In the midst of this pandemic my husband and I set out to take a relatively safe vacation cross country. The plan: road trip west visiting outdoor destinations along the way. Before hitting the road though, we (ok I’ll be honest my husband) put in a lot of work transforming our 2011 Toyota 4runner into a temporary home for us.

We were leaving for 2 weeks and apart from a night or two in a hotel, the car was going to be our transportation vessel as well as our bedroom. To make it both comfy and functional for our needs we needed to do more than just get the normal pre-road trip oil change and new brake pads. First we took out the back seats. The second and third row seats do fold nicely, but there just wasn’t enough room without taking the seats completely out. It took some muscle power on the part of my husband, but once they were out we had room to build a platform to sleep on giving us storage room underneath.

The platform was a pretty easy, simple, and cheap build. The frame and legs were just 2x4s and we topped it with a sheet of plywood. For comfort and to make sure the wood didn’t put splinters in our mattress, we stapled some indoor/outdoor carpet onto the plywood. I think materials were less than $130 total. We even grabbed some battery-operated string lights to hang along the sides of the car so that when the sun went down we could at least see to read and do sudoku before going to sleep (the sun sets early in October). And I cannot forget to mention the giant sherpa blanket to keep us warm while the temps dipped below freezing most nights. It was a very cozy set-up. Our splurge though was on the mattress; we got an Exped Megamat sleeping pad that was so completely worth the price tag. It was the perfect size for the two of us and we both raved about the good sleep we were able to get. Finally we cut pieces of cardboard to fit in the windows. We spray painted them black leaving the car looking like it just had dark tented windows. This is a setup that I think we will continue to make use of in the future.

For fun, my husband also chose to paint the tire rims black. Our black 4runner definitely got much cooler rolling on black rims. It was actually more simple than I thought it would turn out to be. He put the car on jacks, took the 4 tires off, cleaned and sanded the metal, taped off the wheels, then put multiple coats of primer and color and finish. We were both very happy with how it turned out.

Stay tuned for more posts about the places we got to visit!