So I’ve already laid out my pros and cons of why I’m actually doing this, but there’s another aspect to it that I didn’t really explore in that post, and it basically revolves around the idea of minimalism.

We do things big in America. We love our malls, our big meals, our bigger televisions, and our huge trucks and SUVs. We live in a time of unprecedented opulence and convenience, but that doesn’t come without its own issues. The main one is that it is completely and utterly unsustainable. I remember learning in a high school environmental science class that it would take the resources of four or more planet Earths if everyone on the planet were to live the way Americans do. We’re supremely wasteful and consumptive, and it’s a lifestyle our grandchildren will certainly not be able to “enjoy”.

One important part of this whole process is turning the back of a truck into a livable, comfortable space. I have a number of plans and ideas on how to do that, and I’m going to chronicle my attempts at turning them into realities in this “Home Improvement” series. This one is a super basic one, but hey, baby steps. If I plan on living in this thing, I’ll need a place to sleep, naturally. So I wandered over to Craigslist, found the sketchiest new mattress and box spring set I could find, and placed an order. Notice the word “new”, that’s super important, because I’m not in the mood for a case of bed bugs or crabs or whatever else you can catch from a used mattress.

With the bed out of the way, I was ready to try bigger and better things. The next thing on my list was a place to hang my dress shirts and pants. In a real-world setting, this would be called a “clothes rack”. So I took another trip down to Home Depot, which is quickly becoming the most important place in my life, and I picked up some screws, a screwdriver, some clothes hangers, two mounting brackets, and a 6 foot long wooden rod. If I had done everything correctly, here is how the process should have gone:

I did it.

And by it I mean sleeping in the box truck for the first time. I still have a corporate apartment until Sunday, but I wanted to try out living in the box truck, because at least I still have the flexibility of normal human housing, and this way, I could work out any potential kinks.

Okay, maybe that’s a little bit dramatic, once I was in there, it really just felt like being home, in my own bed. It was pretty comfortable, especially for a mattress that only cost me $99. The eventual goal is still to get a super comfortable memory-foam, fancy-shmancy bed, mainly because I feel that without a solid sleep foundation, the rest of my day suffers and I end up using caffeine as a crutch. Not ideal.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to post about every single night I spend in the box truck, but this one was markedly different than the first, and deserves to be noted as such. When it was bed time last night, I wasn’t feeling the same type of anxiousness that pervaded the previous night. I was much more relaxed and confident. I still did my best to be quiet, but I wasn’t stopping every few seconds to make sure that nobody was watching. The overall experience was much more pleasant this time around, and I slept like a small child.