We bought a 2006 Fleetwood Timberlake tent trailer, renovated it, and took it on a 10 day road trip across eastern Canada.
This is everything we used when renovating it and how much it cost.
It is a dream for many people nowadays to own an RV, trailer, or van to use as an adventuring vehicle. The lifestyle of traveling wherever and whenever you want, while not paying expensive hotel fees, is wonderful!
Most campgrounds, in my experience, are between $30-$60 CAD a night per site, whereas hotels can be upwards of $150 per room. During this road trip, my mom, sister and I stayed at a 6 campgrounds, with the cheapest one - $39 CAD for a 2 service site (electric and water) - being in New Brunswick. If we stayed at 6 hotels, we'd be bankrupt.
I'd also say that a hauling trailer, be it hard top or tent, is the superior option rather than an RV. With a tent trailer like ours, or a small hard top, you can unhook the trailer at your campground and still use the car, unlike in an RV or van. As well, even though a tent trailer has canvas material on the walls, unlike an RV or hard top, it did wonderfully during a thunderstorm and heat wave.
The adventuring, the memories, and the drastic decrease in accommodation prices, I'd say, are well worth the investment that is an adventuring vehicle.
However, how much does a investment like this cost? Let's talk about it.
For starters, we bought the camper second hand from Kijiji and it costed about $5900 CAD. You can definitely get a cheaper tent trailer, but we were happy to pay more for a model with it's own full bathroom.
Next, we needed to change the plates on the camper which was around $30 CAD or so.
From there, we needed to install a 7 pin break controller on the SUV. Bare with me as I barely understand this, but a 7 pin break controller is an electrical hookup from the SUV to the trailer that is used to control the breaks on the trailer, the break lights, the turn signals, and charges battery backup while we drive. To have it installed, it was about $600 CAD.
It was very useful to have when going up and down the mountains in Cape Breton as we weren't solely relying on the SUV's breaks, but rather both the SUV's and the trailer's combined.
It also great for charging the battery back up so that we could still use all our appliances at an unserviced/off grid campsite - i.e. no access to electric or water. Forewarning though, unplug this when you park for the night, otherwise you may drain your car's battery like we once did.
We needed to buy a battery prior to this as the trailer didn't come with one. I can't remember what the price was exactly, but I believe it was under $100 or so.
From there, we needed to load 2 propane tanks into the front compartment, which we already had and thankfully, both were full. For the entire road trip, we only used one for the whole 10 day trip. It helped that it was summer time and the nights were warm, so the propane was mainly used when cooking instead of heating.
From there we got started on the interior renovations.
Before we go more in depth on the prices of the renovations however, I feel it's important to say that that trailer was absolutely road ready without the interior renovations. The vast majority of them were purely stylistic.
That is to say, that we did not need to do them, but rather wanted to. If you find yourself in a similar position, you can save yourself some money and only do the necessary renovations.
During the renovation we power washed the exterior, painted the cabinets white, changed the counter tops, changed the flooring, wallpapered the walls, fixed the ceiling (ripped out old, moldy insulation, and sealed the gaps), reupholstered the cushions, as well as sewed new curtains.
These are all the products we used during renovations:
Ceiling glue - already had
Vinyl wallpaper - $116
Vinyl counter top contact paper - $119
Peel and stick flooring - already had
Caulking - already had
Wood glue - already had
Sand paper - already had
RV Roof Ceiling Tape - $42
Cabinetry paint - $40
Thrifted fabric for reupholstering dinette cushions and sew new curtains- ~$80
Bits and bobs (table cloth, shower curtain, drain hose, bucket, WD40, etc.) - ~$100
In total, this adventuring vehicle, with all the renovation, and additions to the SUV, cost us about ~$7127 CAD.
It's definitely not cheap, an investment for sure. In my opinion however, it will continue to pay for itself as we save money on accommodations - the biggest traveling expense - during our future adventures.
What do you think? Would you invest in an adventuring vehicle?
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