Our home for the past two years.

How blue painter’s tape helped us move into an RV

We decided about five years ago to start plans to make ourselves “location independent,” by purchasing an RV to live in and travel. We still needed to work, but with the business we own we knew we could be mobile and still serve our clients.

We spent three years preparing for our adventure, including nightly internet shopping on RVtrader and CraigsList. We were not looking for a ‘perfect’ rig, but one that we could afford and had the necessary items for our future. Not long into the search, we felt a motorhome with two slides, and room for two desks was going to be the best fit for us.

We were living in a 1,500 square foot, 3 bedroom, 2 bath home when we got serious about this tiny living stuff. We decided to block off portions of our house to mimic RV living, as much as we could.

We started with the living area and used blue painters tape to mark off the approximate floor space of the living area of an RV with 2 extended slides. Then we moved the couch, TV, and 2 desks into that space.

Yes, we really did do this. Friends and family came to visit and laughed. In front of us, and behind our backs.

This is not our house. We didn't take any photos of the actual setup. Duh.
This is not our house. We didn’t take any photos of the actual setup. Duh. Just imagine that it looked something like this.

The smallest bedroom and bathroom at our house became our new residence, using half the closet and one small dresser for all our clothes.

We couldn’t move the kitchen, so we just downsized to one set of upper and lower cabinets and emptied the pantry. Kitchen appliances and dishes were minimized into the two cabinets, as well as food goods.

We lived like that for 9 months.

Every day we worked with our desks side-by-side, ate lunch at our little table between the desks, and cooked with only the bare minimum of utensils.

It worked.

By the time we moved into our motorhome, the transition was fairly simple and straightforward.

Our home for the past two years.
Our home for the past two years.

Yes, there were some adjustments, but neither of us thought it was too much different than what we had been experiencing for the previous year. (You can see interior photos of our workspace and living areas here.)

In fact, we found the storage of our motorhome allowed us to have and bring much more of our life with us than we first anticipated.

We often tell people a lifestyle change can be accomplished, but you have to work at it. And why wouldn’t you want to experiment with the concept? What happens if you spend a bucket of money on an RV, and find out the living space is just. too. small?

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