MOBILE STUDIO NEEDED

Day 0 The PLAN

Author: Justin Dunn

Description:

My plans are to find and build a mobile studio to work on any form of art out of and live in while traveling to and from the art projects.

Story:

My name is Justin, I am an Artist. I am a left brain thinker and love to build and create. I love to problem solve and the excitement I get from my own decisions and actions. I have always had a love for machines and more specifically Automobiles. I love anything mechanical really. For me this includes computers as the premise stems from working components. I compartmentalize anything even lines of code as components.

I have big dreams of a life full of focusing on art and working on projects all day. Then have they projects work to make an income. Then take the income and build assets that work passively. This can include video production, real estate, websites, or any other various amount of business adventures. I have experience in may different fields. One common feature to all of them is driving. Everything I have wanted to do incorporates hours of driving a day. I have put hundreds of thousands of miles on multiple vehicle. I have maintained them myself. This has resulted in multiple engine swaps and many break downs.

I have been looking for a way to minimize all my miles in life. Driving so much has caused me to not focus on my work. I have always wanted to be working on work everyday and driving to and from Tampa has been causing me to not be able to get much work done over the past 15 years. I would love to just stop driving and work on my projects and go back to driving after. I would love to be able to drive to the project location and then travel home the following day. I would love to drive to location and have everything I need and more. I would love to work on one project while on location of another location.

Having to take a car or truck has limited what tools and resources I have to work on projects with. Having all my tools at home and having to pack up and bring what I need for that one project has really limited my scope of work. Currently I travel to provide technical support and only have my laptop available to do other work on. This limits the ability to work on videos stored on my larger hard drives. I really only able to use Photoshop, Wed Development, and writing. Then when I return home I have to cram all my other work in.

This is what lead me to plan a mobile studio. This would be a place that I have dual screens and larger hard drives to do video editing. There would be room for a dedicated tool kit for any mechanical project. I would also be able to go inside and focus on nothing but the work at hand. Then take a nap or go to bed for the night and wake up refreshed and ready to focus all energy on work again. This would require a vehicle that could park anywhere and hold everything needed to live and survive for the time I am gone.

The first need was that seemed most important to me was parking anywhere. In 2009, my friends and I went to Slam Fest, a mini truck show, at the Florida Fair Grounds. We had a hotel floor lined up and when we got there the opportunity was no longer available. Instead of making the 2 hour drive home for the night and then back in the morning we slept in a single cab Chevy S10 in a Walmart parking lot. This was the first time I realize you could sleep in almost any situation if you were dedicated enough. I thought about needing something like a motorhome. The glaring issue here is that it was clearly a vehicle someone could be sleeping in.

This was the first time I thought about getting a Step Van. Something like an old Fedex truck would be perfect. I started doing a lot more research and planning a Step Van build. For me a regular van was way too small. I had to have something I could stand up in and stretch out. The step van seemed like no one would suspect that there was someone inside sleeping. I started with the weight capacities, knowing I wanted something that could pull a vehicle.

The biggest vehicle I have to consider is 6000 lbs and 22 feet long. So I knew I wanted a turbo diesel with a heavy duty chassis. I also new I wanted an engine that was reliable and had lots of parts available. This made me immediately think of the Cummins 5.9l Turbo Diesel. Who wouldn’t right. If you get the right year engine it could be mechanical. Then get an electronic controlled transmission and be gold.

Around December 2019, I sold my house for a good profit and was able to pay off all my credit card debt and still have money left over to invest in the next house. I had been doing lots of research on stocks and decided on Tesla stock. I had been watching all the progress of the company and already knew a lot about the products and future plans. I asked a few people about stocks and if they agreed. Multiple people told me that December was a high month to invest and would be advantageous to invest in January. Tesla stock was $350 in December and come January it was already $650 a share. I kept doing more research and determined the stock would still go higher. I started to buy in. I progressively start to buy shares in stages. By the time I was all in my average purchase price was $900 a share.

In March 2020, I decided to use some of the stock out and purchase a step van. I started looking at ads and decided to go look in person at a one before selling out. I found a step van at BGA Bus Sales on Craigslist. I