Hi I'm Koda and I'm Angela. This is Iggy the house truck. We've been full time for two
years in Iggy and three years on the road. We're on the great Tecolote beach
just outside of La Paz Baja California Sur. We've been on this beach for a
little over a week now. It's one of our favorite spots down here. The water is
great. Nice and shallow and warm not many waves and there's a bar at the end of it.
I've always been kind of traveling with either work or climbing, was a climber
for a really long time so I've lived in a lot of different vehicles and I've kind
of always just been a little bit nomadic. I was working up in Alaska in the
summers and she was living in Bend Oregon where we both lived. And I said, "I
never want to spend another cold winter again so we can move to California
Florida or Hawaii." He chose Hawaii and then I started doing
all the paperwork for it and looking for jobs and two months later he called me
and said, "I think we should just buy a van and drive to Baja" and so that's what
we did and we've been on the road full-time since then. Basically we afford this
lifestyle by working about ten weeks a year in Alaska in the fishing industry.
That affords us to travel the rest of the time.
This is Iggy the house truck. He
is a 2001 F-350 with a 7.3 liter diesel engine, four-wheel drive dually. I
originally paid $8,000 for the truck before the build-out. The build-out was
originally budgeted at $18,000 so that's kind of where we quit counting. If we had
to really do an actual estimation of it I would say we were probably about 24
to 25 thousand dollars into it over the span of two and a half - three years.
Iggy started his life as a work truck up on the North Slope of Alaska. They use
the Gruman Olson refrigerator box up there because you can heat it. It has an
inch and a half of spray foam all the way around it. I welded up all the racks,
all the roof rack, did the bumper, you know, everything that makes it pretty.
Iron Cross bumper. 13,000 pound winch which is just barely enough for this guy.
We got solar panels on the cab over and I got two more up top for a total of 450
watts of solar. You can power two six volt golf cart batteries with it. It's 400
amp hours. Cut the door in. The stairs I don't remember where we got
these guys, Amazon I'm sure. These are a game-changer here versus the ladder that
a lot of the other Overlander big rigs use. Got the boxes all around for your
extra storage. The ARB Touring awning. It's the six-foot one so I think it's like
150 or the 1500, they use millimeters, that's key. Definitely a game-changer there. You
can have it out in any wind storm that we've encountered so far and no damage.
This is our water fill. We fill two tanks on the inside. I have two 15 gallon tanks
one on each side and if you include my hot water and our other storage capacity
we have about 33 gallons of water on board when we're full. If we're down here
and we're thrifty, we can stretch it to you know week and half - two weeks. If we have easy
access to water we can run through it a lot quicker. Come around the
back here. We run a propane heater and propane stove inside. This is pretty much
the simplest system we can come up with. It's just bolted to the bumper but it
makes it easy to fill this guy up and take it in and out. Very important is our
RV Map of the places we've been and the places we haven't I guess is even more
important. This is my bike rack here that I made and I have the one up bicycle
racks on there. Super easy, just slap your bike in and out of these guys, put it up
there, close it up, done. Works great for fat tire bikes. So we have Rad Rover
power bikes. They're pretty new to us. They have about 60 miles on them but
they're big fat tired electric bikes, 20 miles an hour top speed. Super fun, really
cool riding around towns down here in Mexico. Open this guy up here and you can
access the garage here. In the garage is where all of our water is. This is where
our batteries are. Most importantly tool storage because down here you tend to break
a lot of stuff. Just living this life you tend to break a lot of stuff and fishing
poles and spear fishing gear also pretty key down here. A ton of room in there for
me, ton of storage. Angela always tries to put stuff down there, but I try
to keep it on the minimum. for sure. We've got max tracks super key.
This is our hot water shower setup here. Water comes out right here on the
pressure side of our pump and so I've got cold here, I've got hot here. It goes
up and it goes through a copper coil that's inside of a black box with a
Plexiglas lid and you basically just have a hot water outdoor shower. Hot
water outdoors or any water outdoors is really nice on a rig like this where you
got the saltwater, you come in you can rinse off your fishing poles, rinse off
your feet, rinse off all your gear and take a quick
shower. It actually gets too hot. That's why you have a little mixing
valve here. And then I've got a dump here so I can dump it all when we go back up
north to the frigid freezing conditions. This guy is pretty cool. This is a
vent that goes up and in and there's an inline fan in it.
It's a bilge fan for a sailboat and if it's raining outside or if we're
somewhere where we don't want to leave the windows open per se I can run that
guy and it takes the air from the coolest spot, which is underneath the
truck, and blows it in. So I can have the fan running without the windows open but
I still have air flow running through this guy so that's pretty, that's
definitely one of the lessons that we've learned in all this is like you have to
have your airflow and you have to get it from the right spots. You don't want it
through your sunny windows. You want to be able to close those up and still have
good flow coming around. I cut this window in here. It's always scary cutting
holes into your house truck, but that window was given to us so it was
super cool because I'm really cheap and probably would have bought something
a lot cheaper than that guy. This is actually our gray water storage right
here. The water comes straight down from the sink right into this guy and I can
pull it out and dump it and then this is 10 extra gallons of diesel fuel. It's
pretty handy to have down here. Diesel's a little bit harder to find. Also driving
through Canada it can save your ass.
