When we bought and moved into our RV, we did so with the intention of selling our home in Utah, spending the summer working in Idaho, then moving back to Utah in the fall for my husband to coach wrestling and for our 2nd baby to be born. And that's pretty much how it all went down until the offers on our home fell through one by one during the summer. It was listed as a short sale, and though we got LOTS of offers - 3 in the first 2 days it was listed - the bank didn't approve any of them. Our realtor showed it a lot during the summer, but we'd already moved everything out...it was empty, lonesome and surely unappealing. The few offers we did get ended up like the others...denied by Wells Fargo. When it came time for us to get ready to move back to Utah, our house was still there...still empty....no more offers, and even then we were still planning on living in our RV in an RV park about 10 minutes from our house. The obvious thing to do was obviously not obvious to us at first...and then it was....
SO we moved back in. We had to get a kitchen table and dressers and I spent about $50 making cheap decorations so it doesn't look so barren in here. Here are some examples...just to make things interesting. :)
{For these first two I bought 6 little frames from the thrift store - $1 each - and painted them white...I also bought an old sheet which I tore some strips off of. Glued the frames to the strips, added pictures of my babies and wha-la}
{This one is at a weird angle because it is sort of behind the Christmas tree now...had to get creative to take this pic. :)}
{Continuing on with the picture frames...I also got these 2 frames at the thrift store. One was $3 and the other was $1! Painted them white and used the same sheet to make strips of fabric for the ties. I also took a strip of fabric and stapled it across the frame...handmade flowers (made with fabric from that sheet) glued to paperclips hold the pictures onto the strip of fabric. Printed the pictures at Walgreens for $.10 each}
{This gem was $7 at the thrift store. It was brassy gold. A $1 can of flat black spray paint later and I love it!}
{This is WAY out of proportion...it's not as ginormous as it seems...$1 at the thrift store.}
{Possibly my favorite find...this desk was $10!!! at a thrift store. It was really beat up. What a little paint can't do, huh? The candle sticks on top were $1 each at the thrift store and the 'believe' sign was $5 at another thrift store, but I got that a long time ago so it doesn't count.} :)
{These gems were $1 each...they are plastic and were the same yucky brass/gold color that the swirly thing up there was. I love how they turned out with a little spray paint!}
{This picture was left behind by some naughty tenants who abandoned their apartment when my husband and I were apartment managers a few years ago. I've been lugging it around ever since, but never put it up. I found this frame for $5 at the thrift store and had nothing to do with either of them so I put them up together. It's a little weird, but I like how it turned out.}
{Got this idea from my friend, Jeanne Oliver who made one last year. It is made with rolled up pieces of old music. I tied mine together with little strips from...you guessed it...the sheet I got at the thrift store. The flowers are also made from that sheet. The leaves are paper.}
Aaaaanyway - Our RV is parked on the side of our house. It's too big for the RV pad that we happened to have (weird how things work sometimes), so it sticks out of the fence. Awesome. :)
A month after we moved back, we welcomed this little angel into our home.
{Lydia - one week old}
I LOVED living in the RV, but I am so thankful that we've had some space to get used to being a family of 4.
We moved into the RV with a lot of debt...credit cards and student loans mostly. This summer, we were able to negotiate with most of the credit card holders and they are no longer calling us and sending us mean mail anymore. What a blessing. Because of the credit card and collection calls, we felt buried. Once those were gone, we felt so much closer to FREE. Then someone brought up the option of modifying our mortgage. We are trying that, and if it goes through, our mortgage will be cut in half. And we will be able to handle it even on the hit-and-miss income we earn. Another enormous blessing. If that doesn't work out, we'll lose our house and move back into the RV. What a blessing to have a back-up plan. We are still working on selling our financed car. Once we do, we will have our truck to drive and a VW Bug that Jeff restored in high school (his sisters had been using it, but it became homeless at the beginning of the year, and he took it back). BLESSING. No more car payments. In the coming weeks we will cut our cell phone bill from $150 to $40 ish. Feeling blessed that we found a way to do that and still be able to do everything we need to do.
So here we are. From the outside we're still in the same place we were in before we started this little journey. Jeff still doesn't really have a job...only odd/temporary jobs, and we're still not sure what's going to happen with our house, BUT we seem to have run into a downpour of miracles on this end of the summer. Life is far from perfect, but it is perfect for us and we are happy...THIS happy.
We will keep posting as long as you don't mind that I am posting from my 13'x13' kitchen instead of from my 4'x4' kitchen. I still owe you pictures of the renovated RV, which I will post as soon as some snow clears and I can walk through our backyard without getting stuck. :) Thank you SO much for the emails you've sent asking if we're okay...we definitely are. We'll keep you posted.
xoxo
