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Creating A Camper On A Budget

Camping Necessities – Shelter
    Fall in other parts of the country bring colored leaves and crisp temps. What do we get with fall in Florida? Hurricanes! Hopefully, Helene is the last one and we can start planning some camping trips. I have been out west and thankfully, there's no such thing as hurricanes here.
    A lot of my time has been spent camping high up in the mountains, so you will understand how it’s been on my mind and as such, it’s what I’ll be writing about for the next few weeks. There are a ton of ways to spend a few nights outdoors…here’s a little of how we do it.
    Shelter, water, and fire…I think that access to these three things is what makes a camping trip enjoyable. Anything less should be called roughing it or just survival, and without them it won't be a fun or long adventure. In fact, I am pretty sure that those three are absolutely necessary to life. There are folks who will say that they could live without shelter or fire, but I would argue that it wouldn't be very long until the elements took over and they'd be DRT (dead right there).
    But when we go spend a few days or weeks out in the woods or in the mountains or even at a remote spot on a beach somewhere, it's intentional, hopefully, and we can plan ahead. Some people have RV's that either hold or provide all of these things, but what about those of us who want to go on an adventure without such a large investment?
    We use a box trailer as the bones for a “makin’ do” kind of camper. It is a great, affordable alternative to an RV. If you don’t mind still roughing it a little and doing without the coziness of a real camper, then this option holds a lot of perks.
    About 18 years ago, I got invited to go on an elk hunting trip as a cook for my father-in-law to the San Juan National Forest in Colorado. We packed up a little box trailer with a couple coolers, some cookware, my old kitchen box, a deep freezer, a tent and a buggy. Then we headed off to spend a few weeks camping and hunting. We weren’t successful at anything other than having a good time and making lots of memories.
    Fast forward to four years ago. Brian and I wanted to go on a hunting trip to New Mexico where our oldest son, Caleb, lives and works as a hunting guide. We needed to be able to camp the whole time for this 6-week trip. We also needed to haul our buggy out there and be able to take our dogs as well. There are no bathhouses, or water spigots at the mountain spots where we would be camping. So, we needed to be self-contained and pretty mobile.
    The weather can also be cold and sometimes rainy, or even snowing, so a tent wouldn’t work for the whole time. We borrowed his dad’s little box trailer again and set it up as a storage/sleeping area. It worked and we had a great time, but decided we needed our own trailer that we could customize how we wanted if we were going to do the trip again.
    Last year we purchased an 8’ wide x 20’ long box trailer and started the process of making it into a useable base camp trailer. First, I insulated the ceiling with ¾” foamboard and covered that with thin plywood. These trailers aren’t very beefy and the insulation barely helps keep the heat and cold out. I also installed LED camper lights when doing the ceiling and wired them to a lithium battery.
    Then I put down a rubber-treated mat on the whole floor. This is great for easy clean-up with the dirt and mud that comes with remote camping. The whole front got heavy-duty built-in shelves with a 2"x4" lip, so your groceries and gear doesn't slide out when driving.
    Because of the width, I was able to build a Murphy bed on one side. The hinge is offset a few inches to allow for the mattress to be sandwiched between the bed and the wall when it is folded up. The legs are on hinges so that they can be folded up when the bed is up. That leaves plenty of room for the buggy to be driven in and strapped down using tire straps and floor brackets.
    A permanent boot box is just in front of the bed and also serves as a nightstand and makes a good dressing bench. I happen to be using it as a writing desk right now as I am hiding out in the trailer. I am currently camping above 10,000 feet elevation in the Santa Fe National Forest in Northern New Mexico. It's 46 degrees F and raining outside so the dogs and I are sitting inside with a Buddy heater going.
    A friend gave me a short piece of Corian countertop a few years back and it sits on a little cabinet base that I built out of scraps. It’s not mounted so we move it to the floor each time we move the camper, otherwise it falls and breaks stuff. But it also gets moved to the barn for chicken killin’ each time, so there is no use in really mounting it.
A bathroom mirror and medicine cabinet combo that I found on Marketplace is mounted to the wall above the countertop. It’s a good spot to store your toiletries so the counter stays free of bathroom clutter. The mirror makes it nice for fixing your hair…still gotta braid your hair while camping. If I didn’t, I would be coming home with dreads.
I ordered some handy folding shelf brackets mounted them to the wall and used plywood as the shelving. Having extra space to get gear up off the floor is really nice. Because they fold down the trailer is still an open useable space for other things back at home.
    The drop-down door in the back and the side door in the front both have cheap magnetic screens attached to keep the bugs out. And the last thing we added just this year was the awning. Those pop-up tents are handy, but they do not do well in the wind and rain tends to buckle them. At $100 a pop, it wasn’t a hard decision to go ahead and purchase the nicer, permanent awning.
    All in all, we have a small fraction of the cost of a regular camper trailer in this. Of course, it took some work to get it useable for our purpose, but it was worth saving all of that money. We don’t have a lot of the perks of a regular RV like a bathroom, kitchen or water tank, but we do have a go-anywhere kind of shelter that can serve a lot of other purposes when not being used. Until next time, get outside and make do with what ya got!