#142 Our converted fridgebox house becomes a cozy home

Five years ago we bought this abandoned land in Portugal to try to find another way of living. Since then we have been regenerating the land, reusing materials to build our infrastructure and documenting everything we do so others can learn from it. In a previous video we moved the fridge box to its final location. In this video we will finish the interior with reused and recycled furniture so it will become a sustainable and cozy home. Welcome to a new Project Camp update. To keep going with reusing things we are going to visit some different second-hand shops to see if we can find high quality second-hand furniture for our fridge box. Because we have the sockets on this side we don't do new things in Project Camp. We already know that. Okay, back to camp. We have all we need for the interior of the fridge box but there are a lot of things to do so we made a list. We have two rooms, a bedroom and a living room and on both have a bunch of stuff to work on. Let's get started. Let's give it a try. Okay, done. And for this take we have recycled plastic cloth hangers made by Precious Plastic Workspace. Okay, let's pause a bit here because these cloth hangers are quite special. They are made in collaboration with Precious Plastic Workspace and to tell their story we need to go away from camp again. We are in Aulas Estiblo de Ofreixo, a Precious Plastic Workspace we helped to set up in the past. It is a social workspace that works with the sea workers in the area. You can find them in the Precious Plastic map. The cloth hangers are made out of recycled plastic and for that the first step they do is to collect their plastic from different sources. Sometimes they do beach cleanups but they also collect plastic locally in their neighborhood with these containers and inside is where they make the next steps. Let me show you. First step, we shred it with this machine to turn it into little flakes. This is our raw material. Then we mix up different colors. Put the mix in the injection machine, melt it and inject it into the mold. Once it cools, we open the mold and discard the sprues. And there we have it, a new cloth hanger. So we now have our cloth hangers ready, so it's time to go back to camp and put it in our fridge box house. For those who don't know, Precious Plastic is a worldwide community of small-scale recyclers based on a set of open-source machines that allows everyone to become a recycler. For more info, you can check the link in the description or go to their YouTube channel. Now, let's get back to Julie in the fridge box. And this open space here seems actually perfect for the mirror. Somewhere over here would be great. Great. But actually, now that I have a closer look, when I open this window, it will actually hit the mirror right in the middle, which is not what we want. Got here two pieces of wood, and they're both cut in the same angle. We place it right here, hits the window frame first, before the metal will hit the mirror. Seems to work, great. So let's install them. And we have two tiny shelves on the side of the mirror, not bad. Okay, now the mirror and the shelves are in place, we can actually stay in this area and start to install the bar for the curtains. And luckily we found in the second hand these guys. And this stick actually was left over for some other project. And this one fits perfectly above this window. All right, bar for the curtains on the wall. But now we still are missing the curtains. So now it's time to actually measure, or take out the rings, and take out the old stitches, and cut the piece of fabric in the right measurement. So that's what I'm gonna do. All right, so let's see if these curtains now fit on the stick. Not hitting the mirror. Next! Okay, that was the last task for the bedroom. Let's go into the living room. So actually the special relaxation feature of this sofa is broken. And we're gonna have a look how we can fix it. But on this side, just that element to connect it to the seat is broken. So it might be actually a bit difficult to fix this. Luckily over here there is the article number with the company. So I'm gonna have a look on the internet and see if we can find them. So after a little investigation on the internet, we actually found the company and also the contact of the person to order some spare parts. So this is what we have done and the spare part just arrived. So we're gonna have a look if they actually fit. So now we should press this button. And that's it, broken piece out. And now we're gonna replace it with a new light rod as they are called. So we're gonna press this in here and then it should plop. There we go. It makes you able to sit backwards with the legs up. Quite special. Next, we needed some light. And by chance we had a broken lamp laying around at home. This is definitely not working. I think I found it. I have this switch. So it's a multimeter and I set it up that if there's connection it makes a noise. But when I tried both sides, nothing happened. So I'm gonna try to replace this old guy that doesn't work for another one a bit more solid that we have laying around here in the workspace. Okay, so lamp is ready. Now it works. Quite satisfying to bring back to life these kind of objects that are forgotten in the drawer in the back of the storage. So it's ready to go into the trailer. Now just... Ready. For this project we want a foldable table because it's such small space. So if we can at least put away the table from that time to time for different uses would be very useful. And for that we have saved a couple of years ago a piece from the yellow van that always thought could be useful for something. We didn't know for what yet. But I think it could fit this project. So this is the piece. It used to be the piece that had a seat on the front of the van. But it