I realize it’s been a little bit since I’ve posted a camper update! We’ve been busy finishing up little details and getting it ready for our road trip! Technically, we had originally planned to be gone LAST week, but we never got a test run in the camper so we delayed the trip a few weeks just to make sure everything was going to work.

For example: when we filled the water tank for the first time we quickly realized that “as tight as Ashley can make it” is not actually tight at all… So both of the connections for the fill and water supply to the faucet were too loose and released at least half of the 20 gallon capacity of water into the floor of the camper…which was NOT awesome. Luckily we didn’t have anything on the floor except a cardboard box of kitchen supplies and, well, the actual wood floor that we had installed.  We parked the camper on our driveway (which is at a steep angle), ripped the floor tiles back out, and let it drain. So while it was super irritating, the camper dried out nicely, we got the connections tightened, and nothing was actually damaged.  It would have been super shitty to have that happen the first night of our road trip, so it’s a good thing we delayed!

Jason actually did quite a bit of work to the camper while I was up in the Yukon taking pictures of bears and eagles.  He installed the floor and also got our mattress installed! The mattress is 5″ thick memory foam from Amazon.  We managed to wrangle a queen size mattress into the camper too! It’s just narrow enough to not be able to sleep sideways across the bed like most campers, so we designed ours to sleep fwd/aft.  This gave us way more width than you usually get.  However the downside is that we can’t have the bed pulled out and set up and still be able to sit at the table. But ya know what? I’m ok with it. We still have an inside place to sleep and eat and hang out.

Now the camper is to the point where we need to start moving all of our regular camping crap from the tubs they lived in to the camper. This required opening all the tubs, sorting through stuff that just kind of ended up in there, getting rid of most of it, and trying to find room in the camper for the things we need. Fun fact: this was harder than it should have been.  Before we built the camper we would just toss the rooftop tent on its rack on the back of the truck bed, shove some tubs underneath it, and go! But now? There’s a lot less volume for storage inside the camper. I’m still working on finding the right little nook to store things in!  I did solve one problem we were going to have though.  We have really nice kitchen knives and since Jason is a knife-snob, we were going to bring them with us camping.  But what do you do with 3 extremely sharp knives that have no easy storage space? Make a custom knife roll!  Good thing I had leftover heavy duty canvas…

This isn’t really camper related, but I wanted to show off my truck.  We finally got the new rear shocks in (they were backordered!) so Jason installed those while I was at work on a fine Saturday morning.  I also realized that the truck was utterly filthy and hadn’t been detailed in an embarrassingly long time. So I fixed it!

So yeah, the truck is ready to go and the camper is ready to go.  This weekend was gorgeous, so Jason and I loaded everything up for a shakedown run! 🙂

One thing I didn’t realize is how see through our canvas is.  It GLOWS orange at night. It looks super badass and it’s also going to make for some really cool night photography!

The electrical system ended up working perfectly and we’ve already tested the solar panels, so I’m not concerned about any of that at all anymore.  We tested the heater all evening and it works very well also!  We weren’t confident enough to leave it running all night long though.  Maybe next time. We do have a carbon monoxide monitor just in case.  The bed itself is super comfortable.  Way better than the roof top tent that the camper replaced and overall everything is fairly easy to use and convenient!

Overall, our first night in the camper was a success!  Nothing terrible happened and we were warm, dry, and comfortable! Obviously, I have a list of things to finish and things that we realized that we needed, but the camper is now officially open for business! I can’t wait for our road trip in a week! 🙂