Minimalist Couple Living in a Tiny Camper Trailer That Cost Only $1,800 - RV Life

[Music Playing] >> KATHLEEN: I think our lives will forever be changed by this experience. I don't think we'll ever be comfortable in a big house. We're just more comfortable in a smaller space surrounded by nature. That's where we feel at home. >> GREG: Living in the camper is very powerful in the sense that you hear the rain on the roof, and you feel the wind blowing through the camper, and you can feel the crisp in the breeze. It's nice. [Music Playing] >> KATHLEEN: We're in Colorado and this is our 1969 Terry camper trailer that we live in so come tour our house. [Music Playing] When you first walk in we have our closet space for storing our clothes. This is my closet. Greg has the same just right across from me. His is a little bit smaller. Next up is our bathroom. Inside you'll see we use a composting toilet. If you're not familiar with a composting toilet, basically what it is... it's the same as a normal toilet, it just doesn't use water and it separates number one from number two. Number one goes in this container, number two, you open the hatch like that it mixes with a soil amendment to become compostable and you can put it in your yard and use it as fertilizer. Same with number one. Currently we don't use our water, or our shower because we're not connected to a water source. We shower at the gym instead. And when we do use water, we use gallon jugs instead and I'll get to that in a little bit. So this is our main area where we have living space and our bedroom and our kitchen. We have a basket for all our fruit and other items that we want in there. Silverware and other miscellaneous storage areas are below. You can see this camper actually has a ton of storage space. Up above we have our cups and glasses, and plates and seasoning in here. Our spices are along the top here. And when we're ready to cook a meal we will wash our fruits and vegetables in the sink but we use a gallon jug instead of actually using running water. Behind me is our bedroom. We sleep here and then we store things up here. When we don't have any guests, we keep this closed, but when we do, this can actually come out the full size of the bed and someone can sleep up here and we can move everything down below our bed for storage which is really nice. We've had some guests who have actually slept above us. [Music Playing] >> GREG: Before we bought the trailer, we were living in Capitol Hill, in downtown Denver in an apartment kind of doing the standard downtown Denver life and I had been talking to Kathleen about doing the van life for awhile and she wasn't quite ready to do the van life at the time but she met me in the middle with a camper. >> KATHLEEN: It's a 1969 Terry Trailer. We bought it for $1800. >> GREG: At the time we justified it as 2 months worth of rent basically. It was kind of how we equated that. Eventually we realized we needed our own space, and to have our own backyard is really nice. It's also really great to have a space to have chickens and a garden. >> KATHLEEN: When we first moved into the camper, I had a really difficult time, to be completely honest. You know, I had to make some adjustments like using a composting toilet, shower at the gym, cooking in a smaller space. Man those first couple of months were pretty rough. >> GREG: Yeah and at the beginning we weren't quite adjusted yet. We hadn't insulated everything and situated everything the way we wanted it. >> KATHLEEN: Now that we've been living small in some form for the past 2 years I feel really silly that I made it such a big deal in the beginning. Now living this lifestyle doesn't seem so hard. >> GREG: It's actually been even more amazing than I could have ever imagined living in a camper would be and it's the perfect size really. We built these insulation blocks to fit in the windows so that we could live in here in the winter. It also comes in really handy in the summer as well. They're made out of styrofoam and radiant barrier and they pop into the window just like this. And now we're insulated. What prompted us to come up with the insulation blocks is the camper is really a three-season camper by design. It has a furnace but these insulation blocks really make it a four-season camper and allow us to live in here in the winter, and in the dog days of summer. >> KATHLEEN: Here's our gallon jugs. After we use them we hang them up here and then we go back to the store and we go all at once and refill our jugs. As you can see we have some of our essential items in here like my guitar, my computer, notebooks, journals, and all the books that we want to read are down here below us. So this is a really great place to hang out. We spend a lot of our time just using this as our sofa as well. This is a curtain that we made. When it's too sunny out we'll have it hanging like this. Otherwise if we want to look outside we will pin it up just like this. Pretty easy to do. Over here is our seating area and it's where the dogs sleep as well. We had a table in here before but we found that it took up too much space and it felt kind of crowded with us trying to navigate around each other with cooking and everything else that we were doing. So we took the table out and now it opens up our layout a lot more. We use these two areas for more clothes and more clothes down below which is nice. One thing that's pretty important that we do with our camper is we hang a lot of things that we use on a daily basis so we hang our cameras, the dogs' bandanas, our sunglasses, my jewelry, some of our fruits and vegetables, we hang our hats and that just makes it easy for on-the-go grabbing stuff whenever we need it. [Music Playing] >> GREG: One of my favourite parts of living in the camper is also the freeing lifestyle that your lifestyle doesn't cost as much as a conventional lifestyle. It's very liberating to know that you're using less resources which means you have more time to backpack or fish or simply just enjoy life really. >> KATHLEEN: We continue to be inspired by other people breaking the barriers on what an alternative living style is. It's been really cool because that's also shifted our ideas and we feel like we can continue to brainstorm new new forms of tiny living and explore them. [Music Playing]

Channel: Exploring Alternatives

Views: 2,354,317

Keywords: rv living, alternative living, tiny house, rv, rv life, full time rv, living in an rv, trailer, mobile home, exploring alternatives, tiny house tour, simple living, off grid, minimalism, tiny house on wheels, van life, minimalist, motorhome living, downsizing, homesteading, sustainable, camper, documentary, mini, tiny house tiny footprint, couple, tiny home, 2017, downshifting, spend less money, how to, budget, digital nomad, rv living full time, nomad, US, USA, rv tour, camping, motorhome

Id: VG4kJrhjzaY

Length: 8min 54sec (534 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 10 2017