A video from @mackfiles07 is captioned “We turned a $500 trailer into a luxury Mega Camper | Part 2,” with the hashtags #rv, #trailer, #renovation, #rvrenovation and #diycamper. It runs about three and a half minutes, carries a title card reading “We Turned A $500 Trailer Into A Luxury Mega Camper,” and tells its story through narration with burned in subtitles. It is the second installment of a series, and the caption is the only place that says so.
The narrator opens with a question: “What would you do if you bought a 43 foot race trailer for just $500, only to realize the first thing you had to do was slice the entire roof off?” The narrator says many viewers called a deal like this impossible, and describes the trailer, which is put at 8,900 pounds, as “a rotting, rusted out shell with zero waterproofing.” In the very first episode, the narration says, the crew gutted everything inside and made a call to jack the roof up to 11 feet to turn the trailer into a luxury mega camper.
@mackfiles07 We Turned A $500 Trailer Into A Luxury Mega Camper
Wiring, Plumbing and Spray Foam
“The real build starts right now,” the narrator says, and the utilities come first. The narration says the crew ran well over 1,000 feet of wire through three bedrooms, a bathroom and the main living and kitchen space, then installed the water heater and routed PEX pipe behind the stairs and into the bathroom. Once the wiring and plumbing were tucked inside the walls, the next job was what the narrator calls the most satisfying step: spray foam.
The narrator gives three reasons for it. First, it gives a solid layer of insulation. Second, it seals the small gaps where moisture could get in. Third, once it cures, it adds a lot of strength to the walls. Watching the foam expand and then cutting it flush with the framing is, in the narrator’s words, “ridiculously satisfying,” and the result is described as ready to handle whatever weather comes.
The Bathroom and the 100 Gallon Tank
The next section turns to what the narrator calls one of the most important spaces, the bathroom, where a modern shower valve and a heavy duty exhaust fan go in and the walls are backed with thick plywood to prepare for custom tile. The narrator then explains that most campers run three kinds of tanks: freshwater for clean supply, gray water for sinks and showers, and black water for the toilet.
To get the system running, the narrator says they had to crawl underneath and custom weld a heavy duty support frame for a 100 gallon tank, spending five straight hours crawling through rocks and dirt and routing drain lines from three sinks, the shower and the laundry into one main dump valve. The narrator says that seeing the full system work made every burn mark and all the sweat worth it.
The video closes with a recap: in two months the trailer went from a rusted, rotting shell into something unrecognizable, with the electrical and plumbing finished, the insulation sealed and the bathroom coming together. The last line before the sign off is a question to viewers about the paint: “So what color should we paint it?” The finished camper is not shown in this part.
What Spray Foam Does in a Wall Cavity
A spray foam guide hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Building America program, written by Steven Winter Associates for the Consortium for Advanced Residential Buildings, says the liquid to expanding foam process tends to fill the gaps, cracks and voids responsible for uncontrolled air leakage. It says closed cell foam expands about 35 to 50 times its original volume and has a typical R value of 6 per inch, while open cell foam expands to about 150 times its volume with a typical R value of about 3.6 per inch. The guide also notes that both types are combustible and need a thermal barrier, typically equal to half inch gypsum board, in many applications. The video does not say which type of foam the crew used.
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