I'm CONVERTING a 6X10 Cargo Trailer into a CAMPER and I Don't Know What I'm Doing! (Part 1)

[Hey everyone today we are starting a new project we are going to be converting this trailer this 6 by 10 cargo trailer into a camper for my sister my sister will be helping me with this as well she does have mobility issues and physical limitations so I will probably be doing most of the heavy lifting but it should be an interesting and fun project I have never done any kind of like real construction only cosmetic stuff so this will be the first time I'll be doing like wood cutting installing w

ood paneling and that sort of thing the idea is to make this into sort of a hard sided tent if you will it's not going to have Plumbing it's not going to have black or fresh water tanks it won't have electric but it will be beautiful it'll be functional she'll be able to bring in a heater and we have some ideas for her kitchen area that won't require Plumbing and it's going to be really cool we've already gone out and purchased a bunch of stuff for the inside once the shell is all built out howe

ver we still have a lot of work to do yesterday we did start work on it so let me take you back and we'll show you where we are so far we're picking up some insulation and some bead board to get this project going get our walls going in the little cargo trailer I'm grabbing one of these make it easier for my sis to get in and out up and down [Music] today is the first day we are going to start work on converting this cargo trailer into a beautiful camper I think we're just going to try to get th

is drywall off the sides today and that's going to be the big project for this afternoon right now I'm just going to go ahead and take this railing off I don't know what you call it but that's got to come off first and then I'll get all this drywall down this is going to be replaced by insulation and then we're going to put bead board over it's going to be really pretty when it's all done foreign if you're new to my channel my name is Catherine I've been living nomadically for almost four years

now and I currently live in a 21 foot travel trailer we're doing this for my sister because she is recovering from a battle with cancer she wants to be able to get out and camp with minimal setup she used to set up a tent however her physical limitations won't allow her to do that anymore so she wants to have a little unit she can just drive up and be ready to enjoy the outdoors I'm looking forward to her being able to join me at some of my beautiful camps on the road this summer we got started

a little late in the afternoon yesterday so we didn't get a ton done but yesterday I had mentioned I was going to be taking I said drywall this drywall down however we decided to go ahead and leave it up these steel uh screws are just embedded in there and it would take a lot of work they were stripping so we just decided to leave that there we went ahead and installed the installation on top again she'll be only taking this out in fair weather and she doesn't need to have a ton of installation

in this small of a space she'll be able to heat it up with a heater pretty well if needed but we're going to go ahead and put insulation wherever we can we'll end up covering this portion down here with reflectix we will not be installing the windows ourselves so there's a couple things that we will be hiring out and that will be the installation of a couple of Windows a vent up here and then what else did we have him doing we're gonna have him do some stabilizing Jacks all on every corner of th

e trailer so today I'm just going to go ahead and finish up putting insulation wherever it's needed and potentially get on to installing the bead board on the walls things are really coming together in here it's looking good I'm going to take a little break to talk about the sponsor of today's video surf shark surfshark is a VPN which stands for virtual private Network and that is really important to me because I live a nomadic lifestyle 100 of my business is done online I often find myself usin

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y bills are paid and it's time to get back to work click the link below using promo code cat to get 83 off in three extra months for free thank you once again to surfshark for sponsoring this video now back to work was definitely intimidated about starting this project but one thing life on the road has taught me is never to let fear stop you go ahead and try it what have you got to lose if I wasted a little insulation making a mistake it wasn't the end of the world I would just start over again

[Music] with each area I covered I became more confident it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be although it took a little longer than I thought it would [Music] thank you foreign ing up the job site as I go I cannot work in a mess or live in a mess I feel much more productive if my space is organized I have all the insulation from here all the way to here on the ceiling and then from here to the back of the trailer right here there's a light fixture it works if you are plugged in if you've

got the trailer plugged into power on your truck or whatever tow vehicle you have but we're not going to be utilizing this so I'll take it down obviously there are live wires in here so we'll have to make sure those are secure so I'm not sure how I'm going to deal with that yet so I'll just move on for now prior to beginning work on the conversion we took a trip to the big city we wanted to visit Ikea for some ideas on how to outfit the interior strolling around Ikea today looking for ideas to d

o and no build cargo trailer my sister has an existing six foot by ten foot cargo trailer and we are looking to convert it into a camper so we're here looking at uh ideas for furniture for something that she can make into a kitchen and we're already getting some great ideas something that you could just put along one wall it's very narrow for shoes but you could pretty much store whatever you want in there yeah every nomad's gotta have a banana hammock it is a new day I'm catching up with you on

