Today is “Launch Day” – a term in the RV community that refers to the day you start living full time in your RV. Today is the day we will be moving our RV out of our driveway and into the local RV campground where we will be living. We’re only going about 10 miles away, but it’s the beginning of a huge change in our lifestyle. We leased a storage unit for the things we weren’t ready to part with or things we would absolutely need if for some reason this doesn’t work out and we end up back in an apartment or house. For everything else – we have purged, donated, sold, given away and even trashed so much stuff. It’s a little sad how much stuff we had to go through – not sad because of what we were getting rid of, but rather because there was so much stuff that we’ve been holding on to – and moving from place to place – that we don’t even use, want or enjoy.

I have to say when it comes to getting rid of things, the military community is the way to go! There is a Facebook page for the local military wives here and several times I was able to just post a picture of something we were getting rid of, and within minutes I would have another wife contacting me to arrange a time to come get it. People love getting stuff for free!! We’ve been so very blessed and have been on the receiving end of free stuff so many times, so we were happy to pay it forward. And it couldn’t be easier than posting a picture and then having someone show up to haul away whatever we were getting rid of.

The little stuff that wasn’t worth the time to post online, things that didn’t make it in our multiple runs to charity, or things we decided against keeping at the last minute ended up out at the curb for Bulk Pick Up Day.  Living on post, one of the great benefits is that every single week a large truck comes around and picks up all the bulk items that you are getting rid of. Furniture, household items, etc – things that don’t go in the regular trash or recycling. It’s wonderful! Just set it out by the curb and the next day it’s hauled off for you!

We set a bunch of stuff out late last night and even before we went to bed, people were going through it finding goodies. First thing this morning, there were ladies out there digging through boxes and pulling out all sorts of odds and ends before the bulk truck showed up. It’s like a free yard sale!! I do love a good yard sale, so I can appreciate the excitement. It was also fun to see some of the things going to a new home. I hope they enjoy it all!

After the Pile O’ Stuff had been picked up, I looked out and instantly felt relief. Like a huge weight had just been lifted from my shoulders. I no longer want to feel owned by my stuff. We say we own our stuff, but really it ends up owning us. The more we have, the more we have to clean, to organize, to find a place for. It’s a never ending cycle that takes up so much time. Time we could be spending traveling, exploring, creating family memories, or being creative. It’s very freeing to let it go!

We’ve moved several times and it’s always a lot of work, but never as much as this. Before, there were always boxes of things we kept “just in case” or things that got stuck in a drawer or closet just because there was room. It didn’t matter if we had 15 coats and jackets for 3 people even though we lived in Texas – we’d just move them from one closet in one house to another closet in the new house. Moving into the RV has forced us to really look at every single thing we own and examine whether or not it is necessary or truly gives us joy. There is only so much room to put things, so we have to make sure we bring the right things.

Hubby and I have had several conversations about various items as we’ve been trying to decide what to take. We got really tickled at ourselves when we were going through one of our kitchen drawers. He would hold up a utensil and I would say “yes” or “no” to keeping it, or we’d talk about what we used it for.

It went something like this:

Ice cream scoop? Of course, we love ice cream!

Cookie dough scoop? I use that every time I make cookies or muffins

Small spatula? I use that to get the last bit of the mayo out of the jar

Wait! Couldn’t we just use a SPOON for all of those things?  How ever will we survive without a cookie dough or ice cream scoop??  Just kidding!  Of course, let’s do it!

We do not need a ton of gadgets and utensils that only serve one purpose when we can have a multi-purpose spoon that takes up less space! 

This past week during homeschool, we talked about refugees and people in other countries. We looked at pictures of “tent cities” where families (often multiple families) so often live. We talked about how fortunate we are to have shelter, clean running water, and an abundance of food. As we were planning this adventure, there might have been moments that we wondered if we could really be happy going from our 3 bedroom, 2.5 bath house into less than 300 square foot with 1 bath, but the reality is – so many people around the world would love to live like we are about to live. It’s all about perspective.

That perspective is something that I hope remains in the front of our minds for the next couple of years as we choose to live life more simply. I hope that every time we feel a surge of discontentment…as we get impatient having to wait for the bathroom…as we feel annoyed at the lack of counter space – I hope those moments will be reminders to PRAY. I want those moments to be reminders to thank God for all that we have been given, and to pray for all those people around the world who are living with so much less.

