Answering Questions about RV Living – Part 1 — 12/15/18

As our time in Austin is winding down and we’ll soon be getting back into full-time RVing, we can’t help but begin thinking about how life will shift for us once again.  Even though we have a really nice RV with many creature comforts, there’s no escaping the fact that there are aspects of RV living that one doesn’t deal with when living in more traditional housing.  So, for those of you who haven’t been RVing before, I thought I would provide answers to some of the questions we are often asked about full-time RV living.  To keep my blog posts to a reasonable length, I’ll answer a few questions in this post and then work on some other questions in future posts.

How did you fit all of the stuff you had in your house into your RV?  Ha! We didn’t.  There’s no way to fit almost 30 years of stuff from married life into 400 square feet.  Honestly, it was absolutely torturous trying to pare our stuff down.  Basically, we had to divide things into several categories: what would go into the RV, what we would throw away, what we would sell/donate, what we could pass along to our kids and friends, and what we would put into storage.  Yep, we rented a 10’x15’ storage space in Gaithersburg for stuff we wanted to keep that wasn’t going to travel with us.  We loaded it up with memorabilia, furniture, winter clothing, etc. Basically, stuff that we are likely to use again once we’re done with full-time RVing…as well as anything that we just couldn’t decide to part with.

When you are driving in the RV, how do you keep your things from flying all over the place?  In our RV, every cabinet door and every drawer have latches to keep them shut, so we make sure to give those doors and drawers a good last push to make sure the latches are engaged. Surprisingly, our refrigerator doors don’t latch closed, so we have to tie a bungee cord around the two handles to keep them closed.  We’ve learned through experience what happens when we forget to use the bungee cord.  I’ve driven around a corner and then hear a BANG…as I turn around to see the refrigerator doors open and items lying on the floor.  One of the last checks we do before driving our RV is to make sure the bungee cord is on the refrigerator doors as well as looking around to see if there is anything out on counters, shelves, etc. that need to be tucked away.

What happens to your mail?  Obviously, since we’re no longer located in just one place, the mail can’t possibly keep up with us.  For these kind of living situations, there are mail-forwarding services that you can enlist for a small monthly fee.  Basically, the mail service gives you an address that you give to the postal service in order to have your mail sent to the mail forwarding service.  The mail service we selected is located in Florida, so we now have a Florida address.  When mail comes in for us, the mail service sends me an email letting me know that I should go online to their portal, where I can sign in and see scanned images of the front of the envelopes.  For each piece of mail, I select whether it should be shredded, sent to us (at an address we provide), or if they should open it and scan the contents so I can further review and make a determination.  The really nice part is that you can tell them to toss all junk mail and not scan any of it for you to review….so we no longer get any junk mail!!!

How is it having two big dogs in your RV?  As you can imagine, it’s certainly easier for the dogs to get more under-foot in the small space of the RV, but honestly it doesn’t seem much different than when we were in our house.  The reason is that even in a bigger house, our dogs tended to follow us around wherever we went, so, in essence, they were always under-foot there, too!  The biggest difference for us is that when we lived on the farm, we’d just open our sliding glass door and let the dogs out to do their business or just hang outside. When you’re in an RV park, you can’t just open the door and let the dogs out – they need to be put on lead and walked. Since the dogs weren’t leash-trained, our first efforts at walking them on leash were comedic…to the folks who were watching us.  The dogs would entangle each other, entangle us, pull us every which way, etc.  We did come up with a solution for letting the dogs out without being on lead — we bought a whole bunch of light-weight fencing that we could set up around our RV so that we could let the dogs out.  That actually helped quite a bit — the dogs no longer yank us down the RV stairs on the way out.  The other challenge with the dogs is that when it rains, the dogs end up tracking in a lot of mud/dirt into the RV. Unlike at home where we had a mud room where we could work on cleaning them before they got into the rest of the house, the RV doesn’t have such a thing, so the entrance to the RV becomes quite the messy area.  The one other thing about having pets in the RV is that, just like back at the farm, if you decide to leave them at home when you go out, your plans always have to take into account getting back to feed them and walk them, so you can’t just be spontaneous and decided to leave them all day and night.  All of that aside, we do love having them along with us on our journey!

How do you guys deal with being in such a small space with each other 24 hours a day?  That has probably been one of our bigger challenges.  It’s actually a three-part challenge.  The first part is that, ever since I retired last year, we’ve had to figure out how to adjust to me being around a lot more hours of the day.  The second part is about the smaller living area of the RV.  And the third part is that we now have only one car between the two of us, so if one of us takes the car to go do an errand, the other person is “stranded” back at the RV. Of course, that’s not entirely true, with the availability of Lyft and Uber.  Though, as we get further outside of highly-populated areas, I’m not sure how available (or affordable) those will be.  There are a lot of RVers who take care of the last issue by having another motorized vehicle (scooter, motorcycle, golf cart) or bicycles.  We don’t have any of those….yet.  Back to the first two issues, I’m extroverted (big surprise, right?) and Karen is introverted, so I’m more likely to miss the signals that Karen needs her alone time to recharge.  That’s when the awkward/uncomfortable conversation happens where the idea is floated that I should go do some errands or do some work at a Starbucks.  With a lot of full-time RVing in front of us, we’ll certainly have the time to continue to work through this issue!

Well, this seems like a good place to wrap-up my first post answering questions about RV living.  I’ll start working on Part 2 soon.  If you have any questions that you’d like me to take a shot at answering, feel free to use the comment section below to ask them!