6 Months Living Off Grid in Camper while Building House

hi everyone my name is haley and my family and i decided to buy a travel trailer and live in it full time while we build our forever home so now that we've been doing this for about six months i want to look back and share our experience with you so far in some of the ups and downs that we've been going through we definitely don't regret making this decision but it's come with a lot of challenges too and so i just want to document it now that i'm getting more comfortable with our camper living it's feeling more like home it's becoming more normal it took you know four months before i really started feeling some of that and now that we're coming up on six months i'm feeling even more into the groove we have about six months left until our house is built and we'll be moving into our home so i'm getting really excited it's also springtime change is happening and this past winter has been kind of brutal at times so looking back i want to share some of those things with you [Music] [Laughter] [Music] my family is me and my husband zane and our son raymond he's 15 months old so we're living with a toddler in our camper we also have four pets in our camper with us we have two dogs and two cats and all four of our pets shed so that was a challenge anyway for us when we lived in our house so we're used to that you know that was an adjustment but now we have such a smaller space you know it's just really important that we vacuum a lot we let roll but we've just gotten used to the pet hair you know if you have a dog you probably understand it comes with pet hair sometimes we love them they're part of the family so the reason we made this decision is because we were given the opportunity to build our home on some family property so we've been incredibly blessed by zane's parents for allowing us to come onto their land and build our home at such an early time in our lives i never anticipated before the age of 30 to be able to build a home like this and we never would have been able to at this time if we weren't able to have this land already it's beautiful land zayn was raised out here in the country and it's really important for him to raise our son out there and now our son can go to the schools we went to growing up and we're just really excited about the life we want to provide for him and any future kids that we might have so we decided to sell our house at the time raymond was only eight or nine months old when we made this decision he wasn't even a year old yet so we decided to sell our house during the coven 19 pandemic it was such a weird time you know this past year has been so weird and it was actually a really good time to sell our house though because there was so much competition for buying a home at the time um interest rates are really low and there just weren't a lot of houses on the market so we had a lot of interest in people wanting to buy our home and we were able to sell it for a really good price so it made sense for us so during selling our house we decided to look at campers and took a lot of time to decide on the type of camper we wanted so we decided on a travel trailer which is one that pulls behind a truck it's not an rv that drives itself we also really liked the campers that had a bunk house in the back so a bunk room is like a kid's room with bunk beds and it was really important to me that raymond's room had its own door and it was really really important to me that the bathroom had a bathtub i was not willing to move into a camper if raymond didn't have his own bedroom and if raymond didn't have a bathtub and those were like probably the only two requirements that i had so we looked at lots of campers and found that the ones with the double slide out in the back of the camper were the the best option for us because they provided a lot of floor space for raymond to play you know he was still really young when we sold our house and he wasn't walking yet but we knew if we're going to spend a year if we're going to spend two years in this camper we're going to have a toddler running around like crazy like he deserves to have some play space and some you know toys and i just i didn't want him to miss out on that that need that he has as a kid to play on the floor and to have baths and things like that so we decided to get a 2019 wildwood um forest river and the name of the type of camper is 3131 kqbts so that's the type of camper we decided on it has a double slide out in the back bunk room so there's lots of carpeted area there's actually three bunks back there and then there's a couch also that can be another sleeping area so like four kids could have their own beds and sleep there it's a really really large area it has so much storage i loved the cabinets and the the closet space in these types of campers and it just feels like a bedroom in there um since we've moved in we've actually taken out one of the bunks above the couch so that there's more head space and it just makes it feel even more roomy in there zayn also built a custom crib for raymond so it fits in the bunk so that it's a full-sized crib it's just inserted into the bunk so that he's safe in there and it's not moving but he has the same crib experience that he had when we were living in our house so that's the type of camper we decided on it has a bathtub it's a small bathtub but it's actually like perfect size for a toddler i also really loved that it's made out of i guess a plastic material um it's the best way to put it it it has traction on it so it's not a slippery bathtub when raymond would have baths at our home i was always scared he would try to stand up in the bath and i was afraid that he would fall down and in the in the camper bathtub the first thing i realized is that like he had really good traction and like wouldn't slip and fall so that was actually really fun to let him like play a little bit more freely in the bath so that's been great so when we first moved on to the property we did not have any utilities at all on the property so it's just land