On a road trip to a camping spot, sometime before we were married, Tony and I first discussed how fun it would be to travel the country and be a full-time RV family. It wasn’t new for me to daydream about this lifestyle. My dad and I would discuss it on our family road trips. However, when Tony was just as excited about doing something like this, I knew it was in our future.

From the beginning of our relationship, we loved camping and going on adventures. We had many spontaneous trips to the Mackinac Bridge (3+ hours away) and vacations in the Upper Peninsula. Some of our favorite camping trips were roughing it on the beaches of Lake Michigan or deep in the woods. All these fun trips would fuel the want to live full-time in an RV and raise our family on the road.

We're now a full-time RV family
mackinac bridge michigan

Buying our new home

Fast forward a few years later, and we started getting more serious. We looked at RVs, went to an RV show, and considered ways to make this work. On a whim in October of 2016, we drove to the RV dealership and asked to tour some RVs. The salesperson was good at his job and sold us a brand new Fleetwood Bounder.

Now what?! We have a 36ft RV in our driveway with no plans of making this crazy dream a reality. One thing we did know – it was happening.

Since we lived in Michigan, we needed to winterize it shortly after we bought it. This was a tad heartbreaking to have this enormous piece of our next chapter sitting in the driveway. We still didn’t even know if we could actually live in a small space and survive. HA!

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Testing out living in a small space

In May of 2017, we temporarily moved into the RV with plans to return to our home in the winter. This was just to see if we could make it work. We still took most of our showers and baths in the house but didn’t spend much time in our home.

That summer, we went camping, including a week-long adventure in the Upper Peninsula and the Apostle Islands in Wisconsin.

When we moved back into our house in the Fall, we knew full-time living was happening. We couldn’t wait! We spent the time waiting for summer with house projects, including new siding, room painting, and floorplan changes.

Our first drive as a full-time RV family

We’re now a full-time RV family

In May of 2018, we permanently moved into the RV with plans of NOT moving back into our house. The part that took the longest was the time spent going through everything and moving our belongings into our RV. We purchased an enclosed trailer to hold the stuff we wanted to keep but not take with us.

We ended up donating and selling almost everything we owned. Going from 2000 sqft to nearly 350 sqft is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but one of the most rewarding. There was only so much room, but I wanted to keep everything. Everything had memories or feelings—I didn’t want to let go. Needless to say, the enclosed trailer is full. Thinking about this now, I already know I can let go of probably half the things we kept.

We put our house for sale in October, almost exactly two years after we purchased the RV. Three months later, our home was sold, and we were traveling south to Texas. It was the most fantastic feeling! We can’t believe that we are finally a full-time RV family!