Let’s build the other half of our house: The living box! So the cabin is our living room/dining room. The box behind will contain a kitchen, bathroom, bedrooms and a lot of storage. Because of the wheel arches, the sleeping area will have an elevated floor of about 15cm. This is actually quite convenient because it will give us space to neatly hide all the pipes under the floor and create some extra storage.

We start the inside of the living box with placing the frames for the beds and then making the higher floor. From there we have a reference for the wall that will seperate the kitchen from the sleeping area. So next up is building the wall and sliding door between the two spaces.

After this we can start filling up the space underneath the beds with drawers for storage. We partially use already existing drawers of old furniture to do so. We work a lot with wood to get a firm structure. We even add a small retractable table between the drawers and the bed to fill up some loose space. We fill everything up to make a firm seperation between the garage section under the bed and the sleeping area.

At the same time we start working on the kitchen. We use refurbished cabinets for the kitchen that we have painted and pimped to look nice, so it is mainly placing them at the right spot and attaching everything. Then we start working on a beautiful wooden worktop. It is not easy to get it completely fitting but it turns our beautiful. We paint the walls and even make our own tiles to make everything even more beautiful. We fix the sink and faucet and it starts to look like a proper kitchen!

In the meantime we make a bathroom, which you can read on a different page. But after that, all the walls are up in the back so we can finish the sleeping area. We make a wall around the upper bed to create a cosy and private sleeping corner. We figure out how to make some stairs to get into the rooftop tents, using a library ladder system and a refurbished ladder. Then we can start putting in the flooring (we use cork laminate), decorating the sliding door and just finishing everything up to make it a cosy little space.

Almost a full functioning house! We have a couple of bigger projects left. One is making an extra cabinet in the kitchen are, between the ‘front door’ and the bathroom. Just for storage. And the other is finishing up the rooftop tents. The big one in front will get a wooden wall, a beautiful wooden cabinet at the head and a bookshelf at the feet. After putting in the matras we can close the space up to really make it feel like a seperate room.

There is a lot of subtle finishing touches going one in this area to make everything look nice and finished. Some of them will be adressed in one of the next chapters, but it is to much to mention them all! But all in all this gives a good overview of how we have roughly changed an empty white box into a cosy little home.