Things Done Right

There's a well known saying… if you want something done right, do it yourself. Well, that old adage certainly applies to us and our truck. In hindsight, even if we couldn't have the truck built in Europe, we should’ve built the truck ourselves right here in Vancouver. It would have saved us not only money, but an amount of aggravation that is now beyond measure.

Unfortunately we never ran the numbers for building the truck ourselves, and frankly, we didn’t really feel much like doing so at this point in our life. But if we had, we feel confident that we could have rented a warehouse locally, bought a few machines, hired some of the primo trades people in the area, and built the truck at a leisurely pace in about a year.

The advantage of living where we do is that there's a huge boating community. This means there is a large pool to draw from of yacht trades people who, in the winter time when the weather here is miserable, are looking for work to fill the four months when they can't easily work on yachts.

Fortunately, even though we had the truck built by others, we did leave a significant amount of work off the build list. This was partly to save money on the build, but more rightly so, we just knew we could do a better job than those at the body builder.

This section is all about what we did ourselves, with a few of the projects being helped by some local trades because there were aspects to the job that we didn't have the specialized equipment for. This mainly relates to the extensive interior decor upgrade. Some of our own projects were also to correct stupid designs that the builder produced. The most notable being the dinette under seat storage catastrophe and table upgrade. Both of which we found easy solutions for, and were things the builder said couldn't be done.