I pray that we will truly find that having an abundant life has nothing to do with how much stuff we have. Instead, I hope we will experience that abundance through LIVING our life – enjoying family time, meeting new friends, serving others, seeing God’s creation and exploring this amazing world and all it has to offer.

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.  

But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal.  

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

~ Matthew 6:19-21

Here we go!

We are just 18 days away from the beginning of our Full Time RV living!  I am definitely ready to get started.  Right now we have lots of boxes around our house as we organize what we are taking with us and what is going into storage.  We’re still purging quite a bit too, so we have piles everywhere.  Piles to be donated and other piles that will go out with the trash on trash day.  I really dislike clutter, so having all these piles and boxes just make me all the more eager to get moved into the RV. I’m longing for the simplicity of it all – less to clean, less to put away, just less stuff.  More quality time, more adventure, more focusing on what is truly important.

Anyway – I wanted to share the first major modification (mod) we made to the RV.   We took our boring brown fridge and made it magnetic & colorful!

One thing we’ve noticed about RV designers – they must love the color brown.  Everything is brown.  Even when you buy a rig brand new and get to choose the fabrics you want, they all seem to just be different patterns of brown. 

BEFORE – this is the way it came

Boring, right?  We thought so.  Our first order of business is getting some color into this new home of ours to liven it up a bit!  I’m making curtains for our bunk area and for our daughter’s area, and we’ll be bringing in some floor mats and putting décor on the walls as we go, but this fridge mod was an easy one to tackle first.   Besides, it serves 2 purposes – to add color and to make the fridge magnetic.

How we did it

After measuring the faces of our fridge/freezer, we went to Home Depot and bought a sheet of galvanized steel and some spray paint.

Hubby then cut the steel into 2 pieces – one for the fridge and one for the freezer.  He lightly sanded each piece so the paint would adhere better and then gave each piece a couple coats of Rustoleum spray paint that was made for painting metal.  We figured if we were going to add color, we might as well make it count, so we went for BRIGHT colors – lime green and turquoise!

At first, we weren’t too sure how we could get the door apart since there were no visible screws to be found and we sure didn’t want to break our new fridge.  After a little investigative work, we realized that the plastic strip opposite the hinges pulled off and went back on easily.  You can see what I mean in the pictures I took as I took apart the freezer.

It turns out we didn’t even need to take out the original front pieces because the new metal ones slide in right in front of them.  But in case you are wondering what your fridge looks like underneath those wood pieces, here you go.

We put the wood pieces back in, then slid the new metal front pieces into place right in front of the original ones, and popped the plastic edging strip back on.  Now we have a fun place to display the magnets we collect on our adventures!

We are now about 6 weeks away from moving into our RV full time!

How does someone prepare to move from a 1600 square foot house (with a garage) into an approximately 250 square foot RV? 

For starters, we have been purging like crazy around our house! We are selling, donating, & consolidating a LOT of stuff, and then storing the rest.

It’s truly amazing (and not really in a good way) how much stuff we tend to collect and how little of it we actually use or love. So this is a perfect time for us to “pass it on” and bless someone else!  The 3 of us had a closet full of clothes, but we all tend to wear our favorites over and over. We pulled out all the items that we will likely never wear again and ended up with 4 trash bags full of clothes and shoes to give away.

Next, we tackled the kitchen! I am a lover of coffee and have been collecting coffee cups for years – usually from places we go on vacation or other fun places. I keep telling myself it’s good to have lots of cups for when we have company, but honestly, I couldn’t fit that many people in my house anyway. Hubby and I both tend to go back and forth between a couple of our favorite coffee mugs and the rest just sit in the cabinet taking up space. So out they went!! We kept our favorites – some with a special meaning to us and my Fiesta cups because I love the fun colors and they go with my small collection of Fiesta plates (that will also get stored for a little while) that have been gifts from my Mom. We purged a lot of randomness & gadgets from our kitchen that were taking up space but not getting used, and were able to give many, many things away to other military families. It’s actually fun to get to bless someone else like that, and WAY better than spending all day holding a yard sale just to make $20.

