It’s been about sixty-seven days, sixteen hours, twelve minutes and fifty-seven seconds that we’ve been living in the trailer. But who’s counting? And for as many people who ask me how the build is going, just as many people ask me about living in the trailer.
I didn’t realize people would care so much.
I usually just shrug and say, “It’s fine.” I’m not really sure what I should tell them.
‘Cuz that’s just how it is, it’s fine.
It isn’t mind blowing, life changing, or fantastic. I’m not fulfilling some life long desire to live in a camper and explore the world. I’m sharing 220 s.f. of living space with my two Labradors, two daughters, my husband and our beta fish Pepper parked in our side yard.
It’s just fine.
I’m not dying. I’m sure others have had it worse. And please don’t make the mistake of thinking this post is a complaint. Because living in the trailer is just “fine”. (Who am I trying to convince anyways?)
Sigh
“It’s fine” is comprised of many “just deal with it” sort of living conditions. We share a community laundry basket. I don’t really have anywhere to put our clothes. The clothes we dirty go in an old hamper liner until it’s overflowing and I have to make a trip to the laundromat, while at the same time we deplete the laundry basket of the clean, folded clothes from the last trip to the laundromat. It’s a fine line between chaos and utter chaos.
Next I store fruit in a bucket on top of some other stuff that’s in there just for camping trips. I’m not sure what’s in the bucket under the fruit, but I try not to think about it, because I’m over caring.
We are currently having issues with ants. I’m not sure where they are coming from, where they are going, or what they are after. Every day it changes, sometimes it’s the sugar, sometimes it’s the bread, and sometimes they are just after the water in our toilet (yes, we have a toilet). But the one constant: every single day they are there. As if sharing the trailer with three other people, two dogs and a fish isn’t enough, I have to share it with three million ants, eighty flies and a couple of lizards too. The beauty is I can kill most of those things.
Another question people ask is if we are still able to shower/bathe/cook/poop whatever in the house. In a one word answer, “No”. We haven’t had water or gas in the house for sixty-seven days, sixteen hours, twenty-four minutes and forty-eight seconds. I make due cooking in my “highly efficiently designed” trailer kitchen – mostly crockpot and microwave dinners. I haven’t used the oven since I set the trailer on fire. As for the shower – well, I sit in the half bath (the bath is literally half the size of a regular bath tub) and clean up that way. The water heater is a 6-gallon tank. By the time I get the water temp just right (somewhere between scalding hot and freezing cold) the hot water runs out. The girls take a bath. And Mike…I’m not convinced he showers at all.
In the very early days of living in the trailer we had not diverted the house water into the trailer line. We had just filled the water tank on the trailer with a hose and shut the water off to our house. Mike went away to work and I was left with the girls and a quickly depleted water supply. Suffice it to say, by the time Mike came home (two days later) the girls and I had all enjoyed showers with pure, filtered bottle water from the “mountains and springs” of Arrowhead. My hair never looked so good.
Most days I feel like I live in a luxury portable toilet. So, I spend a lot of time working on the house. Living in the trailer pushes us every day to get the house closer to completion because, just “fine” sucks.
Just in case you’re curious, here’s some pics (maybe this will get you over to my house in sympathy)
I title this next picture: Lost All Shame
The rest of the kitchen (‘cuz you know…it’s so big it wouldn’t fit in one pic…):
P.s. If you’re wondering what’s going on in the house, don’t worry, it looks amazing. We are just re-running all of the old plumbing, gas and electrical we had to remove from the first floor when we were demoing everything. It’s like slow rewinding our demo days. 🙂 Next time you ask me about living in a trailer, relate it to something you saw on my blog, such as, “How’s taking a shower sitting down these days?” Or, “Ever figure out what’s in that bucket under the fruit?”
P.p.s. That orange bucket under the ice maker in the last pic, that’s my “fruit bucket”.