 Good morning from Colorado Custom Coachworks. I don't really know what I'm doing today. Is it Sunday today, Eric? I believe it's Sunday today. Well, Sunday is a great day to give thanks to the gods of van life and bus life by doing some service and making a prayer that we get some straight lines out of this thing. So, tell us what you're doing today, Eric. Well, we're starting to lay out everything for the bathroom and for the closet and where the beds are going to line up and get everything all squared up and properly aligned and get our rest of our framing, rough framing finished up to. Excellent, excellent. And would you tell us about your channel a little bit so anyone who's watching can check you out and see what you're up to? I would love that. Yeah, my name is Van Der Boom, so our page is called Wander Boom. My wife and I had just started full-time in about a month ago in our converted shuttle bus from Wisconsin and decided to swing by and help Jack out here for a couple of weeks and do some framing to use some of my skills. Cool. Well, along with Justin, who you guys met, Eric is up for some work on the road. So if anybody's watching this and has a little project, get a hold of Wander Boom. We're on Instagram, WanderBooming. That's right. And he's got years of experience. And you guys will see throughout this build, his skills will speak for himself, just like mine will. Speaking of my skills, I don't know where I put that thing. It's far for the course. That one thing. That one thing. I'm going to cut some holes in the bus. So this bus is going to be a little bit different from the last bus. I'm going to have city water and a gravity water fill. That just means hookups for all you guys who are familiar. I'm sure most of you guys are familiar. I'm the one who's not familiar. I'm also going to have a 30 amp service. Again, hookup. On the other side, I got to drill some more holes. So I guess this video today is drilling holes, you know? Drill baby drill on the side of the bus. Also, I get this repeated question. How do I survive on the road? All that. Excuse the air compressor. I did an article with Project Van Life. I think it was called 21 Nomads, how they make money on the road. If you're curious, you can check that out. Just a brief background in case you guys are just tuning in. I have a background in travel hosting. So I've gotten paid to travel and do web series type shows and things like that. Also, previous to that, I was slaving away in this terrible bar. So, without further ado, let's get to work. Alright guys, I think we just figured out how to properly square up. Now we're going from the floor and Eric came up with this amazing idea. Now he's going to, we were reversed before, right? Yeah, this is the first... I was holding and he was up here, but basically just hold that flush to the other square. See that? Look at that. And then your line is on that side right where that little pencil mark is. And then we just turned it 90 degrees. You got that one? Yup, I got this one. So then we just turned it 90 degrees. I think this is the best way I've seen so far. Because we are squaring it. We are not leveling it. And then you just take that one. He holds it flush like so. And then boom. And then you just cross the line. Excellent way to do that, man. We were just talking about how people are off with their, you know, they try to level it. You squared it to the floor and has a very precise measurement. And again with the curved ceiling and everything else, I mean how do you do that? You really got to just transfer your points using what you got. Yup, exactly. I got it marked. That's where my water fill is going. Hopefully it works out. Two by four should be on the other side, on the inside of it. This is the cutout part. There is a little bump here. No big deal. I can put some butyl tape or silicone and that should be just fine. It looks like a good fit there. Might have to shave down a little bit. But let's see how much spray foam insulation I got. This isn't throughout but I got, you know, that's like almost three. But yeah, I got quite a bit of spray foam here as you guys can see. Yeah, almost three inches right there. So got a good deal. 700 bucks. Now like I said, I took wood shop in middle school. That's it. I took auto shop in high school. You know how much construction experience I have? Zero. So for those people giving me a hard time, just remember that. Now, I did figure out something smart. You guys probably already know this. You guys are handyman construction guys. People like Steve or Mike. I was like, how am I going to cut a nice little, you know, rectangle when I put the wood on the other side? You know what I figured out? Well, just feast your eyes on this. This is like breaking news for me but you know, comment that for you. Pretty smart, right? All right, here we go. Here's the hole. All right, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, this is a sneak peek of what we're dealing with here. This is going to become the wall and also the bed frame. That's, you know, we already talked about that. That's a self-explaner. If you don't know what that is, you haven't been watching enough of my videos. But this will be, yeah, this will be mattress. But it's fun because I just made this little hole for the water inlet while Eric's been inside doing what