Week four ended with one of the most important steps in our process of moving to full time. This was the end of our first month living in the RV, which is still waiting for a good name. This week involved setting up the Berkey, our final walk-thru on the house, and our closing day! It also involved a long drive to pick up important equipment.
Setting up the Berkey I, Laurie, was so nervous. It is so revered in RVing circles and expensive and from what we’ve heard, it seems so delicate. We’ve heard stories of people who travel away from their RV (We Are The Russos) having to get a Berkey sitter. It just all seemed so high tech. After reading the instructions for setting it up and following them very closely, it was set up in no time. All we really had to do was prime the filters, which involved taking a water bottle and injecting pressurized water into them until the “sweated” water back out. Basically, you just have to get the filters wet fast. Then we filled it up and waited for that sweet, pure water to filter by gravity down into the lower tank. We had to find a place for this behemoth as well. Living in a small space means that every inch counts. We are pretty packed to gills while we work through our house sized containers of things and buy smaller versions. We are also still figuring out where everything will live. We chose to put the Berkey in the outdoor kitchen to see if that will work for us long term. We nestled it in beside the mini fridge and let it do its thing for the night. In the morning, we had fresh, clean water without a run to the store.
This week, things started to get bad with everyone worrying about how fast the Covid-19 virus is spreading. Rumors were spreading around work sites, the news was all about the virus and very little about anything else. It was starting to get scary. We kept our wits about us, didn’t panic and only stocked up enough to be able to survive for about a month. Since we are new to living in the RV still, we didn’t have time previously to be able to slowly build our supplies. We bought in small batches and spread out our supply runs. This may have put us at more risk by taking more trips but, we weren’t depleting the stores all at once. We mostly stocked up on canned and dry goods with some fresh fruits, veggies, and meat for the short term.
We also finished throwing everything out from the house, and cleaning one last time in preparation for the final walk through on Thursday and closing on Friday! We sold and gave away a few more items that we didn’t want to take to our already overburdened storage unit. The house that we built, picked out the paint and brick colors, features, and furniture for was almost back in the same condition as when we bought it five years ago. We had put a lot of love and good memories into the house but, ultimately we were spending more time outside of it than we were spending in it. We both work 40+ hours a week with hour+ commutes each way and when the weekends come, we are out on the bikes or adventures. It was time to close one chapter of our lives and open the next. Selling to Zillow was a good decision for us, we didn’t have to go through showing the house to strangers-getting kicked out on short notice and having to find something to do with the dogs, the walk through went very smoothly and only lasted 15 minutes, we got to choose our closing date (which was great for us to be able to plan when to cancel the storage bill for the RV and when to start our stay in the RV park), and the process was so easy. Most of what we had to do was able to be completed online and through email. We signed documents and sent them back through email, we were able to ask questions when they came up and got answers quickly as well. Overall, we were happy with our decision and feel that it was the right one for us. If you have any questions about the process that we went through, please leave us a comment and we will answer them.
Saturday March 21 brought a very long drive for a good cause. On Friday, Laurie got the notice that she was going to be able to start working from home and this was going to require a hardwired internet connection. We went to BestBuy after work with all of the equipment that she was given to make sure that we had everything we needed to make it all work. We needed a Hot Spot with an Ethernet connection. The store we went to was sold out, we went online to find the closest one. We opened our search nationwide and the closest Hot Spot was 226 miles away in North Austin and they had 1 left, for reference the next closest one that we found was in north east Washington state! With the virus spreading and so many people transitioning to remote work all at once, anything having to do with a remote work set up was selling out as fast as the trucks could bring them to the stores. But, we left at 6 AM, stopped at Czech Stop for Kolaches for breakfast (anytime you are near Czech Stop, you must visit and get a Kolache. They are amazing!), and got there 5 minutes before BestBuy opened at 10 AM. We were able to pick it up fast from our internet order and get back out of there and back on the road.
It was a very busy week and we made it through the first month of full time RV living. We are so happy that we made this decision to change our lives. We love getting to spend more time with each other, we enjoy spending time in our RV and getting to spend more time outside as well. It is smaller and easier to keep clean, the tight space makes it a requirement to clean up right away in order to continue functioning so overall the RV stays cleaner than the house did. In the house we could spread out and not notice the clutter until it reached a breaking point. We are enjoying this lifestyle and are looking forward to when all of the upgrades are completed and we are organized into a well functioning RV, and we can hit the road. We will continue to share our journey to the road and beyond with you. You can help us along by visiting our social media site, subscribing, liking, and sharing with others who you feel might enjoy our content. Thank you for coming along for the ride. See you next week!
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