led me to the most meaningful experiences.
It's been a quite the ride. You know, it's had its highs.
It has its devastating lows,
but I can't think of a better way to go through life at the moment.
I hope you guys enjoyed this video.
Make sure to like share and subscribe if you did and check back soon for more
alternative home stories.