We made a big difference by consolidating our CDs and DVDs by putting all the discs into a large capacity zippered CD holder and throwing away all the cases. Those plastic cases take up a lot of room!! I filled up an entire plastic tote with just the cases, but all the CDs/DVDs fit into a case that will easily fit in a closet or on a shelf.

We also purged our “memory boxes”.  15 years of marriage and 11 years of having a child means LOTS and LOTS and LOTS of cards – birthday cards, anniversary cards, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, etc.  Rob and I came to an agreement that we were both ok getting rid of 90% of them without getting offended.  We know we love each other, and the chances of us going back to re-read most of them isn’t likely.  So we each picked a small stack of the really special ones – a few notes from family members, extra special notes we wrote to each other, or a few super sweet homemade cards from our daughter – and we let the rest go.  No guilt!

I have big plans to work the same magic on our photos. What prints we have in boxes have already been purged, but oh the many photos I have on my computer!! Yes, they are all backed up (I’ve learned that lesson the hard way!). The problem is, we aren’t enjoying them as much as we should because they are all digital. So my plan is to get some photo books printed of our favorites, highlights from each year, etc. In the process, many need to be deleted. The problem with digital photos is it’s too easy to take 10 shots of the same thing trying to get the best photo, but then the extra 9 never get deleted. That will be a project to tackle after the move.

We do have a small list of items that we have sold or will be selling before we move. Things that will give us a little pocket money to get some needed items for the RV. But mostly, we decided to give stuff away. We’ve always been extra blessed when we needed things and in the spirit of being thankful, we wanted to do the same for others.

After all the donating, consolidating and selling – we will be putting the rest our stuff in storage.

What are we storing?

* Sentimental things that we know for sure we want to keep – A tote of memory items for each of us

* Things that we will need if/when we move back into a house or into a bigger RV and that would be hard/expensive to replace

* Things that won’t it in the RV but that we will want access to. For example, we’ll store our off-season clothes in the storage unit and swap them out as the seasons change. We’ll also keep a box or 2 of holiday/seasonal items and decorations and see what we actually use this first year. I’m sure those will get purged again as we see what we end up using in our new home. We’ll also store some of our daughter’s toys & books that she’s not bringing so that she can rotate them if she wants. For the most part, her main books will come from our weekly trips to the library anyway since she reads so much, but we are storing a few boxes worth of her favorites or ones she wants to keep for her kids one day.

What other preparations are going on?

We’ve made reservations at the RV park where we will be living. We’re actually really excited about this place. Hubby will be closer to work, and we’ll be closer to our favorite library and grocery store. It’s the little things, sometimes! It’s got a beautiful water view, lots of ducks for Emily to feed, and a little store where she can have fun spending her money on snacks. She’s even asked if she can earn bags of duck food for doing well in school!

We’re also preparing the RV for us to live in it full time by making a few modifications. I’ll go into more detail in another post, but so far we’ve painted part of Emily’s area, replaced the master mattress, knocked out some false walls to increase storage, and we’re giving our fridge colorful, magnetic front panels! I’ll also be making curtains to replace the brown ones for Emily’s bunk area and for ours to brighten up the place.

Next, I need to work on purging my sewing supplies and deciding what I’m taking with me. I’ll be taking my sewing/embroidery machine with me so I can continue to do my crafty projects, but with limited space, I’ll have to be very organized and try to only have supplies on hand for the projects I’m currently working on!

We’re making progress! Stay tuned!

Yep, we bought an RV and are planning to move into it full time soon!  We’re going to be full time RVers and get to go camping every day!  Our family has always enjoyed camping together.  Rob and I used to camp 1-2 times a month before Emily was born, and after she came along we introduced her to the great outdoors.  If you know anything about Emily, you know she is truly a nature girl!  When we first took her camping, she was still a baby so we took the Pack-N-Play and set it up inside our tent for her to sleep in.   As she grew, she eventually graduated to her own air mattress – first a toddler size and then a twin size.  Through it all, she has always loved being outside in God’s creation.  She loves the dirt, water, mud, birds, creatures, hiking, sticks, rocks – all of it!

