LaDonna Salo’s wood-trimmed sleeper features a wine bottle theme. Soft colors and all the amenities of a house make Salo’s life on the road more comfortable.

When LaDonna Salo bought her Peterbilt 379 in 1996, it was a pretty basic 1992 United Van Lines truck – right down to its painted white wheels. “There were no lights and no chrome,” the owner-operator from Fort Oglethorpe, Ga., says. The sleeper wasn’t much to write home about either. It was a small, factory sleeper with only basic amenities.

Three years later – after she had paid off the Pete – Salo plunked down $50,000 to stretch the frame and install a new 120-inch sleeper from Double Eagle. It’s custom designed with all the amenities of home: a shower, couch, built-in microwave and convection oven, hardwood floors and custom touches that Salo picked out herself. And the best part about it – every penny she spent was deductible.

Today, truck makers offer optional amenities on factory trucks unheard of 10 years ago – sinks, special fabrics, brushed aluminum dashes, special-edition logos, sleeper configuration options, choices of style in instrument clusters and premium seats. You can order a Kenworth W900 with an 86-inch sleeper or a Western Star 4900 EX with a Stratosphere Sleeper tricked out with many of the premium features, like cabinet doors, that are standard on aftermarket sleepers.

For many owner-operators, stock sleepers and cabs – even with today’s choices – don’t offer the custom touches they desire to turn their office on the road into a home away from home. Some are looking for the extra space they can’t find in a 70-inch factory sleeper; others want kitchens, toilets and showers; and many are looking to add their own personality to fleet-spec’ed tractors that often look more like gray-clad cells than comfy bedrooms.

“That color gray – I hated the color,” says owner-operator Russ Brown, who recently refurbished the interior of a Freightliner Classic he bought from Swift Transportation last year. The color probably worked fine for Swift, which buys tractors by the thousands. But for the Oklahoma City trucker, the stock sleeper just wasn’t up to his specs. There were no cabinet doors to keep clothes and other items from falling out, and the cabinet designed for the television wouldn’t allow anything larger than a 9-inch screen. So Brown and his wife Debbie decided on a custom theme, stripped the sleeper down to its skeleton and got to work.