Hello, welcome to the inside of our house truck.
So we have 96 square feet in here so the dimensions here are 8 feet across 12
feet long 8 feet tall so tons of headroom which allows for a lot of
storage. I actually use a step stool to reach the ceiling, fantastic fan I can
barely reach it. This is a door that Koda built. It was one of our bigger
challenges. It's actually the second door. The first one had a metal skin on the
outside. It would warp with the heat so it didn't shut very well so this is
second version. Nice porthole window, it's kind of fun.
High-top table with an IKEA chair, it folds up. We can easily sit three people
here if you're not huge. This lifts up. We keep laundry in here, we call it the
office. There's a little shelf in here that we keep paper work on. I love having
a fixed bed it's been really key to traveling and being able to not have to
make a bed every day. This is a kind of a hiding cupboard. Koda calls it the 'chip
cover' because chips take up so much space. These awesome blankets here from
Our Open Road, two of my greatest inspirations for the
van life. They've been traveling for a long time doing this. Back up here, the
bed, we have a couple of extra feet on each side because we have the
headboard here and at the end we have a bookshelf down here and then mostly just
room for the cat to play around. We keep this up here because he seems to like it.
I never meant to keep it out all the time, but he sleeps in here. We have a big-screen TV, super fun.
We lay in bed and watch Netflix series all the time. We actually download
programs to our phone while we have good service or Wi-Fi and then
we have an HDMI cable that plugs right into it and this is our fan I think Koda
showed you from the outside. So that blows across the across the bed and we can turn it
it on right here. There's a switch under here.
It's a little bit loud but worth it yeah. And we have an inverter here which I use to
make bullet proof coffees in the morning, mostly, and to plug in the TV. That's all
we use it for. Tons of storage underneath the bed. We use big rubber totes for all
of our clothes so the top is all clothes, some toiletries. Underneath we have shoes
and gear and one is usually for full of all the canned salmon that we bring back from Alaska.
Berkey water filter on the counter. The
cupboards are the only thing I think in here that Koda didn't build. Home Depot
cupboards, they've held up. I was a little scared at first you know getting the
latching system to keep things stable. We use gear ties for a lot of
things while we're rolling down the road, that's been really key. Over here we have
the truck fridge, it's a 12-volt fridge. I like it because it's you know vertical
versus the Dometic slide-out coolers. I find this so much more convenient and we
have a small freezer in here. It also runs on 110 if we're plugged into shore
power. Marine pump, running water. It's a little loud.
I mean, you know, but we didn't not like, it doesn't really matter. We don't have
hot water hooked up. Let's see, I grew some grass for my kitty cat because
we're in the desert and he likes grass. It's a propane stove. Don't have a switch
so we use the spark lighter, super easy. Two burner *boom*. From Home Depot we got these super handy
shades. They work good. This is our new solar
controller. We had a Windy Nation up until two days ago. It died so we had to
go into La Paz and this was the only one that was available. Here we have a
little bit more storage. Koda was really excited about building this spot to keep extra
beer that doesn't fit in the fridge so it kind of slides through. One of the
really best features, was crucial to us, was to cut a hole so we have a
pass-through into the cab for the cat and for safety, you know. We can both
squeeze through there if we had to so I love having that and for the best
feature is actually when we're rolling down the road and things start rattling
back here we can just close it and it's like peace and quiet. We don't
worry about it, we can't hear it. This was actually built specifically for a litter
box because we had a cat when we built the box so the litter is tucked away in there.
This is our propane stove. It's a Wave Three I think. We've only used it
three or four times, works great. We decided use milk crates because we had them
so we built the boxes around the milk crates.
Seasonal work or find a way to work remotely I think is kind of key because
you just can't save up enough money to sustain it. I mean I guess some people
can and some people do. You know these people who've lived in their rigs
for four or five years you know with kids and they don't work, but they come
from a different background than we do. But yeah I think either seasonal work
and getting on a seasonal circuit which there's a ton of. No matter your
skill set. You can always find seasonal work. For me it was I kept moving from
place to place for work and when I finally decided like I want to go
somewhere because I want to live there then I was able to make it happen. So I
might not have known that I wanted to work in fishing industry until I was
like I really want to go to Alaska this year and I got into it. Figuring out you
know what you want, where you want to be, and then hopefully going from there.
The reason I live my life the way I do is cause like 'live intentionally'. You know
it doesn't matter what you do but don't just succumb to the circumstances around
you because that's where you grew up. You know don't take a job just because
those are the only jobs available. Intentional decisions I think is what
gives me the freedom to feel confident. The choices that you make, not
the circumstances that happen to you. It's my kind of philosophy on life.
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my blog imfeelingadventurous.com. Thanks. Peace!