How to Make a Truck a Home

The morning after we had said goodbye to everyone we know, sold most of our stuff, and packed the rest into our truck, Kyle looked at me and said, “This is literally the least mundane thing we have ever done.” And boy oh boy, is that the truth! 

This move has been the most uncomfortable, gut-wrenching, nerve-wracking, and scariest thing we have ever done. These heightened emotions, coupled with the excitement that we feel to be on a once-in-a-lifetime adventure, has catapulted our lives into a place that feels anything but mundane.

In this season of giddiness, before we return to that place of normalcy, I think it is important to document the experiences and emotions that are teaching us so much. Through semi-decent photos, buggy car-window videos, and raw journal entries, I have been trying to capture our experiences and emotions during this season. But before I get in to sharing the juicy details of our adventures, I thought it’d be best to start back at the beginning.

Before our 14 day road trip began, Kyle and I spent countless hours researching the best ways to get from Denver, CO to Homer, AK with a cat and a dog. We thought long and hard about several different options, one of them being tent camping. We recently invested in a wonderful Big Agnes backpacking tent, because we really love tent camping. But… a cat in a nice new tent sounded like a terrible idea. We looked into shipping the cat instead of traveling with her, but that was expensive and it seemed kinda sad. Another downside to the tent idea was the fact that there are many animals on the way to Alaska that like to kill people and we felt that we’d be pretty defenseless in a thin-walled backpacking tent against bear and moose and all the other scary things that live in the woods. So, we nixed the tent idea. 

We knew that we needed an option that was:

1. Cost-effective (because, Money…)
2. Stealthy (so we could sleep in Walmart parking lots… because, Money…) 
3. Safe (because, Animals…)
4. Easy (because we knew we wouldn’t want to set up something extravagant after long days of hiking and/or driving)
5. Comfortable (because we knew we would need good sleep to navigate the Alaskan roads)

Since Kyle had been in the market for a truck for a while, we decided that building a bed in the back of a truck would meet all our needs while accommodating our fur babies. After searching for months, Kyle found a great deal on a Ford F-150 with all sorts of cool gadgets and gimmicks and bells and whistles that apparently made it the perfect truck for us ;). I have to say, it’s a pretty good looking truck. With the help of some of our Bests, he acquired the classiest name: “Frisky the Ford” (lol).

Frisky became part of the family in April and we began ‘The Truck Build-Out’ soon after. For advice and ideas on how to make this work, we turned to the good ol’ fashion YouTube. We watched SO MANY youtube videos (…embarrassing amounts) and while the videos helped us get ideas, none of the plans that we saw would really work for our truck. So, we ended up creating the design ourselves. It was challenging, but so much fun to see it come together after months of brainstorming.

Since YouTube didn’t provide us with the perfect design (how dare they), we decided to film the process to help people out who might be looking to do the same thing. Click here to see how Kyle and I (and our animals) made a truck our home for 14 days. Enjoy!