he does best. And this is quickly coming along. I mean, framed all this out, added some wood there. And before my very own eyes, I might have a place to poop inside my bus which is not inside a treasure chest. So no more magical treasures inside the treasure chest. Great news. I did not burn out the pump motor. It was actually due for a new filter. So for those of people asking, oh my gosh, you're running veggie oil, you're going to go through so many filters. To fill up this 120 gallon tank, so far I have used three filters. Three. At about $8 each, $10 each, $12 each, I forget. So somewhere around $30 in filter for 120 gallons. So I paid $30 to go 1,000 miles. I think that's even better than a Tesla. Do you guys ever get a little scatterbrain when you're working on a project? There's like 10 million things to do and you, I don't know, never finish any of them, but then you start a bunch of them. Anyways, speaking of another project to start, this is a new seat. That's the old seat. Long story short, that's 11 inches. That's 11 inches. I'm a tall dude. I might take this mounting plate and put it on that and add an extra three inches to it. I don't know. That's what I'm thinking right now. Sounds like a good idea. Also, this seat, I would like to replace the upholstery for it. I'm definitely not going to take this off and put it on there. That belongs in the trash. The only thing wrong with this one is the armrest thing isn't intact 100%. Not really sure. I took it off, tried to fix it, didn't work out. An advantage of having this one on here besides the other height is that I could put another self-powered sub under the seat, I think. I'd have to double check the dimensions, but it is a possibility. If not, a little extra headroom. It's not a bad thing. Interior, while I'm playing around outside. This looks like it's coming together. We just had a nice little conversation before. I just want to share my gratitude with everyone watching this video. You're an amazing dude. Thank you so much for coming by. It means a lot to me. No problem. I enjoyed it. It was fun. More fun as we go? We're getting right into the fun stuff, guys. This is the part where it drastically changes right into an adventure mobile before your very own eyes. Now, I'm out here, said I was playing around, but I'm doing some pretty serious work. This is some pretty, like, you know, safe stuff I'm doing here. So, I took off the base plate of that. I took off the base plate of that. I'm going to bump it up three inches, and what I'm going to do is weld these holes shut. The reason being the new holes are going to be close by, and I don't really feel like being ejected, having an ejection seat in the front, God forbid something happens. So, I'm going to make it nice and safe, weld it all, cut new holes, all that fun stuff. We'll bump it up and then I'm moving back a little bit because I'm tall and I've got long legs. I'm just going to clean this off because what I learned was you have to weld with a clean piece of metal there. Also, I don't think I've ever done a tiny house tour, but there are some fellow travelers who have actually been traveling a year longer than I have. It's starting to rain right now. Tiny house expedition, Christian and Alexis, so we're going to talk to these guys about some traveling stuff. Not so much a tour because you guys probably have what, two dozen tours online at least. Cool. Hey guys. Pretty good. I'm just working away inside, just trying to keep busy. We get it. Yeah, so... Our tiny house is partially in travel mode right now. Awesome. I just want to let everyone know that. And would you guys introduce yourselves and what you're doing, especially like the documentary stuff, whatever you can kind of say about that and channel and everything? Absolutely. So, I'm Alexis. And I'm Christian. We call ourselves Tiny House Expedition. We are a traveling tiny house project. We do documentary filmmaking and community education about all aspects of tiny living, including communities, legal obstacles and solutions. And we just live and breathe tiny, everything, every day. Yeah, we do. We just did an event. So, we're traveling through. So, this thought we stopped by and say hello. Cool. And as I pointed out, we're in travel mode because maximum cuteness is not achieved at the moment. And on the note of traveling, you guys are now the most traveled tiny house, right? Yeah, how many miles have you put on? So far, it's just over 50,000. We just hit 50,000 when we got to Leadville, Colorado. Cool. You guys are a good 20 more than me. And I know the pace I've put on over two years and 30 something thousand miles, maybe even 35 at this point, including this bus. It's a lot of money and fuel. It's a lot of where do I park and things like that. So, how do you guys deal with a full-time traveling schedule? Because that's an insane amount of miles. It's true. It's like, sometimes we travel a lot. We stay between a week and two months at different places. If we're staying in a place less than a week and we do that multiple times, we start to feel a little crazy. So, trying to find a balance with travel where you're not running yourself ragged is really important. We've gotten better at that for sure. So, we park in a lot of driveways and backyards. Networking's awesome. I know you can relate. And then sometimes campgrounds. We hope to do some more boondocking in the future. We're going to get a little solar. We see a tiny-ass community sometimes. So, yes, that's a big thing. Yeah, it is tough sometimes to balance making money, having some downtime and then doing the film work. It could be pretty crazy. So, we just have, I think, perfected our workflow over time. Yeah. It does mean arguing sometimes. