Full time RV living - One year in - RV tour /// E58

you guys have been watching us for about a year now and meg and i realized that we haven't shown you inside our camper so let's get a fire going first [Music] [Music] okay our camper is a wildwood uh forest river makes wild woods this is a 2012 here's the model number 31 qbts i i know it's a 31 qbts but i think it's a 32 foot rv it has two slide outs in the back and it has one in the living area what else does it have has this uh sun shade thing which is good for weekend camping we don't usually even have it up because it usually gets windy in the middle of the night and needs to be closed so we just keep it closed it's been good the camper has been very good to us so i'm gonna take the camera and have meg tour us around yep you wanna um here we'll show how we how we uh prop the door we have a bungee cord because our little hook thing broke all right that's our steps come on in come on in this is our home this is it it's always this clean that's a lie all right meg show us what's what i mean people can see but tell us what's what here this is where we eat this dinette when we got this camper it was already partially renovated but it was in a beach theme so we kind of redid that and it had a couch and a separate table we took those out and we installed and made this dinette set so we could have more storage underneath each bench is all storage we do dog food here this has the printer trash bags those kinds of things and this tape this table has been it's worked out great for us this top is a one of those like pre-assembled wood things from lowe's it's pine and he just stained it and uh here i'll give you a close-up of the benches here's one of our benches it's just we use that shiplap stuff you get at lowe's or home depot and uh yeah we framed it out with two by threes and uh it just matches up and for us it's me and meg and the two little ones one adult is on each side i sit there meg sits there and uh autumn and clara sit on the inside because there is a bump out here see the meg um i've hit my head so if you're gonna get an rv and you're tall like six feet like me you're gonna hit your head a few times and then you just get used to it i haven't hit my head in like a year so if you were to travel with this rv which we've only done four times this would come all the way to here yeah and it gets very very tight in here uh the couch slash bed here is a twin size memory foam mattress that we built a platform for which also has storage underneath we store uh mop broom nail polish and we have a whole container of medicines under there whole pharmacy is under there nail polish yeah the nail polishes underneath the girls stuff it's just for fun so it let me say something so the bottom there um that is just open because we learned our lesson we had a cover that matched this stuff over there and we learned that in the winter with condensation on these windows the moisture would go down the wall there and we had a little problem with some mold forming so we eliminated that piece that way air can get up underneath the mattress so we're still kind of thinking of a way to cover up that with some screening or something like that make it look a little nicer but we'll take the cover off this couch has worked out great because all four of us can fit on it to watch a movie or something and uh the dogs sleep here they love it yeah the dogs they love the bed we don't have them come into our bed they're outside dogs most of the time like they're out there i don't know where but they just run freely and they will bring in uh chiggers and mites you just don't want that stuff in your bed and this is our island we also made this and this if you want to get a shot of the other side john here scoot the trash can out of the way that we could just see there we go same shiplap stuff but um that's just the wrap so this is those cubicle things that you could buy from target and places like that those quick assemble little cube units this is a two by three unit it stands vertically and it's hard to get a shot and we here we go we built these side pieces on it to fit cutting boards um baking sheets cupcake yep um cheat i guess you call it and this has worked out great this provides the storage for all of our dishes yeah our dishes are mugs tupperware down there coffee tea and um so anyway that that's great because it's at a site it's around the corner here you don't look at it from you know if you're sitting on the couch we finished it with the same stain and the uh and the little wood top to match the dinette this is our kitchen and i don't think we would be able to function in this kitchen without this island that we made because the amount of counter space that this rv comes with is this yeah that's it and over here but it lets you have a cutting board type thing for the top of the stove but it there's really no counter space yeah our preference we are our big house that we sold had an induction cooktop that we installed and we loved it we loved the way it cooked and we can we bought this so we're not using the propane burners it's very safe it's just it runs on electricity and it's just easier to use for quick little uh you know click of a button and it heats up a tea kettle rather quickly yeah we really prefer the induction cooktop um i would say one of the biggest challenges of living in an rv full-time is the size of the fridge and that's why a lot of rv renovations they put in a full-size fridge we don't have that we have a second fridge out in the shed now but we functioned with this one for a year without that and i've learned some really tricky ways of fitting things into this fridge for example we drink a lot of milk and i would get a new gallon of milk at the store but we still have some of our old gallon of milk so pro tip meg's pro tip squish the old gallon of milk and still have the milk in it and you can fit it in the door when i see that i just get a chuckle hey it works so let me just run you through here we got the microwave up top below the microwave there is a fan for exhaust there's supposed to be a light under there too that we don't really use that's the stove top what you see there that chestnut colored wood below that meg open the oven i'm going to say something most rv ovens have this thing this uh this oven i have pull out those cookie sheets meg those those stay there