Will is handy. If he is idle for too long he gets bored. In fact, the first month of quarantine during the pandemic he rearranged our garage at least three times. He also started brewing beer in our garage, built a gate for our front porch and then ran out of things to do while stuck at home.
Before the Makeover: What We Dreamed Of
About a year ago, I suggested that we renovate a van and turn it into a camper van. I was certain he would think it sounded fun. After all, he has completed some pretty cool projects around our house. But I was shot down.
Fast-forward one year. The great sheltering in place forced us to brainstorm how to get from Georgia to Montana to visit his family in the fall. I mentioned the camper van renovation project again and again was shot down. A few days later, he asked me if I was serious, and I said yes. That’s when the research on campers and RVs began. We rented a Class C motorhome for a few days and decided it really wasn’t for us.
Discouraged, we spent night after night scouring the internet and watching YouTube tours of small Class As. We were trying to find something that felt right. And then it happened. A video about truck campers started playing automatically following whatever RV tour we had been watching on YouTube. We were intrigued.
We spent the following weeks researching truck campers, trucks (because we didn’t own one) and trying to find both for sale at a reasonable price within a reasonable distance. Since we had to buy both a truck and a truck camper we couldn’t buy new. Used truck campers aren’t easy to find in the south.
Planning the Truck Camper Transformation
We narrowed down our search to four truck campers that we wanted to inspect, with the closest one being an hour and a half away. The one we had our sights really set on was sold before we had a chance to drive the four and a half hours to look at it.
The first camper we looked at was too big, and the second one had a lot of questionable issues. But, we were willing to give it a shot if the third one didn’t pan out. The third one seemed just right. We made an offer, and I finally had a camper project! We could have left it as is and simply bought a bigger generator, re-sealed the outside, and gone on our merry way. But, we were stuck at home because we still had to have the Torklift system installed on the bed of our truck, so we could carry the camper. And it was on backorder. So the truck camper makeover began.
Read more and see the final result in our next post.
