New Camp trailer – WooHoo!

We turned in our camp trailer for a new version with room for our *almost* teenager to have some space for herself and her dog. We have used it just a handful of times due to C19 so we are anxious to get out and do some camping this summer!

Our family usually goes camping off and on all summer, for hunting season, and use the trailer for a guest room during the off season. Saying all that to to say we use our trailer A LOT. Our favorite places to camp are river banks and logging roads up in the mountains. The less people the better, lol. We actually wore out a trailer after about 10 years, traded it in on a new one that we really liked. We had that trailer for several years but it wasn’t built as well and the first one and started leaking. Never could get it to stop even though we went through it several times caulking all the windows and resealing the the roof. We resealed all the lights, seams, etc and still could not trace down the leak so we ended up selling it and buying a new one. This trailer we decided to get a bit longer and the floor plan we picked has a small room at the back. Its a bunkhouse as was the last one, but the bunks are in a small room so Jessica has her own space as she hits teen years.

We still added the solar panels as the last one had, and water filters, HAM radio, hand operated blender and food chopper (Tupperware sells them, they are great!), percolator coffee pot, inverter for the solar panels, upgraded batteries to handle it all, etc. As long as the sun is shining and there is a fresh water supply somewhere, we can camp self-contained for quite a while. Another thing we always look at is how high does the trailer sit off the ground. Logging roads and river banks are not known for being smooth so we always make sure each trailer sits higher than usual. LOL! when we were at the RV lot looking at trailers, Jared and I would actually bend over at the end of a row of the style we wanted and look to see what trailer sat highest, that’s the one we started looking at first.

We also took out the microwave as that was pretty useless in our kind of camping, lol. Instead we made it more shelving for the kitchen, along with adding more shelving throughout the rest of the trailer as well. We found most cupboards in a lot of trailers only have one shelf and that is such a waste of space! Jared always matches up the coloring of the stain the best we can and makes more shelves. This helps out quite a bit for storage space.

Other things to think about when camping is ease of use in the tiny kitchen. We love to cook and trailer kitchens are not made for home style cooking usually so…..we change things up a bit of course! For the actual kitchen, we bought several things, a magnetic kitchen knife holder – freed up a drawer. Paper towel dispenser that we mount right inside the door – cooking inside or out there is access to paper towels. Paper plate dispenser, yep its a thing, we mounted it under the shelves above the sink right next to the styrofoam bowl dispenser. A spice rack is a needed thing also. In the last trailer I had a tub that I kept all my spices in, in this trailer, they go up on the shelf were the microwave used to be. Jared put a bar across the opening so nothing falls out but its still open for accessibility.

Something else we do that might seem odd to others is we don’t cook inside if we don’t have to. We have a long folding table we set up, next to that is the camp stove. In the new trailer there is an outside kitchen in it. Well, here again we are making changes to make it suitable to actual off grid camping. We are taking the useless electric fridge out, that will probably go in Jared’s shop by his workbench. The kitchen sits kinda high and is a little difficult to use. The little sink and cupboards are pretty nice though. The way its built, the counter space sits almost chest high so I don’t see using it much unless I get a step stool. We will probably set the table and camp stove next to the outdoor trailer kitchen and that should work pretty good.

We can’t wait to actually do some camping this summer and use our trailer. It looks great sitting in the driveway and being used as a guest room, but we would love to actually use it, lol! Pictures are from when we first bought it, before we made our changes. Will update with pictures in the coming weeks when we can finally get out with it!