hey there jenna here welcome to my channel where i take you on tours of tiny and unique homes in
today's video we're going to meet a young couple that transformed a box truck into a gorgeous
tiny home i think you're going to be really surprised when you step inside to see how spacious
a box truck can really be and they've come up with a lot of clever ways to expand the space including
a multi-purpose room that includes their bedroom living room office and a bedroom for their cat
if you like these kind of videos make sure that you subscribe and hit that notification
bell so that you know every single time i publish a new video but right now let's
step inside this box truck that's turned into a beautiful tiny home
make this house
hi i'm courtney and i'm sawyer and this is our box truck lp
so the experience that got me familiar with tiny living was my sophomore year of college
my room was like an eight by eight and i spent a year in that room if i could do it
with the same view every day then i could make it work on the road van life was really taking
off at that time the opportunity to travel was what got me excited about tidy living
i was running a 5k and had a heart attack two firemen happened to be running behind
me and were able to uh give me cpr and save my life i got the phone call from his brother
saying that everything's fine but sawyer had a heart attack and died for 15 minutes
it really just drove home like the fragility of life and like the importance of time so we really
like committed to we want to live on the road and like see as much as we can so that was a real
catalyst for our decision to find the truck and get started
all styles of things that we could actually like be in looked at party buses
everything once we had chosen a box truck we were basically just doing the waiting game on
craigslist checking every day a couple times a day and eventually this one popped up locally it
was only 10 miles from us and it was for 3 500 so a very affordable deal we were balling on a
budget so we needed to find the cheapest vehicle possible that was in good shape and we found her
when it comes to the time of a build i feel like there's two ways you can do it you can
do it slow and cheap or fast and expensive and we did the slow and cheap model where we were just
waiting for materials to come along we were in a really fortunate position where i was already
working as a carpenter and my sort of style was with reclaimed wood material so i had a place
to store things he actually took the reins from most of the building which is really incredible
but he's also a carpenter so i don't think my craftsmanship would have been as comparable
so the truck was 3 500 and then the total cost of
the build would be 9 000 10 000 between 12 000 and 14 000 total
welcome to the outside of elfie she is a 2003 isuzu npr she's about eight feet
wide and 23 feet long bumper to bumper so i painted the mural on the side i was super
excited to have such a big canvas to work with sort of my thought process for why i chose her
was i wanted to give our truck a face so i like to say this is elfie also i just wanted
it to be unique and stand out because she really does stand out so i had to add to that
right here is our inlet valve to our water tank we have a 45 gallon tank it lasts us about a week if
we're showering we think it's sort of the perfect size for us because it does fit inside so when we
are in the colder months it doesn't freeze so for our truck we have a 4.8 liter turbo diesel engine
and that was something that was really reassuring to us when we purchased the vehicle was that even
though it has 247 000 miles at the time 90 of these vehicles were functioning normally at 310
000 miles so it still has a big chunk of lifespan for us to enjoy with it we tend to not do the
math on mpg just because it's rather painful we can achieve 10 if we're driving really careful
here we are on the passenger side of the truck one of the first things you're going to notice
from the outside is just how tall the windows are so i'm here at 6-2 so it's just really nice
when we are in like a parking lot and have to be there for the day you can have your curtains
open and not feel like everyone's just looking in at you also on this side of the truck we have
two propane boxes and we can hold four standard five pound barbecue tanks that's two up here and
then two at the back this box runs our oven and holds the spare tank the two at the back
run our water heater and our traditional heater through the winter we did about one tank a month
all right so here we are at the back of the house and as you can tell one of the things that was
really important to us was making it feel homey even though we are living in a vehicle we kind of
wanted that sort of cute front door appeal that you can get from a traditional house so some of
the features we wanted to include on the back were the symmetrical porch lights to me it just sort of
reminds me of a caboose when you're coming up to a campsite in the dark and you have the porch lights
on it's a really cute feeling to it so here we have the tool shed and it is sort of a mix
of both the tools that i thought we would need in case anything did go wrong but also this
is just my passion a lot of this stuff is just what i thought would be fun to use on the road
and then here we have a furion instant hot water heater and this unit is
really nice for us because it has a digital thermostat that you can set a temperature on
inside so there's no fiddling with the taps you just set your digit and then crank the hot water
on full blast for me that's a comfortable temperature and for courtney it's scalding
one of the things to be aware of if you're buying one of these trucks is that the roof is a very
thin fiberglass layer that really can't support any weight it's only there to keep the rain out so
we actually put down a half inch layer of plywood over that fiberglass layer and attached it to the
rafters we had put beneath that and then she did the whole thing with a reclaimed corrugated tin so
we actually have a really robust roof layer that you can walk around climb around on if you need
to do anything to the solar panels on our roof we have 885 watts of solar and that runs down into a
330 amp hour lithium-ion battery that is 24 volts that we had reclaimed from a bmw one cool feature
about elfie is that she did come with a liftgate it's been super fun to have it just as an extra
step to get in because she's a little bit higher up so let's head up and i will show you the inside
we were really drawn to sort of an open floor plan which is why we have both
windows sort of mirroring each other we wanted to feel like we had a lot of room
for activities and to just kind of hang out without feeling so squished for our heater
we have the wave 8 catalytic safety heater it's made for a space three times the size
so it heats up really quickly in here our cat especially loves it during the
winter time she always just kind of posts up right in front of it lounges and gets warm
