From Cargo Trailer To Camper

The trailer conversion to a camper is actually starting to shape up kind of nicely. We now have a bed which can be folded up into a couch as desired, and we have plenty of storage space under the bed area. In a way it’s kind of like the little Teardrop campers but bigger and not quite as cute

The Camper Bed Platform

As you can see in this photo, our bed platform is simple plywood sitting on top of supports.

The support on one side is a seven foot pantry cabinet we had given to us by family. We just laid that on it’s side and it makes nice little storage cubbys to hold all our dishes, food, games, books and so on. The opposite side of the bed platform is supported by three buckets. Each bucket has two 2×4 blocks on the lid so the height of the cabinet on the other side is matched.

Under The Bed Storage

The buckets will eventually be used for various things but right now they’re empty. They get pushed under the couch area when that’s set up, both to add support and to get them out of the way

The Camper Bed

When the bed is laid fully out with the foam mattress and sleeping bags, it’s really quite comfortable. I was surprised at how big it ended up being too! We have plenty of room for us and the dog to sleep at night, and we can spread out to play games on a rainy day if we want, too.

The bed doubles as an excellent place to carry our solar panels too! Until this last week, we had been disassembling our solar panels and layering them into a huge blue plastic bin with sleeping bags between to help keep them protected while we’re on the road. After they were loaded into the bin, we’d then load that into the back of the Jeep and strap it down with our water jugs.

We have a bed now though! And it’s all padded too So this time instead of taking the entire solar panel setup apart, we just took the back legs off the frame. We left the solar panels on the frame itself, fully assembled, and just slid it face down onto the camper bed. Then we covered the exposed back with sleeping bags and strapped it down.

This traveled really well, even through a brief side trip onto a 4 wheel drive road. It should make camp setup much faster now too, since we won’t have to put the entire solar set together. Instead we’ll just put the legs on, stand it out in the sun and plug it in

And now that we have the huge bin out of the back of the Jeep, we plan to pick up more water containers and bring our carrying capacity up to about 50 gallons.

(Update) If you haven’t seen the cross country trip notes, take a look at how small the sleeping area was in this trailer when we first started out. This new bed seems HUGE in comparison!

And here’s pictures with the bed in couch mode…

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