Tigris99 wrote:Mother nature has been such a bi-polar biatch the last couple years it's hard to be prepared.
You live close enough to me that I understand exactly what you're going through. It was over 70F a couple weeks ago before my trip to Sedona. It's been snowing (flurries) all day, and there's a dusting of white crap on the ground right now. Which is significantly more white crap than fell here for the entire month of February. So bizarre. It's been unusually dry here this year so far in general, so even when it's been above freezing, the trails haven't been the usual muddy slop...They've been dusty at their worst.
Which makes me concerned for the upcoming season. I was seeing active mosquitoes in January, and I'm hearing about active ticks in the area already. The bug season is going to be BAD, and the local land management agencies have already been getting fires started by lightning from time to time. Fires normally aren't much of a concern here at all (can't recall the last time I've seen more than "moderate" fire danger on the park notice boards), and I have a sinking suspicion that this year is going to have some damaging fires.
On our drive home from AZ, we had to deal with smoke from some pretty major grass fires between Amarillo and Oklahoma.
Anyway, I'm thrilled with the camper.
If I was you, I'd really start diving into materials costs before you commit one way or another. My camper wound up being right around $10,000 with all the options right out of the gate. If I wanted to do it a little differently, I could have bought a much simpler camper from the same company and then DIY modded it for less than half that initial expense, spreading out the cost of the mods over a longer period of time. Would have been an interesting way of doing things if I was so inclined.
When I was pricing things out for myself when considering DIY, I was looking at probably $3k bare minimum for a super basic trailer and cabin, and who knows what once various options got added to the mix (considering the likelihood for cost overruns in the DIY process, doubling the budget wouldn't have been a bad idea). I probably would have wound up spending within a couple thousand in the end on DIY as what I ended up spending on this pro built trailer. And I feel like the finishing touches turned out better this way.