by Rebecca Turner

After 6 years of living in the real world (aka – not college) we’ve come to the conclusion that the path we are following might not be exactly what we wanted after all. We are finding that we are letting the daily grind of our jobs wear us down and aren’t taking the time do the things that make us happy. So after much thought and lots of long talks, we decided it was time to ‘turn-about’ and make some changes.

Photo Credits: Rebecca Turner

We have always loved camping and have longed to take a great cross country road trip. So to this end, we’ve decided to throw caution to the wind, plan a great trip and build a teardrop trailer! Though we have some skills (I work in architecture and my husband is a mechanical engineer) we have never built anything like this before and are learning as we go. This is also ultimately a great test to see if we can design and build something together without killing each other!

In researching trailers, we found a lot of photos and websites selling trailers and plans. But in order to customize the trailer to our needs we decided to wing it and document the whole process on our blog! The trailer is being built on a small 4 ft x 8 ft utility trailer with walls cut from standard 4 ft x 8 ft plywood. The interior cabin is a little smaller than a full size bed and the back opens up into a basic galley kitchen. Inside, the galley will be a two burner propane camp stove, a small sink with a hand pump faucet and a ton of counter space. We decided this will be an ‘off the grid’ trailer and will be running all of the electrical with two 20 watt solar panels on the roof that will power a few lights, fan and a couple of DC ‘cigarette lighter’ style outlets you typically find in cars.

The construction process is still ongoing, but we are hoping to be completed before the end of June and be on the road by August. So far this has been a stressful, challenging and very rewarding project! As things come together every moment we aren’t working on the trailer is spent thinking about it and designing in our heads. Once we are on the road we are looking forward to lots of adventures and figuring out the next direction our lives will take.

We’ve kept up a blog – turned-about.blogspot.com – in the hopes others can learn from our experiences and build trailers of their own!