Almost Ready to Move Out of the RV

One month ago, my wife, our two dogs, and I moved into a twenty-foot RV parked about sixty feet from the front door we've been working toward.

It's been a real month.

The dogs have figured out the layout of the RV better than I have. Whitney has figured out how to cook a real dinner in a kitchen the size of a hallway closet. I've figured out that sitting down to put on shoes requires a plan, because the bedroom is also the kitchen is also the living room is also the office, and there's nowhere a grown man can put on a sock without bumping into something.

There were weeks when almost every room in the house looked something like this. Hard to remember now.

But here's the news I came here to share: the house is almost there.

And after thirty days of bumping into things, I mean almost there in a way I haven't felt in the whole project.

The shift

For most of the spring, the house was a thing we worked on. Lately, it has started becoming a thing we live in. Slowly. One room at a time.

The master bedroom mid-paint. French doors out to the back are about to become the most-used door in the house.

Paint went up. Then tile. Then fixtures. Then — one by one — the rooms stopped being rooms under construction and started being rooms with walls in them.

What the month in the RV actually taught us

Here's what I didn't expect: living in twenty feet of space for thirty days didn't make me want a bigger house. It made me want this house, exactly the size it already is.

Six thousand square feet was never the point. It was just the version we'd drifted into. Five acres and a hallway with a single bulb hanging from the ceiling — that's the version we picked. On purpose.

Whitney says the morning we're done she'll make coffee in the new kitchen and we'll drink it sitting on the new floor before anything else has been moved in. I told her that sounded about right.

The dogs, for the record, do not care about square footage or hallways. They care about whether someone is sitting on the floor. They have always been ahead of us on this.

I wrote two follow-on pieces from these same weeks — The Bathrooms Are Finally Real, on the tile-and-fixtures side of things, and When the Rooms Started Being Rooms, on the paint-and-finishing side. If you want to start from the very beginning, here's From 6,000 Sq Ft to 5 Acres.