all the time because there's one burner under there and there's one rack and we you could cook a nice meal in there but it will cook the center it'll just burn it so i put those two cookie sheets in there and it radiates the heat a lot better in there and since then our cooking has gotten a lot better so if you complain about the burning oven like everybody else that's what we came up with and it works like a charm yeah it works great it it distributes the heat much more evenly that it hits those cookie street sheets and kind of goes around them to to make it work much better we keep our silverware and utensils here cleaning products and pots and pans lids there and we'll keep our pots and pans up here that's it guys three drawers and one cabinet right there and then up here is just our uh hanging cabinet i guess you could call it there's our refrigerator freezer on top fridge on the bottom and it's got a mode here if you look you can turn it from that's another thing the propane can run on yeah the propane you can switch it to gas if you want to or it'll automatic if it runs out of electricity if the power goes out it'll just switch the gas off yeah what's great about rvs i don't know if it's all rvs but this one is designed to be off-grid for a short amount of time you could probably get away with like two or three days at the max but everything can run on the propane including the fridge so and there's also a water tank so if you didn't have water you can do that and the pump will run off of the battery so when we lose power it's funny because all the light all the lights in the ceiling will stay on because they can run on the battery sometimes when the power goes out it's hard for us to to tell whether or not the power went out or if we just tripped a breaker which is another thing to think about when you are running things in an rv you have to learn what things you can run at the same time because our coffee maker and the uh induction stove top sometimes you can't run those at the same time because it'll trip the breaker the things that you have to just that's why i said you might want to consider if you use a lot of electricity all at once you might want to consider a 50 amp versus a 30 amp rv um so as far as the kitchen meg you're in the way sorry there's our backsplash that we did it's just little stick on tiles and then meg added some thumbtacks which kind of looks like it's a design element yeah the thumbtacks were added because it does not stick to that wall um something to keep in mind if you want to renovate an rv and you want to use stick on wallpaper or tiles or something like that on the walls either you need a really really heavy duty glue or you need to tack it on somehow because the outside walls just get too hot and it will they'll fall off yeah temperature change it just you know there's a toll on the adhesive but uh we adapted that's what we did we also make turn on the fireplace we installed this last fall and we used this last winter that's our fireplace and it's just an electric fireplace which takes the chill out and um it's kind of great uh it's not really giving it justice on this uh this video the girls love that they can oh yeah they could change it to oh it's flickering oh it's going nuts yeah hold on let me change the uh exposure you know what the buttons do not that's made it worse is it blue green girls love changing the colors yeah it's flickering but it doesn't flicker like that that's just the video okay um all right let's switch you can uh give the tour of the rest of the rooms okay this fireplace definitely does the trick takes the chill out and it's great you have to run the propane if it's like you just want it warmed up a little bit but it's not going to be 20 degree weather sufficient heat so our rv has this little swingaroonie we'll call it uh we stopped it from swinging we don't like that because i just think it's ridiculous this is designed to you can unlatch it and spin the thing around so that you could have the uh the tv in the bedroom here if you want to watch it there's not pocket doors just sliding doors so we use these to kick out the puppies um or stop them from coming in at night and just i guess your privacy so there's the door on each side here and then meg why don't you come on this side probably better light i'll go over here all right here's our bed this is our bedroom this is the master um what is this a queen size bed we did this little wallpaper back here meg's storage of clothes my store is symmetrical so we each have clothes storage on these sides um and if you want to come around mac here's our tv setup over here come on in all right we closed the doors and that's what we do at night time we just watch a little bit of tv and then we go to sleep so we have a tv on this side tv on the other side and we installed that dvd player yeah there okay so that is that so originally there was one tv and you could switch it to either room but we we put a tv on both sides it was just silly you had to close the door spinning around like it was just it was just silly so this whole bed also lifts up and there's storage all up underneath here that you could access from the outside of the rv too i'm quite comfortable in here this is our little nook and you know we had a king-sized bed and like a huge bedroom in in our old house and it's just surprisingly comfortable i am just bundled up like a little squirrel with meg we call it our little nook i love this whole set up here and it took a little getting you see like a week or so but man i look forward to going to sleep in that bed go down to the girls side of the hot of the camper oh we didn't talk about these two um cabinets this is pretty much our pantry yeah sure i mean there's a crock pot up here we're not the neatest like you know everything goes here and whatever it's hard with such a small space to keep it looking kids and we're real okay here's some tootsie pops here's some cookies that like just we're real people okay i should pick those up nick's gonna yell at me all right so yep that's there and there's similar things down there too um there's also we extended our food storage with these little hanging baskets they're kind of great for produce it looks nice you know i mean hello southern living let's go all right we're gonna go into the girls bedroom this is great and we should have been selfish and taken this