A year ago, our family of 7 downsized to a 386 sq ft home. A week later, everything shut down.
On March 6, 2020, my husband and I with our kids who were 7, 6, 4, 2, and 5-months-in-utero — ditched our 2500 sq ft house to live in our 38-foot RV full-time. Unlike most RVers, however, we weren’t planning to travel much. We just wanted to simplify and be able to focus on what’s most important to us.
As it turned out, of course, we wouldn’t have been able to travel if we tried. Yet somehow, a year later, we are still living tiny and loving it. Here are five ways we’ve grown through these unusual circumstances:
- We don’t have a choice but to learn to thrive.
It’s not easy to undo a decision like selling your house and furniture. My husband is one of those skater dude types who always says “I’m just gonna send it” when facing sketchy terrain, and that’s exactly what we did before knowing what would happen in the world.
I had planned on spending our days at Disney, museums, the library, playgrounds, and friends’ houses when we felt cooped up. Obviously, because of Covid, this didn’t happen. So, we figured out how to make it work. In our family, both “busy” and “bored” are very bad words that must never be used.
We’ve learned to explore the outdoors like never before. During the cool weather, we spend the majority of our days outside. With leaves and twigs, the kids pretend to open taco shops and build castle forts and create their own dramatic plays. During the hot weather, we spend a lot more time playing board games, creating art, and watching Avatar: The Last Airbender together. If the mosquitos aren’t bad, my husband reads a few chapters from a novel to the kids by the fire pit. (Currently, we’re on book three of Andrew Peterson’s Wingfeather Saga.)
The RV quickly turns into an untidy disaster multiple times a day, but if everyone helps, it only takes a few minutes to clean up. So it’s very easy to justify all the extra time spent kissing baby cheeks, braiding hair, playing marbles, making pasta from scratch…my to-do list is gloriously small.
2. Since we’re saving a couple thousand bucks each month, our relationship with money feels so much more free.
Six months in, we decided to “send it” even more and upgraded an RV that gave us an extra 40 sq ft and would make this lifestyle sustainable for even longer than we planned. The bathroom is now big enough for a crib for the baby, my oldest son has a private loft, and we can raise the girls’ bed each day so they have their own entire playroom. Including insurance, this raised our monthly mortgage to about $400, which is nothing compared to what we had been paying for a house.
Plus, if we want to eat at Chipotle more often or splurge on KiwiCrates for the kids, we will still be way under budget. When I go to farmers markets, I want to buy from everyone, and it feels so nice to know we have the wiggle room to say “yes!” to local businesses — local people — again and again.
We actually save more than $2000 a month because we buy less stuff. We simply don’t have the space for it.
When we moved, oblivious to the impending economic woes due to the pandemic, we didn’t realize how lower personal expenses would help us sustain our company.
Our quality of life has significantly increased by being more loosely-goosey with our money.
3. Since we don’t have anywhere to escape, we’ve been forced to work through our relational problems.
Since I can hear nearly every conversation the kids have indoors, I can be more attentive to what might be going on in their hearts. Sometimes, I’m not in the mood to talk with them about what’s going on and I’m just impatient with them. But even then, they get to see an adult apologize. Chances are they’ll grow up and be adults who need to know how to apologize, too.
Our marriage’s ups and downs have felt more intense, but overall I feel like we’ve made several years’ progress of building trust, growing friendship, and stoking romance in just this one.
If you want to warp-speed your personal growth, confine yourself to a small space with people who might bring out the worst in you. We’ve all had to face our weaknesses and self-awareness like never before.
4. How others perceive our financial situation doesn’t matter. Also, it’s amusing.
When we first made this move, I could perceive the closeness of a relationship based on that person’s response to the news. Those who said “That’s so you!” know me deeply. Those who just laughed awkwardly and didn’t know if I was serious don’t know me at all. People who say “I’d love to see you in a nice big house” might know me and love me well but just have different values.
Telling strangers about our lifestyle gives an even wider range. Businesspeople who talk to my husband are so impressed with the company he’s built that they often assume we’re millionaires. Nope.
People who hear we’re living in a trailer often assume we’re one bad paycheck away from homelessness. Also nope.
My husband’s employees see us living in a home cheaper and smaller than their own, so they know we’re not leeching off their hard work so we can live in a McMansion. They know their boss lives simply.
Yet we’re also about to spend two months working remotely in Colorado, so in many ways, we are living large.
(The monthly rate at campgrounds, by the way, is usually under $2000. So, when you add in the gas expenses of travel, we are usually about breaking even with our previous mortgage when we do take our RV somewhere.)
5. Our circumstances don’t determine our joy or stability.
Sometimes I get fed up with tiny home life. I miss my shelves of books. I’m tired of cleaning the floor so many times each day just so the baby can have somewhere to crawl. I don’t have enough space for our clothes. I‘m tired of having to put the crib in the bathtub just so I can access my closet. I wish I didn’t have to climb a step stool to access my pantry.
But there were many things that annoyed me about home and life when I was in a big house, too. Plus, I used to pay to work out. Now I get to do it for free just by hauling my laundry, running back and forth between the kitchen and the grill, etc.
Life is just…hard. Relationships and the stuff of life are always going to be full of pain and inconvenience. Babies are an extra challenge no matter what kind of home you have. But our personal reasons for gratitude are so massive — even eternal — that our circumstances are a relatively small factor. Plus, we’re still living more comfortably than the majority of the world and much of America. It’s a privilege that we even had the choice to downsize.
And, truly, downsizing — even in a pandemic — has been one of the best changes to our circumstances we’ve made so far.