was a foldable seat. So you could sit or you could fold the seat up to have more space in the front. But we need to figure out where to attach it. The height also. Because normal tables are between 70-75 centimeters. Dining tables from here up is more than 80. So we will need to screw our frame around this. But that's not that easy because this is a very thin sheet of conglomerate. So we cannot just screw something and make it sturdy. So we're gonna look what is behind this. This is the depth or the piece that we need to make in order to attach our frame. And to get the right depth, that was 3.6. I found this leftover piece of plywood which are 1.8 each. So 1.8 plus 1.8, 3.6. We have the right depth. So now we're gonna put back our paneling. See if it fits. But now we're gonna make a little trick and place the top part a bit to the left. So then it's aligned with the window. We have some leftovers from another project you might remember. That it's actually a perfect tabletop. It's HPL. It's good for outside but it's also waterproof, flat. So we need to make some cuts on it. For that we put in a specific blade. Because it's not the same to cut this kind of material than the wood. But it's already set on the machine. This will be the main piece of furniture on the living room. So it will act a bit as a storage place, kitchen counter. And we also want to install a sink on it. But for these uses this is not the best surface we can get. It's a thin piece of wood. It's kind of easy to damage. Not the best to make it wet. So for that we'll need to think in a bit of another solution for it. But I think I have something in mind that could work for this piece. So we took some measurements, made a design. And sent it to our precious plastic friends. This time to a workspace in Lasafour, Spain. Let's see how they do it. So the package from precious plastic Lasafour just arrived. So let's see what is inside. It looks great. It's exactly what we wanted. A tabletop made out of recycled plastic. With nice finishing. It's amazing. Now in order to cut these bigger beams. I will need to use the circular saw. Because the blades of the jigsaw are not long enough. So the hole for the sink is ready. So we already have our countertop in place. Sink in place. Next step is put back everything together. Little details. And we'll have it ready to put back in the trailer. As you can see there is no glass in the door. Let's close the cab with some curtains. Okay we have one done. The ropes are able to move. Which is handy. So if we want to open the curtain in the cabinet it's possible. Strong. So let's make the second one. Number one and number two. Both done and ready to be attached. We will need to get some hooks. Attach them to the frame. And actually take the glass out from the door that has still in it. So yeah it's good to go. Cool here it is. Almost done the cabinet. Only missing the tap. We attach this piece of fabric now with some screws. Which works way better and it's way more tight. This one we leave loose for now. So yeah time to bring it in to the trailer. Now we have our cabinet in. But we have here a little issue. In order to open the door we need to leave some space in between the wall and the cabinet. To be able to open it. So we have decided to close this door completely. Unlock it and just access to the bottom part with the curtains. So then we can actually move this thing all the way to the wall. And we gain a few centimeters in such small space. With these little pieces now the door is completely locked. Now there's no more hinges there. So we can actually push the cabinet all the way to the wall. So we got some back finishing for our cabinet. Put on the wall. Looks nice. We also have a small window here close to the sink. To avoid the water to go against the wall. So next step is to connect our sink to the outside. And for that I have found this leftover pipe from other projects. I think we have it for connecting the first time the water. We have some offcuts around. But it seems like a good size to connect here to the bottom. Water in the pump. Water out the pump. And the energy just comes from us. Cabinet done. Now let's make some shelves. So as we saw before in the plastic sheet our friends made. There were some free spaces that we used to cut another piece of recycled plastic. Because on top of the kitchen probably we need some extra space. So with that extra pieces we are gonna try to make a shelf. First thing we need is to cut some metal parts for the frame. So I have the pieces cut up. Next step would be to drill the holes according to our screw system. Okay so we have the metal parts ready. Already welded, drilled. And a bit of grinding to make it fancy. Yes this view is awesome. And the window frames are really nice as well. Anyway we would still like to add some curtains. So this trailer can also have a bit more privacy. And we will need to look at the fabrics that we found and see what fits. We have a bit of light blue bed sheet. And the other side of a light blue bed sheet. And a nice piece of dark fabric. Let's see what we can do. Okay so we got now one side of the curtain cut into two. And now the idea would be to fix these two together. And we would have a bit more space to give it a nice shape. So all the little bits of secondhand fabrics are used. And the bed sheets are turned into curtains. So this is done. Okay the list is complete. Now we have a cozy home with lots of reused and recycled stuff. We are very proud of the final result. We went for a very rough trailer we found in a scrapyard. To this very special home. We had many challenges on the way. But no one said it would be easy. Okay that was it for this update. If you like what we do you can support us in Patreon. And watch already the next update without ads and in 4k. Otherwise thanks for watching and see you next week!