Meet Our New Gypsy Caravan!
I'm finally updating you on project wanderlust! We found our "dream" trailer about a month ago and it has been sheer chaos ever since. Wahoo! I don't want to sugar coat this journey and make everyone think it's been easy-peasy. This path is NOT for the faint of heart! In the past few weeks while attempting to even get the trailer to a point and a place where we could start working on her we've had 2 vehicles break down, money lost, broken fingers AND toes, hospital visits for dehydration and numerous yelling contests to name a few of the challenges!
With that being said we are so excited about our new project and with A LOT of work we finally were able to start remodeling!
A little background: TIm and I currently live in a small apartment with 2 other room mates. We decided to look into our own place several months ago and started saving for first, last and security and became very jaded with the crummy, over priced apartments available and are both fed up with sinking all of our income into renting something that will never be ours. Even painting or updating an apartment is a loss of money and energy.And ultimately I wanted to throw up thinking about handing over our hard earned $5,000 to another lazy land lord and feeling like we got shafted. Buying isn't quite yet an option for us and we really want to do things differently without having to settle on exorbitant loan rates and a mediocre starter home with no land.
So.....we decided to take a risk and put every penny we had saved into purchasing a trailer and attempting to live in it for the next few years until we had a sizable down payment. At first we looked into shiny new trailers and RVs with beautiful hardwood, flat screen TVs and central vac and told ourselves that if we were trading in our rent we could afford a loan payment. Then we remembered that our goal was to do things differently and prove that we could make this work without owing anyone a dime. Plus if we can do this I want to show people how it can be done realistically. Much of the the info or blogs I've seen have been about people who have had assets to start out with and sold a home and downsized etc.. So we STRUGGLED to find a trailer that was within our measly $5,000 budget. We considered trailers that were completely gutted, trailers with collapsed roofs, trailers from 1982 (older than both of us) and trailers that were literally growing mushrooms. We talked to so many swill merchants trying to pawn off their lousy, falling apart tin cans. AND we did our research. I now know so much about trailers it would make your head spin.
We lost most of our hope and Tim thought maybe we should just start the apartment search again since we have already given our notice for July 1st. But I am WAY too stubborn for that and told him I'd live in a tent before moving into another apartment. Just when we were ready to give up (and kill each other) we checked out one more and thank the universe we found one!
She's a 38 foot long 2001 Sierra by Forest River with 3 slide outs. The original owners were a lovely couple who kept her in immaculate shape and were very honest and real with us about any damage or repairs. The kitchen is teeny, the decor is outdated and there is some water damage on one of the slide outs and the floor by the door but the pros far outweigh the cons.
We decided on this one because of the amount of storage, The potential to winterize and insulate it. The layout allows us to make our own updates and like I said everything was so well taken care of we thought it might minimize our chances of having too many surprise problems. Plus it has surround sound, central AC and an ice maker...that's more luxury than we have in our little apartment now. This is definitely a park model trailer because of the size so there won't be much travel with her which is a bit of a bummer but livability is most important to us right now and that meant more space. Our goal is to have a semi permanent spot to park her and get somewhat settled so we can simplify and save anyway.
We left a down payment that day and lined up our friend to help us move her out to my father's with his landscape truck to start renovations. We paid a total of $5,500 for a beautiful trailer that is appraised at more than $7,000. It's a week into June and we FINALLY have our trailer parked and have started this crazy process!
Our first order of business is opening up the floor and slide where there was some known water damage and see what the extent was. MUCH worse than we thought and if it weren't for TIm I probably would have had a panick attack but he's amazing and fixed up a very ugly problem VERY quickly and basically for free. More about that in the next post. Second step is replacing the ugly linoleum/carpet mix on the floors and painting (the fun part!).
Next post will be about the first updates and the first problems! Hope you follow us on this insane adventure! Would love to hear your comments and ENCOURAGEMENT! :)
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