uh we have no plumbing we had no water no electric at all so we moved into the well we parked the camper first we parked the camper on the property while we were selling our house and we moved into our camper at the end of september of 2020 so it was the very last week of september and our house closed like october 5th or something so what we were doing was kind of going back and forth between the camper and the house cleaning the house and getting it ready for closing we didn't have to worry about having raymond there when we were cleaning the floors and things like that so it was a really good transition and adjustment all during this time we sold a lot of our um belongings so we donated to goodwill we sold things we threw things out and we really like cleansed and decluttered a lot of our life which was really sad and hard at the beginning for me and then it was actually really empowering and nice my views on living have changed a lot since being off grid being in the country and just having a simpler way of life in the camper so the very first week we were living in the camper we were parked out on the property we had an amazing view of the pasture and the horses and we loved watching the sunset it was just stunning out there but we actually got below freezing a couple nights that very first week we moved in so like i told you before we didn't have any utilities so we were using a generator and filling it up with gas to run the electric of our camper and we were learning a lot so i i knew nothing about electric like i didn't know how generators worked i didn't know how the camper worked with like electric and gas like propane zane knew a lot more about that stuff than i did but it was still a huge learning experience you know we would over load the generator a lot and have to go out and restart it and like we had to learn what we could plug in where and what we couldn't for it to not blow a fuse and so that was like a huge learning experience and we planned to have like a month of experiencing that and and figuring it all out before it would get cold but it got cold that first week and so we learned how drafty the camper could be especially in that back bedroom raymond's bedroom because it has those two slide outs you know air would come in more freely into the camper so we got electric heaters and we did find those couple nights that it got below freezing but our stress was just higher than normal you know moving raymond in there is he warm is he sleeping okay um as a mom i was just really concerned to make sure he was okay and he was totally fine um he slept fine he was warm and and we got through that time um but that definitely tested us the very first week on top of just learning about like how long will will our water last when we fill up and with water how many showers can i take before we run out of water how much dishes can i do or raymond needs a bath you know how how long will it take so how long will it take the generator to run out of gas before we have to refill it you know that was all a learning experience and we would run out of things a lot we would run out of water or the the generator would go out in the middle of the night we'd have to go out at 3am and it's sprinkling filling it up with gas trying not to spill gas on your hand because now you smell like gasoline like it was a whole different experience and it was really stressful for a while um in december we finally got our electric set up so we had to have an electric meter put in and it's now ready for our house build which was really really helpful to have that already set up but it was a huge huge um help when we got the electric because then we just ran an electric cord we didn't have to deal with the generator and the gas anymore so that was a huge thing you know one thing about living in the camper is it's made me appreciate the utilities that i've had my entire life so having running water having warm water having heat or air conditioning just having like the benefits of having like electric things you know um it's made me really appreciate and be more careful be more mindful of how much water i use um and just you know we've been living a much simpler life so we have less dishes we have less clothes we just we don't watch tv really very much we don't have wi-fi out there we don't have cable out there we have some tv um like local channels and we can maybe pop in a dvd but you know our way of living has been very different so even though we are building a big beautiful home i really hope to keep some of those elements of just the simple life um in our home and that's going to be challenging at times i know because our closet is so much bigger than we needed or wanted our pantry is bigger than we needed or wanted and you know at the time working with our architect which i'm gonna make another video about our house and the layout and all of those things but when we met with the architect you know our house plans ended up having much more space than we planned and so i hope that we can keep those simple things we don't need to fill up our whole closet with so much clothes you know let's just be realistic is my hope so we had electric and it was december so at that point we had moved into the agricultural building on the property so we um cleaned out the bar we called the barn so we cleaned out the barn and made room for our camper to be able to be pulled in and parked there for the winter so that way we are out of the wind and the cold we are under shelter so there's never going to be snow on the camper and we could insulate in addition to that so we knew that it gets really cold in iowa in the winter getting water to the camper was always a bit of a job so what zane would do is put a water tank in the back of his truck and drive into town about five minutes and there we had a water building in our town where you can put a quarter in and the water will pump through a large hose very quickly you know gallons of water 50 gallons at a time i think for a quarter so he would fill up the water tank and then he would drive it back