The only downside to camping in a tent is the weather.  For a while in the summer, it just got unbearably hot and too uncomfortable to sleep well.  Then there are also the lightening storms.  You do not want to be in a tent with metal poles in a lightening storm.  In the winter, the opposite problem creeps up and it was sometimes way too cold for the camping gear we owned.  We’d go camping as often as we could, but sometimes the weather would force us to cancel some trips.  For many years we’ve looked forward to getting an RV with heat & A/C so we could go camping year-round.  We finally did it! 

We ended up getting a Jayco x213 model.  It has a rear slide for the master bed at one end and bunk beds at the opposite end.  When the slide is out, it really opens up the space and gives us plenty of room.  It’s really a great layout for our little family!  We will use the top bunk area for storage, while Emily gets her own bottom bunk.  She can even fold up her bed and have a good size play area. 

We have a dinette area and a comfy sofa for hanging out

We did replace the master mattress with a better memory foam one – it is OH SO COMFY!  The space for the mattress is for a King, but we bought a Queen size for our replacement since that’s what we are used to at home anyway, and this gives us room to add more storage.  I love the windows by our bed, too!

Emily has a twin size bunk bed with a big shelf for her belongings.  She even has her own door to the outside! We’ll be hanging up some more storage for her and she’ll also keep some boxes of toys & books under her bed.  She’s being silly in this picture and it makes it look like she’s crowded up there, but she really has plenty of room – her bed is the same size as the one in our house that she sleeps on.

When she wants more space inside she can fold up the bed and spread out her toys or crafts.  She’ll even have a folding chair and we’ll have a folding table she can use under there too.  We will be lining the floor with foam mats to make it more comfy and colorful under there.  Right now, she and her Daddy are in the process of painting the underside fun colors!  I’ll show more pictures when everything is done.

So why live in it full time? 

Well, why not?  People do this all the time.  There are especially many homeschooling families that travel around living in an RV.  Many with WAY more kids than we have.  I’ve even read about a family with 12 kids living in an RV!  Wow!  Of course, their RV is much bigger than ours, but then again we only have one child.

We did some thinking and realized that we can live in the camper full time at a local RV campground and actually save a lot of money monthly compared to rent or living on post!  We have an old student loan debt that we are determined to get rid of and this will make it happen really soon!  We know it will be an adventure and we’ll have some challenges, but we are used to taking on crazy challenges in this family so we are looking forward to it.  We love family time and getting outside together so that will be easy.  We’ll also be able to just load up our home on the weekends and go visit places that we want to see while we are living in this area.  We have a big list of places we want to visit while we live in the Maryland/DC area!  The next time we move with the Army (which might be later this year), it will be so easy!

We’re planning to sell/donate a lot of stuff that we don’t really need.  Turns out, there’s a lot of stuff we don’t need around here.  Then, we’ll put the rest of it in storage for later.  Hubby will be giving up his woodworking for a while, but he’s spending his extra time on school anyway so he says he’s ok with it.  I’ll have to simplify my sewing hobby a bit, but I am taking it with me and will be like the many ladies out there that sew while living in an RV full time!  Emily will have homeschool and her favorite things – Beanie Babies, arts & crafts, and reading.  Right now she’s really into making things with polymer clay so she’ll be able to do that easily in the RV.

And a BONUS – it will shorten Rob’s commute to work, and we’ll be closer to our favorite grocery store and library! Yay!

Will it be hard?

Honestly, we think it will be way more fun than it will be challenging.  We are all really looking forward to living simply for a while and cutting back on the “stuff”.  Rob and I have a goal of hiking the Appalachian Trail together once he retires, so we figure if we can spend 6 months in the woods with only a backpack full for each of us, surely this will be a piece of cake!

Privacy will be the biggest challenge because our bedrooms have curtains and not doors, but we are all committed to making it work and we’ll get creative.  Our plan is to work hard to save money and once we knock the debt out, we will upgrade to a 5th wheel model with more room and a separate bedroom (with a door!) for Emily.

I hope you’ll follow along on our latest adventure with us.  I’ll give a more complete tour of the RV once we have it all set up and ready to go.  We look forward to seeing how God grows and uses our family through this. 

Jesus says, “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” John 10:10

The word “abundant” means plentiful, generous, ample, even rich and lavish.  Christ wants us to have an abundant life, but that doesn’t mean more stuff.  That means finding the real JOY in life – in Jesus Christ and in each other.  It’s going to be a great journey!