hey there welcome to my channel where i take you on tours of tiny homes and
showcase stories of people living alternatively in today's video we're going to take a tour of
perhaps the best overlander i've ever seen the owner mike modified a military truck
into his own off-road home on wheels and has been traveling around the globe ever since
the inside is not what you'd expect it's surprisingly spacious
modern and carefully decorated i think you're really gonna like this one and if you'd like to
know every time i publish a new video make sure that you subscribe and hit that notification bell
hi my name is mike i'm with drive the globe and this is my tiny home on wheels
this is actually my third big over landing rig went on a 13-month trip throughout africa
and i discovered an old land rover and that's how i got into sort of the expedition kind of thing
i bought this truck two years ago and then i built it last spring so i've been out for about a year
my background isn't really in building trucks honestly not really in any of the things i do i
watch a lot of youtube videos and i've been out and about enough over the years to see
other people's builds so i take cues from a lot of different places i built it in friends backyards
and in campgrounds so these trucks come out of the military at auction they're fairly inexpensive
this truck i picked up for 18 000 bucks i built the entire thing myself i moved into it in about
two months and it took four months total to finish the build i wanted the inside to feel like home
since i'm going to be on the road living in it full-time i would say the total cost of this build
is just about 90 000 to 100 dollars so i wanted to keep it under that hundred thousand dollar mark
one of the things that i do while being nomadic on the road is that i've been an instructor for
overland expo for nine years i enjoy teaching other people about places that i've gone
off-road recovery techniques border crossings visa issues and things like that what i love
about this whole sort of being on the road thing it's a merging of over landing with van
life and rvers and it's just people with the same goals in mind to just get out there and explore
some of the advantages of going with a military vehicle is that they were well maintained they're
built extremely rugged and when i picked it up two years ago it had only 5 000 miles on it
it's a 1994 storm stevenson former army truck i did very little changes to the actual military
vehicle anything that you modify tends to create further problems in the future so what i did do
is we have a cage added for the cab to mount mostly my cycling gear on the roof i changed
out all of the military lighting to led so every light was replaced on the exterior of the truck
coming back this way a little bit i did put under body boxes underneath the vehicle for storage for
camping you can see the tires are big these are 48 inch tires and you can see one of the
features that the military trucks come with is a central tire inflation system so it's push button
control from the cab and basically when you go off-road you hit the button for sand for mud
and then it automatically inflates and deflates as you drive so that's a nice feature that happens
to come with these trucks you can see up here this is where the spare tire is located people ask it's
400 pounds per tire and i'm certainly not going to lift it up and down you can see right in here
this is all hydraulically controlled so it has a boom that lowers the tire and raises the tire
these pods right here are max air vent fans for the bathroom and for
the shower and for my hot water instant hot water heater inside
and then you can see i built it kind of like an rv so i have water fill here
and then right here i've got 30 amp shore power hookup
these are the fills for the transmission for engine oil and all that and then the
dipsticks are even allocated and this is kind of interesting because look at this dipstick
because it's got air brakes and these are the air tanks i added a external thing so i can run
air tools and an air jack if i need to change my tires and then underneath is a grey water tank the
gray tank hooks up here i've got 85 gallons of fresh water i have a 25 gallon gray water tank
and i have a cassette toilet inside that's about seven and a half gallons one of the features about
this particular m1079 from the military is that this box is already on the truck i didn't have to
put it on i didn't have to build it it actually comes with windows i have screens that pop out
and then i added the five feet uh bump out here on the rear of the truck for my bedroom section
and then i have my bike racks here these are one up bike mounts and i usually carry anywhere from
two to four bicycles being a big cyclist i decided i wanted a nice bike mount here so i could work
on it and that pops in here so i can mount a bike on the back here and do some maintenance
and then i've got my 2021 ktm
390 adventure bike i custom built the frame that it is sitting on and it has a ramp
and then to load it up by myself because i wanted to make sure i could do all this by myself
getting it down i can you know come down the ramp getting it back up i have a little portable winch
i mount on the front here with a remote and i just kind of walk the bike right up onto the ramp
or if i don't want to have to move this big rig around it's convenient to have a motorcycle
back here i've got another box i can mostly keep my motorcycle and kayaking gear in there
the main reason for the underbody boxes is so i don't have to put anything inside the habitat
so when i roll into camp my inside house if you will
is completely ready to go there's nothing laying on the floor i don't have to move
like kayak pedals or anything like that everything is stored externally on the truck
i replaced the entrance with just a regular old rv door that i got on ebay
somewhere and i built these steps these are torque lift steps that you can buy online
and what's nice about is it just slides in when i'm on the road so
it also doesn't need storage it's underneath the truck
so we're on the roof here i've got 12 renegee 100 watt solar panels
i made a kayak mount so it's not touching the panels and probably when i have it mounted
it cuts down maybe 15 of the solar power but not a big deal i got a wii boost for cellular
boosting my fm uh antenna sirius xm select radio on board in the cab and in the habitat
all right now that we've checked out outside let's go inside my home
so inside my home here my four main goals for this build was to have a kitchen a place to
work a bed that i didn't need to fold out and a full-size shower like you have in your home
we're gonna start here in the kitchen this is what i did not have in my last build
i have a burner top here uh kind of an oven that believe it or not you can actually bacon
it works pretty good especially frozen pizza the cabinets as you're looking at this is all ikea
and a couple people gave me some you know negative feedback they're not going to hold up and i can
