Home Built RV: Work out your design

All those wonderful ideas and places to see, people to be and things you only saw in a book.  So now we need to begin our design.  Some considerations at this point are:  Do you need a kitchen area, an inside shower or toilet, how many beds?  Where will you sleep, where will you eat and what will you haul?  What do you already have?  Look around and take stock of what you have in terms of tools and materials.
The first thing that I did was look at some of the efforts that have been posted out on the Web.  I found everything from someone that converted their Minivan to someone that made a self-contained two story out of a box truck.

I visited several of the RV sales groups to see what a manufactured RV Trailer might contain and what the measurements looked like.  I learned about gross vehicle weight, axle weight and it's distribution.  What kind of vehicle would work with the various weight classes or really sizes of the trailers available.
After this research I started to formulate what I felt would work for us and how we wanted to use our "Home  away from Home".  We wanted to be able to go "Camping" to the Beach on long weekends or to the mountains for maybe a week at the time.  We also wanted the ability to maybe go to Football games and camp out the night before in order to avoid the game day traffic.  This led us to decide that we wanted to have a Kitchen area, a bath area and sleeping area for at least 4 if not 6.  We have a Minivan already and didn't want to have to buy a new vehicle for hauling use if we could avoid doing so.

We have some key tools and in our case we happen to have an old 4 X 8 trailer that we could use as a platform and possibly expand it's foot print just enough for our goals. We also decided to use aluminum studs and beams for the frame in order to save weight.and use the thinest plywood possible for the interior sheathing wall and then a 3/4" for the exterior wall and floor.  I did several floor plan mock up versions first before final design.  My goals were to have the lightest materials, but still have functionality.  We used Steel I-beams welded to the present trailer platform to lengthen the trailer to an 11 foot versus the original 8 foot by placing them so that we added one and a half foot forward and an equal one and a half to the back.  We then placed aluminum crass members to form the floor and build the walls on top of them.  I have a time line of pictures located at this LINK.  Please feel free to take a look and as they say a picture is truly worth a thousand word.

*All images provided by Pinterest by permission.