bedroom for ourselves but we didn't we wanted our kids to have the play area and the space to hang out and like have toys and activities and art sections and sleeping quarters so let's start on this side meg over here this is where they put their little heads they each have a window i'll stand over here they each have a window so who sleeps up here autumn of course the you know evil knievel uh she wants the top bunk claire has the bottom bunk and um yeah it's kind of great we made these little bunk beds we never painted them but we just made those out of two by three it's just simple little you know little setup there but this is a slide-out it's a bump out on this side and there's another bump out on the side that you're at right now but this bumps out so when these two things when you're traveling these come in and the room's really small so when they open up though you have this really nice i mean master suite if you want to call it that so if you don't have kids and you are just a young couple or old couple whatever just the two of you this would be a really cool just hang out tv couches be very comfortable if it was just me and meg i'd have the bed over there and i would in here i would have a tv a couch maybe a desk or something like that yeah and because i really enjoy having a desk and a computer and just being somewhere to like just think and like write down ideas and things like that so this is a great model to do that so um all right we purposely i i purposely picked out this rv model because of this double pop out in the back room it provides such a big space for them to to live in their little tv is over here we have some drawers for them because they can't really reach these closets but these are closets in here and some storage and stuff but they have you know just some storage in here that we put our towels and things like that but it's just closet space so yeah switch sides on this side here this is another bump out same side as that one and i designed and we built these desks out of just some shiplap and two by fours and they each have the same exact amount of space got to keep it fair but it really functions well so this is a desk and this is a desk they're just a mirror image of each other and uh gives the kids a place to go and do their homework and the weird times we're in right now if they had to switch to virtual they would have two individual studying quarters that they could each you know get their school activities done if they're going virtual so this is just great they could do art projects there's an area for their laptop they could have a book open they could do a lot with this and this is another one of those little storage cubicle things that you get at target they have their little toy box here this is just a really great space for kids um and they don't miss the old house they they love it in here they run in and out of the house all the time they watch tv they just do activities so more than enough room for a seven and nine year old sister oh can i talk about this too these we use one of these at night time for the kids i usually put it on the low setting and put it about halfway and close the door this is a rather safe space heater because it's filled with oil and it heats up really slowly it's not one of those electric blower things um so this is a very safe uh heating alternative method and when i close that door and just put this thing on a low setting it makes it toasty in here really yeah i like sleeping when it's cool but i feel bad because the kids are cold so i come in i turn this on for them like last night i woke up at three in the morning realized it was cold came in turned it on and they i closed the door and when i went and woke them up for school this morning they were toasty as can be and i was nice and cool bundled up with meg so this is a great thing to have in your camper but i have a feeling that the wood stove once we get it installed is gonna warm up everything we're probably not gonna need that yeah probably okay and last room yeah let me show you where uh business gets done this is our large bathroom and uh you get some serious thinking done in here this is my toilet and our sink it's great because you could sit relieve yourself and brush your teeth at the same time and wash your hands meg is in the shower right now and i'm on the toilet so anyway meg put up this wallpaper here which is uh kind of gives you a woodsy but not like whoa that's you really like the woods look it was on this wall as well and it fell off yeah that same problem with the heat here's the bathroom guys standard tub in there has a skylight above and there's a fan up above the main area there's a vanity with mirror there's a sink one cabinet toilet over here and uh meg did a nice little wallpaper job on that wall it's pretty nice surprisingly we function and it works just fine for us doesn't it meg oh yeah so one big adjustment you're gonna need to make from you know subdivision living to rv living is your hot water your hot water um the way we do it we don't just leave it on there's a little switch up here i can flip the switch and you hear the propane light up the hot water tank it's a six gallon hot water tank which means if you are right about adjusting the uh the flow and shower you can get a decent shower out of it we've done showers back to back no problem you don't put the water on full blast because you'll burn through the hot water in no time but um we don't do our dishes with hot water we just use the hot water for the shower and it's a thing when you need the hot water you turn it on and when you're done with it you turn it off if you don't it'll just constantly the the tank will heat it up it'll cool down it'll turn back on again it'll cool down and over and over and over again and you'll burn your propane tank out in no time if you're a weekend warrior or a week-long uh vacation rv type person that'll work out great for you and your next trip just refill your propane tanks but if you're living full-time you don't want to be refilling your tanks every single week we probably fill them once every two months or three months it's not very often it's not often we just use the propane really for hot water um that's about it it's super cold in here we'll turn it on for the heat because it heats it up really quick but be smart with your propane usage and you can really make it last a