so when you walk into the house immediately to your left is our bathroom i'm in love with our
bathroom door the wood is from an old barn that was built in the 1800s about it was one of my old
co-workers barns that they were tearing down and they just let us take whatever we needed
we found the handle at an old antique junkyard of sorts the door is bi-folding accordion style so
it folds out of the way the bathroom is right next to the front door of the truck and that was a very
intentional decision anyone who has a composting toilet will know
the reasoning behind that decision really you just want as short a pathway there as possible so if
you step into the space we built a custom shower pan and one of the things that we did that for
was so that we could have a much more dramatic angle in that drainage pan than normal showers
do so that even on varied slopes we can still keep all the water going where we want it to
so courtney wanted to add a little texture to the shower pan by painting white stars on there
i thought it would be really cool if we used actual wooden stars because then they would
actually give us some texture to the pan and give some grip so that you don't slide around too much
one of my favorite parts about the house is the fact that i get a full length mirror and the
cool part about it is that it actually opens up a little bit inside of it is the medicine cabinet
it keeps all of the items that we would normally have in a bathroom so over here we have sort of
our breakfast bar that was actually just a recent contribution and we are absolutely in love with it
i don't know how we lived without it it's pretty cool because the stools fold up get tucked under
there and then the bar closes over them so that gives us extra space in here and also it's just
more secure while we travel we use this bar for eating this is mostly where i set up my laptop
and so i'm able to work from home and usually with a beautiful view so that's been wonderful
so just across the hall we have our kitchen one of my favorite things about the kitchen
is our spice rack the wood that's used inside of the spice rack to hold all of the containers
is the original flooring of elfie all this yellow wood that you see in our house is actually from
sawyer's grandma's house when she tore it down so that's been really fun to be able to get to
use that and have her sort of a part of our home we have our water tank that is down here it is
a 45 gallon tank the depth of our counter was determined by the width of our water tank so
when we put in our stove we had this extra section in the back that we had nothing to use it for we
weren't going to use it while we were cooking so we decided to use it as our trash can so just the
lid lifts up and we're able just to keep a couple bags in there it's been really nice to just get
it out of the way so i made these tiles for our backsplash i got this idea off of pinterest so
how i did it was i took some clay i rolled flowers into it to create sort of a mold and then poured
the plaster on top of that to create these tiles we wanted a stove oven combo we chose this one
sort of arbitrarily our friend had got it as well he liked it it was well priced i do like
having the three burners the oven is nice it's a little funky sometimes but we've figured it out
so here we are in the living room and well actually it's the most amount of rooms in our
whole house because this is our living room our closet our office and our bedroom all rolled into
one and then in the back is our cat's room if for whatever reason we need her contained we can lock
her in this little cage there's plenty of space for food and water if she needs to be in there
the other thing that this does is it pops out all the way and then we have her litter
box down here so when we need to clean it it gives us full access to take that in and out
so this was a afterthought addition but we had this countertop that wasn't being used for a
whole lot i made it so that you can remove the top you take these two hooks and they
simply hook onto the side and this is nice because you can adjust it
wherever you need it to go then we have a simple leg that stores in our closet set that on
get the leg situated and then you have a nice desk that you can work out
also here in our study we have this beautiful like platter tray that we got from one of our favorite
stores where we converted the truck and we got it it was just like incredibly corroded and you
didn't get a sense of all the detail that was on it and we brought it home and cleaned it up
so down here we have our fridge and we just put it on a simple box with felt pads instead of doing
any sort of expensive slider and it just pulls out just like that and it's nice being on the pads
because you have total mobility and we actually use it as a coffee table and sort of lots of
orientations in this space hidden under the couch we have basically all of our clothing storage
we each have two really large drawers that you can fit a lot of clothing in
in the backrest we have little compartments for like socks and underwear that sort of thing
so in the corner where we obviously couldn't get drawer access we decided to put our batteries
you can take up the cushion and then you have a hatch where you can easily access our batteries
and inverter so here we have our bed hoist system it comes with a hand crank but we
didn't really have the patience for that so we put it in a drill and then you just
real simply hook it right there and then squeeze the trigger and it'll come on down
one of the nice things about using the drill is there's no safe speed regulation so you
can really just send it up or down as fast as you want to the only downside is that it has
developed a bit of a squeak so here in the bedroom of the house we still have access to our bookshelf
which is something we really appreciate it's easy to get either in couch or in bed
we have a separate light that works on the back wall on a dimmer so you can have a nice mellow
lighting if you need to we went for a queen size bed just because we knew we wanted to be
able to have a little bit of distance from each other when we're sleeping somewhere really hot
it was really helpful for us to have the desire and the motivation to begin the life but not a
lease ending or a time frame where we had to be done and we had to start and finish
by a certain time frame we were able to wait for materials for the right price and things like that
being able to downsize into a smaller space has really been empowering i think you could say you
don't actually need as much as you think you do you just enjoy the things that you do have
more living this sort of nomadic lifestyle there are so many different ways to do it
we happen to have found this specific way that has worked really well for us but i've met so
many people who do it differently and everyone really just thrives in what works best for them
thanks for watching this week's video please make sure to like share
and subscribe and i will see you soon with another tiny or unique home tour
you