home again only five minutes away and then he'd pump that into the camper so we were really lucky to have that water source really close by but it was still quite a task to fill up the camper water and we've been able to make that water last about a week with showering at the gym we shower a lot at the gym my husband and i do um and we mostly just give raymond baths and do dishes with that water so and obviously like flushing the toilet and things like that so that has been um how we've done water in the winter we had a long-term water source a large tank that we filled up with water and we were able to pump into the camper so around november we moved the camper into an agricultural building on the property so that we were out of the snow and the wind and cold and we were able to kind of have double insulation for keeping warm in the winter that worked really really well our pipes never froze well they never froze until february so our water source also never froze until february so if you remember in february 2021 we had those really really low temperatures in that winter weather that it even sweeped the country in southern states and pipes were breaking and this just happened a couple weeks ago and now it's spring here and it's really nice but for about two and a half weeks we had below freezing temperatures just consistently bitterly cold and it got down to negative 16. i think that was the lowest it got one day and that was the most brutal time in our experience so our white our water pipes were frozen our rod our water source was frozen so we couldn't pump water in and our fridge also broke during that time and stopped cooling so we were dealing with like no water source no hot water because we couldn't pump it into our tank to heat it up and our fridge was broken so that was a really really tough couple weeks a lot of tension but me and zane came together and i will say that through all of these hard things it's been incredibly hard for us but i think it's strengthened our relationship a lot we've appreciated each other and the work we've done for each other we have appreciated um you know the the blessing of having water and the things that we need to provide for our family we have saved a lot of money in this whole experience to be able to get the property ready to put money down for um building the home paying for the architect putting gravel down we have done a lot to prepare for those things we've even paid off a student loan and taken some big chunks off of some of our student loans and we've done that because we don't have a mortgage we paid for our camper with the money we got from selling our home so we don't have a payment on the camper either we also are paying a lot less for utilities water and electric are are not not as expensive running from the camper so we've saved a lot there's been a lot of benefits in that sense um another benefit to living in the camper has been the small space with a toddler so i've baby-proofed it and now raymond is 15 months old so he's running around and he's independent he's learning how to you know open up cabinets and stuff so we baby-proofed everything but i can sit in his room and sit on the ground and say raymond come here i need to change your diaper come sit down and he might be walking around in the kitchen and like you know testing me to see if i really am going to make him come change the diaper but i don't have to get up and run after him like it's such a small space that i can see him and i know he's safe and eventually he comes back to me and he'll sit down and let me change his diaper so when i'm at other places i notice how much more i have to get up and chase him and follow him around and it's more exhausting so maybe i've gotten a little bit lazy you know in my parenting because the camera's been nice for knowing where rey is and uh just like knowing that he'll come back to me eventually so i could just stay sitting in his room and wait for him to come back so that's been a great thing so now that that winter weather has passed it's springtime and we've been doing some spring cleaning and opening up the windows again and it's been really refreshing i can see that we have about six months left until our house is done and i'm getting really hopeful for the next six months i'm planning on doing a full spring cleaning this week and just really organizing well and resetting because i felt this in the house always too you know you get through the winter it's kind of stuffy you want to open up the windows and reset and just clean and start your life again i mean i like winter but it just gets long by the end you know it's march now i'm just ready for nice weather so i know we have six months left and i don't want to like think that oh i'm almost done with this camper so i don't need to like clean up that box of toys over there like no this is still our home we still need to keep it nice so that's what i'm going to be doing this next week is a lot of cleaning and things like that so i know i jumped around a lot in this video and in there i did share pros and cons to the camper life and our experience so far um there's probably a lot that i forgot to share and i do plan on making some more videos in the future to just document this this time in our lives i want to make a video talking about our house plans and what it's going to look like and the land i also want to make some cleaning videos and show you the space a little bit more like i said i just haven't really documented the last few months in the camper because i've just been focusing on living and adjusting to such a big change in our life so um as we move forward i can share more about those things let me know if you have any questions and i'm happy to share more so thanks bye

Channel: Henely Homestead

Views: 4,401

Rating: 4.9473686 out of 5

Keywords: Full time RV living, Full time camping, Off grid living, New home build, family living in camper, living in camper while building house

Id: u458SvARxLc

Length: 19min 42sec (1182 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 11 2021