long time all right so here is the outside the back outside of the camper i want to show you a few things here okay yeah you can just back up give a general overview here so if you go back in our episodes episode 12 we added this under skirting it's been on for a while now it's just tin roofing and [Music] it's built with maker pipe go watch episode 12 if you want to do something like this it really helps with the frost um regarding frost proofing your rv for all the water lines the the water tanks and all that stuff underneath our code inspector actually required us having a frost proof solution so this is what they came up this is what we came up with and we just finished it off with some wood on top so there wasn't some gnarly metal edges but like i said go back to episode 12 and check out that project this is our access to get underneath the rv this is just another piece of tin and slopes off in case rain hits it we just open it up and about once every two days or so my kids do this for me so they don't make me climb under here but there is a hard pipe there's a four inch pvc pipe going in here instead of having one of those flexible tubes if you're going to be living permanently there's four inch pvc that comes out of the black and gray side and it goes right down here which leads to our septic tank yeah and we have some while you're looking you will have critters be ready for them we have these live traps here if we catch one a particular rodent i'll say it rat don't be surprised if you see some friends or you hear some creepy things under the camper even though it's it they'll find their way in so trap them move them problem solved okay back here now this is where our camper is plugged in so i installed this uh one of the first things we had to do we obviously we're going to move our camper here and plug it into power so we had to add this outdoor outlet this is a 30 amp 120 volt outlet and it's something that you might want to consider if you have more energy demands you should really understand i mean it says it right here yeah 30 amp supply if you use a lot more electricity you might want to consider getting a camper that is power rated for 50 amps but ours is 30 and we also have our water coming in right here so we have electric and water and this is what i recommend this has saved us i don't know how many times but we learned our lesson from getting frozen pipes once and i went and invested in this this isn't a cheap thing this is probably 50 to 75 or something like that depending on your length but this hose here plugs in we have the plug just kind of going underneath and there's an outlet on an extension cord for a gfci protected outlet from on the camper but if you look over here this water hose has a little temperature probe here and when it's plugged in if the temperature dips below 40 degrees there's a heating element inside this hose that keeps it warm and prevents the water from here to here from freezing and winter time your hose if you don't have it protected like that are really insulated it's going to freeze depending on where you are and this is great because you could just leave that on and if you need it to leave for the weekend or something like that it will you know automatically just trip on if it needs to if it's getting too cold so this is a camco just probably search for a heat you know we'll just link to it in the description what else meg earth ties um you can't really see them yeah we're just right over here all right we have a a boot scrubber which is very helpful in the rainy months you're going to be using your steps that are built into the camper all right down here is something now i'm we're going to show a little clip of this installing these but these are earth ties so there is an anchor that goes well into the soil like 36 inches or something like that and then it's attached to the frame of the rv and it ties it down now you might think that's unnecessary you're not going to use one of these things if you're just vacationing but if you're going to be living in it permanently for an extended amount of time i highly recommend for three reasons the first reason it might be required legally by your local code ask your code inspector number two it stops the camper from bouncing around a little bit we have a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old and they move around a lot in the back where their bedroom is and when you're laying in bed and they're being goofy you're kind of like it feels like you're on a trampoline a little bit and that eliminated that when we installed these and the third reason probably the most important is that it protects you from high winds this thing will save you and just keep this rv on the ground these are our propane tanks okay they're 230 tanks one of them is powered there's a switch here and you can flip it to the other one that way if this one runs out you could turn this one on and go refill this one this powers optionally the refrigerator so if you run out of power or you're just off grid you can power your refrigerator it also is used for the heater and it's used for the hot water is that it meg i think that's it the hot water the oven oh the oven too yes the biggest hog the biggest uh user of propane is our heat so we're going to replace that this winter with a wood stove so now that we've shown you the camper we want to tell you a little bit of like overall how it's changed our lives because it really has yeah big time i recommend that everyone some point in your life you should try living in a camper or a small space because it really will change your perspective of things after living in the camper for a year now i really i thought that i was going to be really anxious to get into a bigger space that it was like really cramped but it's done the opposite to me it's made me feel like i need less space not less than this but a regular size house it almost feels too big yeah if you're thinking like a 2400 square foot house is a pretty average size you might be after living in a camper you might think maybe 15 to 1800 square feet is plenty for what i need so yeah your opinion will change and the other thing that has kind of changed my perspective is just material items we have a 10 by 20 foot storage unit and a 10 by 15 foot storage unit two of them and they're full of stuff and i don't miss any of that stuff there's a few select