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Mitty the Ambo — Ambulance Conversion

Converted a $7,000 ambulance into a fully off-grid remote office and home, "Mitty the Ambo," and lived in it full-time for about sixteen months with my wife Christy and dog Atlas, covering roughly 50,000 miles across the U.S. Designed and built custom electrical, water, heating/AC, and workspace systems from scratch. Covered by Business Insider and Tiny Home Tours, and the basis for a three-part LinkedIn article series, "What Living in an Ambulance Taught Me About Product Development," on product foundations, user-centric design, and keep/kill/pivot decisions.

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“What did you actually do here?”

I converted a $7,000 decommissioned ambulance into a fully off-grid home and remote office, which we called "Mitty the Ambo," and lived in it full-time with my wife Christy and our dog Atlas for about sixteen months, covering roughly 50,000 miles across the U.S. I designed and built every system myself from scratch: a solar-powered electrical system, an integrated hot-and-cold water system with filtration, a dual-fridge setup on a custom sliding mount, custom modular table mounts built from aluminum scraps that doubled as a standing desk, and a window AC unit housed in a converted storage cabinet for under $400. Before building anything, I used cardboard prototypes to test mechanical concepts like the bed layout before committing to materials, guided by three design pillars I set for the whole project: reliability, modular functionality, and minimal friction. The work got picked up by Business Insider and Tiny Home Tours, and became the basis for a three-part LinkedIn article series I wrote, "What Living in an Ambulance Taught Me About Product Development," covering product foundations, user-centric design, and keep/kill/pivot decisions.

System DesignPrototyping