Full-time RV Living
First 30 Days

---

TOP 10 THINGS ABOUT LIVING IN AN RV FULL-TIME

RV Morning

10. Cleaning the whole inside of the RV takes about 15 minutes

9. Takes less time to get ready in the morning with less clothes options

8. Finding new local places to eat

7. New neighbors everyday!

6. Saving rent/mortgage money

5. Discovering we can live with less possessions

4. Using almost all solar power and not paying an electric bill

3. Going just about anywhere and taking our home with us

2. Not having an actual home address 😛

1. More time to focus on each other and what’s important – to LIVE LIFE!

30 Days Living in our RV Full-time

We have officially been living in our RV for one month. How has it been?  Awesome!  We love our new home more than we imagined. There have been some things we have observed in the last 30 days…

2 Minute Shower

SHOWERS

We no longer take long hot showers. We take short hot showers in an itty-bitty space. We get wet, lather up, and rinse. This has probably been the biggest adjustment for us. Showers are not what they used to be, but they are not bad. The water is hot and the pressure is good. We take showers on a regular basis. We don’t necessarily shower less than we used to. There is also the difference of the room temperature before and after a shower. It has been a little colder in the RV, so we try to warm it up a bit in the RV before and after showers so we don’t freeze getting in and out. We also installed a new shower head (Oxygenics) that allowed for the water to be paused and it also feel likes more water pressure even though it uses less water than a typical shower head. Yay!

Outhouse

BATHROOM

We use the bathroom whenever we need to. We do like to use the campsite bathrooms if we are going number two (I know, maybe a little TMI) for a couple of reasons. It’s a little more private, its considerate, and maybe this way there is less “stuff” to gunk up our black water tanks. (P.S. They don’t look as inviting as the one pictured)

SLEEPING QUARTERS

Our queen size bed is above the bed of the truck. There is not much head room, but the bed is rather big. You cannot sit up in bed without touching the ceiling. I sleep on the inside of the bed and Jimmy sleeps on the outside. It is a bit more cramped sleeping on the inside as the ceiling slopes down toward my side and it can feel a little closed in. I cannot get out of bed without climbing over Jimmy. Thankfully I do not have to frequent the bathroom at night so I just make sure I go before laying down for the night. On some of the colder nights it didn’t feel as though the warm air got to my little corner and Jimmy was burning up. It only happened a few nights and I haven’t felt cold at all since we installed our Wave-6 heater. The bed itself is quite comfy. I sometimes like the cave like feeling and like to pretend I am a bear in hibernation. Overall, not so bad, but it is going to take some more time to get used to.

Spices

KITCHEN

We have not done a lot of food preparation in our RV yet.  The frig was on the fritz for a while so we didn’t want to stock up and have our food go bad. We plan to utilize the kitchen more next month.  We have prepared some meals and we’ve noticed that because of how small it is, only one cook can be in the kitchen at a time. There is also very little counter space to set food out, cut food and use the sink. We will probably use our desk space for food preparation as well. Our kitchen is not organized very well. We have tried to set it up so that things don’t go flying when we are on the road, but it has made it difficult to access some things when we are parked. We will have to work on this. We also haven’t learned how to operate the convection oven. We need to bust out the user’s manual and get cracking! The weather has also been a little lousy for BBQ-ing. We love to BBQ so hopefully we can do more of that.

RESOURCES – WATER, PROPANE & POWER

Within the last 30 days we’ve been camping mostly at Doheny State Beach with a short stint at Casper’s Wilderness Park for only 2 days. Doheny doesn’t have any hook-ups. It’s dry camping. We typically fill our fresh water tanks once a week and at the same time we dump our gray and black water tanks. We were never given a user’s manual for our RV and have yet to find the details online, but we believe we have 30 gallons of fresh water, 30 gallons for gray and 30 gallons for black. We imagine that our fresh water consumption will go up a little as we are using the RV water for drinking water now (for the first few weeks we were buying bottled water). We will have to see how that affects our water usage. We have a 35 gallon propane tank and we used half of it. We have used the heater every night. Two weeks into being in the RV we finally got the gas lines hooked up to our new heater (Wave-6) which uses a fraction of the propane that the original heater does. We love it! We have used the gas stove almost everyday to heat water for hot beverages and we’ve boiled water to make hard boiled eggs every week. We haven’t used the stove beyond that, so in the next month when we do more cooking we may go through more gas. We’ve also never had an issue with not having power or running out. We had one 150 watt solar panel on the roof of the RV to start with, but two weeks ago we installed two more 150 watt solar panels giving us even more power. We now have a total of 450 watts of power. We produce enough power from the solar panels to run all of our electronics except our batteries cannot hold all of the power. For now we can charge our laptops, use a blender, and turn on all of the lights, but we cannot use the convection oven, air conditioner, or use my hair dryer when we are off-grid. We will need to invest in a larger battery bank that holds more amp hours and a larger power inverter to run everything. We can always fire up the loud generator to operate everything but we prefer not to unless we absolutely need to. Plenty of our neighbors at the RV park do this, but we prefer to use mother nature’s harvestable energy. (Wow, we sound like tree huggers). In the last 30 days we’ve only used the generator once. We’ve adjusted to not being able to run everything. We use the stove for heating up things and I just avoid washing my hair at night when it is cold and wash it in the morning when it can air dry. I might want to see about getting a hair dryer that uses less cranking amps but I’ve heard they’re not that great.

CLOTHES & STUFF

We haven’t missed any of the clothes or other gadgets we got rid of. In fact, as we suspected we have many clothes that we haven’t even used. We will get rid of things that have little use to us on the road. There are a couple of cabinets that got stuffed with things in the hurry to get out of our apartment and it has been hard to remember where we put everything. Having such a small place, it requires organization. Every item will need to have its place and it will become more evident where those things should go, the longer we live in the RV.  We have organized a lot but there is still room for improvement.

ADVENTURE

We’ve had a lot of fun just exploring our own backyard. We have both been to the Dana Point area several times being Southern California natives, but never on foot. We’ve walked around a ton and we know we still haven’t found all the hidden gems. We’ve seen that there is a waterfall on some hiking trail in Dana Point!  Who knew? We will definitely miss our sunset views overlooking the waves, seeing the train whiz by and hearing the bells clang at their approach and last but not least, hearing the waves crash at night that has lulled us to sleep. We are looking forward to our next destination and all of the things we will see and experience there. We have both been going to our full-time jobs, but starting February there will be no set work hours and also, we will be a distance from friends and family. So next month will be completely different.

FRIENDS & FAMILY

We will miss our friends and family.  Our friends and family have been very supportive of our decision to make this trek. With our journey ahead we are not sure when we will be in Southern California again. We will need to come back occasionally but we don’t know when and it will only be for a short while and we will be back on the road. We’ve taken some time to say our goodbyes and spent time with the ones we love. A special shout out to Rudy & Mikey for the sweat and man muscles used to get us going on the road!

GOAL

Our goal next month is to meet more people and do more things during the day. Our new work schedule will not depend on us being in an office the majority of the day. We will be out and about which allow for more day adventures and of course coming into contact with more people. We can hardly wait! Tucson, Arizona – here we come!