items like sentimental things irreplaceables that i'd grab but most of that stuff the old furniture all the time i wish we got rid of the stuff yep all the kids old toys um just it's they're just things and you it's been there for over a year now it's gonna continue to be there for another two years or so but now we're thinking we might move that stuff here and go through everything and probably eliminate most of our objects that we don't really have a sentimental attachment to yeah because we're going to build this nice beautiful home and then have this stuff to put in it we don't want that we want to be all nice and clean and a lot of open space and storage that you know closets are overflowing so that's our that's going to be our goal as time goes on just getting rid of our stuff whether it's donate trash or sell we'll go through that process i'm not looking forward to and the other thing that i thought was going to be an issue is just being really close to like the the six of us and at times yeah our two daughters and we we acquired two dogs and the dogs and i thought that it was gonna feel really confining and it doesn't really feel that i mean of course there are times you're like oh but overall it's nice to be that close it's nice to be able to wake up and i have to wake up the girls for school and i can just yell to them and they can hear me we couldn't do that in our old house i'll say something having a camper will not force you but it'll make you want to be outside more if you're craving more of being outside breathing fresh air and just being amongst nature if that's something that you're craving for and you want more outside how you want to get the kids off of the tablets and tv and stuff our kids are usually outside they play in the woods they play on their swings they just do things like what we did when we grew up we entertained ourselves ninety percent of the time i am outdoors and i love it i feel better i get great vitamin d every day it's just i i really like being outside and if that's something that you desire and you want to make that life change this isn't a better way to do that yeah it really makes you closer as a family i've asked the girls before if they like it better in the camper or better in our bigger house we went from 3 100 square feet to 200 to 240 yeah and we couldn't be happier it it's it's really awesome and it it's easier to clean when you cut out all the clutter it really makes you feel feel good and less to take care of less to keep track of yeah it's and when you have less space it makes you consciously think about things before you buy them like if you want to buy some kind of decoration for example you have to consider in your mind okay it's going to be out for that holiday but where am i going to put it and when you only have a limited amount of space it makes you really think through whether or not you need things and whether or not you have the room for them basically if you have the space like when we had our bigger house if you have the space you will fill it so if you have a small amount of space again you will fill it but you don't have as many material items and it just feels so freeing to not have that stuff it is very freeing i like it all right what else highly recommend it if you're considering living in an rv stationary semi-permanent semi-permanent stationary on your own land it is a great way especially if you're in a situation like us and you're building a house and you need a place to live it's really great to live on the land that you're going to be moving to and be close to your build whether you're building it yourself or you're having others build it for you you can be on the spot and be able to oversee everything it's a great situation and it's a lot easier than you think it's going to be you adjust as you need to and it'll change your life really it'll change your perspective on things yeah going forward there's two projects that we're gonna do to improve our rv situation even better the first one is installing a deck platform yeah look how autumn has to go in and out of the camper you'll notice she's gotta go grab the handle go down the stairs go back up the stairs and then reach out and grab and shut the door it's hard on little kids it's hard on dogs so that'll do two things allow a safe entry and exit for kids and it'll also allow the um it'll give us more living space outdoors that we could just walk out open the door and have a nice outdoor platform it'll also give us a a way to take off our shoes outside of the camper that's true too we bring in so much dirt and mud into the camper in the winter months and it would help to have a place to take take your shoes off right there yeah you're always doing like a balancing act like trying to get your boot off but not get it in the mud and or dirt yeah it's annoying and the second project that we have coming up real soon is installing a wood stove into the camper we have an issue with condensation that needs to be resolved this winter and winter is coming winter's coming it'll provide dry heat and it'll keep things dry it'll keep things warm you don't have to burn the propane all the time so a lot of benefits to installing a wood stove so stay tuned for those two things and of course we have our house built we're actually gonna start breaking ground real soon here we're almost done with the driveway i'll show you maybe next episode or two where we are with the driveway um we made it all the way to the house site and it's a really cool driveway yeah i'm excited about it i'll try to fly it with the drone again if you guys liked it last time um yeah i'm proud of it yeah so we have a lot of exciting things to come thanks for watching yeah thanks guys wow carmen you're really really posing she wants to be the star celebrity mountain cur oh you feel left out maddie all right the second pro you trouble ran across the street what are you chasing huh you can't do that carmen and i saw you you did not check for traffic at all okay thanks autumn thanks for showing that to us and then she slams it when she leaves right yep because you don't want to climb the steps and close it nicely yeah right okay

Channel: Walnuts and Wineberries

Views: 61,840

Keywords: RV living, Fulltime RV life, Camper life, RV renovation

Id: XHhK_gOXKoo

Length: 37min 7sec (2227 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 01 2021