tell you over the past year i've been bouncing around the cabinets are holding up just fine
i magnetize these so that the magnets are super strong um but on top of that
i put you know bungee cords here just as extra security so stuff's not smacking into it when
i'm bouncing around off-road and then you can see like this is all my plates and silverware
this is a double sink ceramic sink i love it because doing dishes so much easier when you
have actually some space to put water and things in this is the akuva uv light water filtration
system you can see when you turn it on turns blue under there this i have a dometic uh two
zone fridge freezer that slides out from under i had to kind of custom fabricate this whole thing
so it could fit underneath the plumbing but you can see like that's the freezer and uh fridge so
a lot of space for food no drinks in here because i have a whole other refrigerator inside the cab
these are velcroed i actually velcroed this and velcroed that this is the
espresso machine is screwed down toaster doesn't move so there's very few things the
couple things like the pods and whatever i just stick inside the sink when i move
but really i can set the whole inside up here in three minutes after rolling into camp oh yeah
normally you would install a what they call split unit air conditioning in these they run for about
4 000 bucks if you find a dc unit this is a regular window air conditioner for a house
that you can get at lowe's so it's 175 dollars i can break this thing an awful lot and replace it
and still spend less money than a split unit it works great it's only 135 square feet inside here
and i can run it for about eight hours on my battery life and it's running through an
inverter so you figure your loss is probably 25 30 percent below that is my charge controller
brings in all the energy from the solar panels around the corner here i've got uh onboard
sound system so these are some of the upgrades that i made that i didn't have in my last build
and the ceiling which is faux tin vinyl i used in prior builds so i kind of knew what i wanted to do
in fact everything in here is really plastic based or non-wood it's because i changed environments
a lot i didn't want a bunch of shrinking and contracting and warping and whatnot
so i tried to use every square inch and a lot of people put dinettes in their setups and i
kind of spend 98 of my time outside so i didn't really want to do that which gave me ability to
have like uh i call it my kitchen table folds up i rarely rarely use this unless there's a couple of
us sitting here and it's uh inclement weather or something outside you can see i don't have a whole
lot of places to sit but everything has storage um inside so i got these little stools underneath
and then all my little drawers uh in here you know pull out and you got all sorts of stuff that i can
store in there so kind of using every little space i work a lot making videos and doing things so
i wanted a real computer so this folds down here and i have an imac that's mounted in here
i call this current one three because it's the third big orange rig so this is my mercedes
unimog this is the trailer that i built and lived in for a year and then this is my old land rover
you kind of if you spin around on the other side here i got pictures up on the
on the wall of different travels but this is me in the sahara desert with the old 1965 land rover
so this is my little bathroom uh unlike some other builds i have a separate bathroom and
separate shower they're not in the same room so in here i have my cassette toilet and i have my you
know vanity and sink and you got the main mirror and of course i shaved my head so i got these
mirrors on either side here so i can see either side of my head in the mirrors up there coming
down this section is heading towards my bedroom where i have wardrobe on one side and a full-size
house shower with a glass door and sort of a rain head shower i just that was one of my big
priorities was to have a nice shower on board i use about a gallon a gallon and a half per minute
water flow out of this and with an 85 gallon fresh water tank i've got plenty of water on board this
comes across here and hooks into here and then i have hanging here for clothes drying or whatever
so this wardrobe on this side it actually is almost the full height of the truck i had to
measure this three times and so i built it in place and then inside here is uh you know hanging
drawers and then shoe storage underneath
and then back here this is the five foot bump out section that i built and inside here is
my bed which i was able to get in a like real you know home mattress so it was comfortable
i installed the two arctic turn windows on the sides and a max air vent fan overhead
all right now we are in the cab of the truck which is for me one of the most panoramic views you get
with a cab forward design sitting here i'm about five feet off the ground it is super spacious
when i got this truck it was just a barren loud metal space not one soft surface in it so upgrades
that i've made i did put cab air conditioning unit in off of a later model uh vehicle this pod here i
added from a different truck as well and this has all my overhead lighting controls i use the garmin
overlander for my gps right here garmin in reach is over here for tracking and for sos recovery
and then i got an ipad in between the seats that i mostly use when i pull the side of the road and i
want to look up something there used to be a third seat for the military where the guy would sit back
here and pop up through the gun turret to shoot uh i have a second dometic refrigerator here this is
where i keep all my uh gatorade and water and beer and whatnot in that fridge and then i have storage
behind the seats for you know camera gear my one wheel and stuff like that the biggest uh expense
honestly on this whole truck and upgrade that i made was these shielman seats from germany they
are just incredibly comfortable and you know dual armrests they're heated they're amazing i
did all the the the paneling this uh fabric on the doors and i insulated super insulated underneath
the seats both for heat and for sound so i can drive around along the road you know comfortably
uh listening to the radio in a truck that before it was like oh you know you must
need to wear a headset uh so you wouldn't go deaf you know it's got push button start
to me being out on the road the best thing about it is that every morning i get up in my own bed
with my own stuff i'm always at home it just happens to be i look out the window
and i get a different view every morning if i could say one thing to anybody just do it get
out and do it you can prepare forever and get ready to get ready just get out there
thanks for watching this week's video if you'd like to see more over landing rigs
and modified military trucks turned tiny homes i have a playlist for you
in the description and i will see you soon with another tiny or creative home tour you