day three of construction of the travel trailer I'm just showing you Snippets of each stage because I don't really know what I'm doing so this is not a how-to video I have watched some videos so it's not like I'm going into this completely blind however I'm not sure I'd recommend that you do it exactly the way that we are but it's going to work for us so I did get the rest of the insulation put on yesterday uh except for down here so today we are going to be rolling out some reflectix and stapl

ing it onto this bottom portion this plywood portion today's goal is just to finish that and then we might start working on the wood paneling there is a big storm on the way it may not look like it right now it's actually very nice right now the high is about 50 degrees however it is about to change rapidly their temperatures are going to drop and overnight there's going to be quite a bit of snow up in the more northern part of the state they're talking feet we're talking inches down here maybe

you know eight nine inches and it's going to get pretty gnarly for a few days we do have a garage slash shop that we can work in when the weather gets bad and maybe cut some of the paneling and keep going at it for a bit even during the bad weather anyhow it's time to get to work foreign okay this is one wall done and it's ready for paneling all right that didn't take too long we got the reflectix along every single wall my hand's gonna hurt from that stapler but we did it the wind is kicking up

that storm is definitely moving in so we are going to call it a day we brought a piece of the paneling in here this is the beadboard paneling we're going to put it the lines vertically so we were just doing some measurements for that before we start cutting and uh we're coming along pretty nicely I'll check in again when we start work again I'm just beginning day four of work on the trailer we are now to the point that we can start cutting and putting up the paneling and I'm very nervous about

that I've never done anything like this I've watched a bunch of YouTube videos so hopefully we'll be okay we did take another trip to Home Depot this morning for some supplies [Music] when doing any kind of project whether it be your home or your cargo trailer just know you'll be making lots of trips to your local DIY Center lots and lots of trips [Music] it seems like it's constantly going back and forth to Home Depot as you can see there's a little bit of snow flurries that big storm never rea

lly materialized where I'm at further north I guess I got some heavy snow but it wasn't as bad as predicted but it is very very cold so some of the work today will be done in the garage and better get started first thing I have to do is measure how long we need this to go measure to the top of this beam 70 inches six feet [Music] [Music] this year [Music] oops Oopsy Daisy all right got the first one cut let's see it's not perfect hopefully I'll get better as I go but looks pretty good what do yo

u think it's good nice you get an idea of what it's going to start to look like it doesn't look straight to you I think so I mean looks like on the floor on the ground it's straight which is what we need because up here is it's going to look uneven because it is well I meant like the lines oh I hope so I think that looks straight like I'm following this one down are you ready yep watch your fingers sister I think that's in oh nope it's not foreign as it turns out we need longer steel screws but

it's okay that we put some holes in here because we'll just patch them up she's going to paint anyways um so I've cut this piece and I've cut this piece I'm going to bring this piece in and see if that fits hopefully it does and then we are back to Home Depot to find longer screws it was funny the guy said to us when we were leaving see you in a half an hour because he guess that's just how it is when you're doing projects you're running back and forth unfortunately it's about 35 minutes from wh

ere we are okay well I think that's gonna work it's gonna be one wall up to the door all right Home Depot here we come [Music] thank you hey okay it is day five of work on the trailer we kind of stopped things down yesterday because we had to rethink how we're doing this we had covered up the steel studs with insulation and unfortunately our steel stud finder could not find this does because this whole thing is steel um so we actually are going to have to uncover all the studs I'm going to take

this down we have to make sure all four corners of this are attached to the steel studs at least if not more so I'm going to be cutting these down into smaller pieces and making sure they're attached to the studs and I think that's going to probably do it for the work inside the trailer for part one I'll be splitting this into two parts and the next part is going to be very exciting because I think that we should have all the paneling done we'll get the flooring in and we'll start bringing every

thing in uh that my sister bought for this trailer I'm sure that the professionals out there are just cringing at what I'm doing again I'm learning as I'm going I've never done this before and this is just going to be once again a hard sided tent so the fact that it will have some insulation in it and uh some paneling in that and flooring is going to be just good enough for the purpose that it's being used we actually got about two inches of snow last night wasn't expected but it woke up to a li

ttle bit of a winter wonderland here and it's very cold at 16 degrees to wrap up today's video it's going to be kind of fun I'm going to show you some of the things that my sister bought for the trailer and to install into the trailer and then uh also I want to kind of go over the layout of how it's all going to be set up once it's done today my goal is to first of all take this paneling down and get it paneled properly all the way to the door and then this side here all the way to probably that