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Now, how do you guys roll into... Well, you said you plan in advance some places where you go. I kind of was like a tumbleweed, honestly. Do you guys ever just kind of, they're like, let's go this way today and then you just find somewhere to park? Like, pulling a trailer being so long. How does that work? Yeah, usually what happens, well, you know, Alexis usually puts the schedule together for the most part. And so she has ideas of where we want to be and some of the people that we want to interview. So, what happens is that I sometimes knock stuff off the schedule because it's either, you know, the timing's not going to work out just right or it's going to take us a day longer to get somewhere than I actually thought, you know. So, it's sometimes things like that happen. So, the schedule does change. It's just adding, we try to add a little flexibility so that if something comes up, like some friends are coming through town. Right. And this always happens, yeah. Yeah. So, it's, we try to, I make a like a six month schedule and then about a month out is when I firm up and then within that, there's like a solid week of wiggle room that it might totally change or we might just decide to go to the National Park for a couple days or something. And could you tell us a little bit about the documentary that you guys are doing or documentary series, I should say? Yeah. We have two series. One is Living Tiny with Legally, which is illegal obstacles and solutions, particularly zoning for tiny houses on wheels. And that's on our YouTube channel. And then the other one is about the people, culture and community experience of the movement. And what we want to do is kind of show how tiny living is revolutionizing American housing. So the backdrop of what's happening in our economy and insane housing markets. It's almost making it affordable again. Make America affordable again? Something like that, right? I want that on a hat. Yes, seriously. Because it's so expensive. I mean, and you know, I look back and I just wish I would have lived in a van or something in Venice Beach and would have saved $1,200 a month on rent. So, yeah, it's tough. Totally. There's no time like the present to go tiny. Yeah, cool. Well, thanks guys. Appreciate the time. And great hanging out past 24 hours and all that stuff. So, yeah, I hope to see you guys on the road. Yeah, see you here. Cool. Right, so I'm ready to weld. I don't know what the heck I'm doing, but luckily we got JT over here to make sure I don't burn the whole building down or kill myself. Would you give me a quick demonstration or a quick explanation of how to weld for a beginner? Yeah, so something like this. Honestly, it's probably best to get a backing plate. Okay. That way you can kind of just fill up the hole. Yep. If you get something that's real thick, it won't stick to it. You can just knock it right off. Don't grind it or anything so it won't stick. Cool. The main thing is as you start welding with this, you just want to be sure that you're getting enough wire because that's a pretty big hole to fill up. So if you feel like you need more wire speed, just crank it up a little bit. But yeah, like I said, it's best to just back it so you can sit there and just fill it up and kind of trade real nice. Cool. So that's the grounding cable if I remember correctly, right? Yep. And a welder uses electricity. I thought I welded before with a flame torch. I think I was totally wrong. Yeah, that's a cutting torch. Okay. You can sometimes bond things together with a cutting torch. You know what you're doing. Yeah. Yeah. So different welders have different dials. I think there is one for the feed of the cable. It's pretty much always the same wire speed and voltage. Okay. And then of course when you have a gas setup, it's always going to be better than using pork score. Yeah. So the gas is so it doesn't splatter as much and it looks a little bit cleaner. That's right. Correctly. Cool. Sweet. All right. Guys, I'm going to try this. You know, burn the whole place down. All right. So along with being able to DIY your own rig, these guys will point you in the right direction here. So I'm getting some help from a seasoned veteran here. And we're basically putting a little backing so the weld doesn't fall through. So it can pull up like you said. And then just, you know, clamped in there. Yep. Cool. You're going to just move whole. All right. Perfect. So I can touch that brick once it's all heated up and a face shield so I don't burn my eyes out. We can see a little progression here. That was my first weld. That's but ugly. The second weld is all right, but I missed the outside corner. So we got JT is going to show us how to properly fill a hole like this. Yeah. Cool. All right. Let me try that last one. I think I can nail it here. Okay. Okay. Gotcha. Gotcha. There you go. Yep. Yeah. They didn't adhere at all. So all right. Cool.