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A Canadian YouTuber pulls a folding plastic box out of storage and turns it into a full shelter in seconds.
Steve Wallis, the Alberta-based host of “Camping with Steve,” has built a reputation on testing the cheapest, weirdest, most unconventional shelters he can dream up and then simply living in them for a night to see what breaks. In this video, he digs out a DIY pop-up structure he and his crew fabricated the previous winter out of coroplast — the corrugated plastic sheeting more commonly seen on yard signs — and puts it through a real-world setup and hangout session.
- The shelter is a homemade folding structure made from coroplast, built by Wallis the previous winter, not a commercial fiberglass pop-up tent.
- Wallis demonstrates the setup and usability of the shelter on camera and says he may build a second version and film the entire construction process for viewers.
- The test follows Wallis’s established format for his shelter videos: pitch it fast, crack a drink, then hunker down to see how it performs.
Coroplast Benefits for Shelter Construction
Coroplast is lightweight, waterproof, and cheap — the same qualities that make it a favorite for temporary election signs and moving-day boxes also make it useful for rapid-deploy shelters. Because the material can be scored and folded into rigid panels, builders can hinge it to collapse flat for storage or transport and then pop it open into a standing structure in seconds, fastened with simple hardware rather than tent poles or guy lines. That’s the same rapid-deploy logic that’s turned coroplast into a go-to medium for DIY emergency shelters and even micro-cabin projects, where builders prize it for holding its shape without adding much weight.
For Wallis, that translates directly into content: a shelter that folds down small in the off-season and pops into a usable structure on demand is exactly the kind of budget-camping gimmick his channel is built around. It’s the same spirit that’s led him to test everything from tarps to scrap materials as makeshift housing in the woods, the same instinct on display in his bushcraft tent made from plastic wrap.
The “Bob Ross of Camping” Formula
Wallis has earned a nickname for his calm, unhurried on-camera style — Vice dubbed him the “Bob Ross of Camping” for the way he narrates even the sketchiest builds with the same relaxed patience Ross once brought to happy little trees. His formula rarely changes: get the shelter up as Step 1, crack open a cold drink as Step 2, then hunker down and let the footage show whether the setup actually holds.
Step 1: set up shelter. Step 2: crack a cold one. Step 3: hunker down and see what happens.
That stripped-down approach is what separates his channel from more polished survival content — there’s no dramatic narration about life-or-death stakes, just a guy in Alberta testing whether a folded sheet of plastic can keep the weather out for a night. Viewers who follow his channel for that same unpretentious testing style have also gravitated toward his other budget shelter runs, including his solo overnight building a sandbag shelter in the woods.
Future Phases of the Build
Wallis teases in the video that he and his team may construct a second coroplast shelter and document the entire build from scratch, rather than just testing a structure that was already assembled. That would mark a shift from this video’s role — showing off a finished prototype — into a full how-to for viewers who want to replicate the design themselves.
Given how often Wallis’s channel circles back to compare cheap DIY builds against name-brand gear, it wouldn’t be a surprise to eventually see the coroplast shelter measured against something off the shelf, the way his audience has seen him break down setups like the Coleman Instant Up 10P Lighted Northstar Darkroom Tent.
For now, the coroplast box stays a one-off experiment sitting in Wallis’s gear pile from last winter — proof of concept, cold drink included, with the full build video still just a tease at the end of the clip.
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