last big beam so that the gentleman who's installing the windows can get to work installing the windows because he needs these walls up before he can do that so I better get to work all right so this has got to come down nothing like doing things twice and are you watching me for me girl is snow on your nose snow on your nose so we once again had this uncovered and we'll be able to see the Steels that we're drilling into and hopefully this time it's gonna work thank you all right Safety First s

afety goggles on and here we go I never thought I'd be using power tools when learning how to use them but not bad skill to have and voila and I learned to cut it on this uh insulation board from a YouTube video as well as learning how to use a power tool from a YouTube video see if this fits a little windy all right I can clearly see a stud right here all right I got this wall done now it is on to the other side looks much better than what we did yesterday that's for sure foreign let me tell yo

u it is a cold day my face is frozen so if I'm talking funny that's why anyhow I got the two walls done that I wanted to get done today this is all I'm gonna have time for for part one of this build in terms of the building portion because I'm getting ready to go on an adventure so part two will be really exciting A lot's gonna happen this took a lot longer than I thought it would but live and learn so if you can imagine once these screws are covered up we're gonna put we're gonna put something

here to kind of cover this up make it aesthetically pleasing but this is just to give you an idea but yeah I did it pretty excited now for the next part of this video I'm going to show you some of the things my sister bought that will make this little cargo trailer little she wagon a home for my sister okay I wanted to show you some of the major components that my sister purchased for the cargo trailer and the first one being this cassette toilet she wanted one that was tall high so that it woul

d be easier for her to get on and off of and we will be uh installing a grab bar near it so that will make it easier for her with her physical limitations back here we have a Mr Heater water heater so she does have a shower set up and this will heat up water so that she can take a shower if she's out for a few days uh we haven't tried it out yet so some of these things I might make separate videos for afterwards just to talk about how it all panned out how they worked down here she has an induct

ion cooktop she bought from Ikea I did hear that these are kind of power hungry so we'll see how that works out and she may end up going to some sort of a fuel uh burner but we'll see we'll see how that goes hopefully it works out well for her and the flooring is going to be these puzzle piece flooring that look like wood I think this is really clever it's going to add padding underneath her feet and they can be changed out if they get ruined she'll have the dog with her it's going to be a littl

e bit of insulation as well but we do have some flooring repairs before we lay that down in the existing trailer it's gonna look amazing and she's got all kinds of other bibs and Bobs but we will share that for the next video here's an awesome photo she has hanging of us hiking the Pacific Crest Trail I think we did about 17 miles on a little section hike in Southern California that day it was uh it was a fun day here are a couple of the grab bars one will be near the toilet and one will be at t

he front entrance into the cargo trailer down here she has this massive anchor power supply so she should have no power concerns and if we're camping together she can always recharge it through my solar she also has one of my images hanging up here and this one is also available on my website and this is the kitchen she picked up she'll be using two seven gallon jugs one for fresh water and one for gray water with a battery operated water pump [Music] before cancer my sister loved to backpack hi

ke and oftentimes tent camp although she can't do some of those things now because of her physical limitations that doesn't mean life has to end it might look a little bit different now but nature is out there to be enjoyed and she can still do it [Music] my poor GoPro has already fallen I've broken my tripod I've deemed it up and it's brand new I wanted to show you real quick the initial plan for the layout of this little trailer it is going to have a twin size bed going all the way across the

back here so that's going to come out about three feet and take the whole length of the back she can also make that into kind of a couch situation when these doors are shut with some pillows behind it it should be really cool back here in the corner is where the toilet will go and I think we're gonna put some sort of a round bar like this so that a curtain can go across it's only going to be her in here so she doesn't really have to worry about the Privacy thing however just for Aesthetics if sh

e doesn't want to have her toilet out in the open it'll be tucked in this corner over here will be your kitchen set up which I've shown you that I've shown you a picture of that and then I think here is just going to be maybe a table situation or some storage um I don't know exactly what's planned for this area she's also going to need to fit Birdie's crate in here I think that's going to go somewhere right here so it's going to be snug but it'll be very cozy very cute and it's coming together s

o on part two it's going to be very exciting lots of changes it's gonna all come together it may not be the next video it might be a couple videos from now next video will be an adventure video but I hope you enjoyed seeing this I hope you learned something I have learned a lot again not necessarily sure I do things exactly the way that we did them but it's all going to work out anyhow thank you all so much for joining me I always appreciate you tuning in and I will see you on the next adventure

see you soon bye-bye [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music]