Life at 70 square feet
“Isn’t it kind of cramped in the van?”
When Kara and I first started this whole RV-lifestyle journey, the first thing we did was sell our four-bedroom, 2,800 square foot house and downsize to a one-bedroom 940 square foot apartment. We lived there for almost two years as we figured out the best next step. Eventually we bought a 38-foot motor coach that was just under 300 square feet.
Getting tighter.
And yet, somehow, that motorhome ended up feeling more spacious than the apartment did. Sure, there was some shuffle—we, like a lot of people who go full-time into an RV—made the mistake of trying to transfer our whole lives into the rig. We tried to replicate our house in there, which meant we had too much stuff. And too much stuff meant we were living around our space instead of living in it.
Over time, we came off the road and got another apartment. This time it was a vast, luxurious two bedroom with about 1,500 square feet. Room to stretch!
About two years after that we decided to move yet again, and this time relocated to an apartment that was referred to as a “flat” in their brochure, which amounted to about 2,400 square feet of townhome living, complete with three bedrooms and a garage. Massive.
Enter the goldfish principle—you and your stuff tend to expand to fill the space you occupy. And we did. We pulled everything we had out of storage and filled that flat, really settling in and occupying the space. It was comfortable, and we enjoyed it.
We were house hunting when the idea of getting back on the road occurred to us.
We had put a bid in on a house, and we were approved on a loan, and then they came back asking for a bigger down payment. We felt pretty strongly that we could come up with that, if we needed to. Or I could probably have worked some writerly magic and convinced them to stick to the original deal.
Instead, it got us thinking.
Why were we trying to buy that house in the first place? Did we need more space? No, we decided. It was about ownership, having property. We wanted something that would gain value over time. An investment.
So... why there?
If the idea was to be strategic about buying property, about making an investment, why buy in that neighborhood? Why buy in that area? Property values (at the time) were pretty stable. Any appreciation would be fairly minimal. And in the meantime we’d own a place in an area we were constantly road tripping to get away from.
So why not just get on the road again?
Ok, that was part A. And it was enough to get us excited about the idea.
But part B was all about downsizing.
Kara was always the more nervous one, of the two of us, when it came to living in a smaller space. She likes to spread out, to cook big meals in a well-appointed kitchen, to have plenty of space for projects and creating. I tend to work from a desk. I like to have a space that’s all me, but it can be fairly small and I’d be fine. In fact, in each of the massive home spaces we ever lived in, my office was where I spent the most time, and it was typically one of the smaller rooms in the house.
But Kara surprised me when we started talking about getting back on the road. She was the one who suggested we put everything into storage and downsize to something tiny.
We ended up buying a 24-foot camper that was, maybe on the high side, about 180 square foot of living space. Our smallest home yet.
Again, we took too much stuff with us. But at least this time we had the additional of the back of a pickup to cram some things into, so the living space itself was relatively open. And for a few months, we lived in it just fine. We each had our seats at the table, where we could work. We had a cramped little kitchen, but it was enough for Kara to do some cooking. It just turned out that cooking on the road wasn’t really something we cared to do that often. More on that later.
We were comfortable in the camper. But there was a downside we could never have predicted.
We had planned all this, bought the camper, moved our stuff into storage, and terminated the lease on our massive townhome, all in the first couple of months of 2020.
Remember 2020?
In fact, the last day of our lease was April 1st. And it was on that day that the whole world suddenly went into lockdown over COVID-19.
I won’t kid ya... we panicked a little.
Because here we were, effectively homeless, at a time when traveling was sort of frowned upon. Campgrounds we’d planned to visit were shut down. Restaurants and cafes we’d planned to work from were turning people away. Stores we planned to shop in were limiting the number of people who could come in per day, and their shelves were stripped bare.
We couldn’t find public restrooms. We couldn’t get groceries. We couldn’t find places to park.
Thank God for Kara’s folks. As much as we hated to impose on them, we really had no other place to go. So we managed to get a storage space for the camper, we grabbed our stuff, and we moved into a single bedroom of their house, about 100 square feet.
We stayed there for two months before things started calming down out in the world. It was still hard to find public restrooms, and you still couldn’t go into restaurants, per se. But things were beginning to open up just enough. And we got on the road again.
We didn’t get far. We stuck to Texas for the first few months. And living in the camper was just fine. Small space, yes. But we were learning how to live in that space.
So one unexpected downside to the camper, though, did come up.
We were parked in a pretty amazing campground in Kerrville, Texas, which is a couple of hours in all directions for anything you might want to do or see. Shopping, dining, activities... all of those things were a trek. And since public restrooms were still kind of hard to come by, and only a few businesses were opening up in reasonable ways, we found we were a little screwed if we were more than an hour or two from the camper. We’d have to ditch and drive back, just to use the restroom or have a meal.
That was when Kara asked, “What if we traded the truck and camper and downsized to a van?”
Downsize. Again.
We were already living in a space smaller than the bathroom we’d had at our last apartment, but sure... downsize. Again.
We were driving back to “home,” to her parents’ place, when we stopped at an RV dealer and took a look at what would ultimately become our new mobile residence. It took some negotiating and some haggling and some dealing, but eventually we managed to swing it. We traded our brand new F-150 and brand new Lance camper trailer and got a brand new Coachmen Beyond conversion van. About 70 square feet.
Downsizing to that space meant getting real. We knew we couldn’t take all of it with us. Not even half of it. Not even a third of it.
So for about a month we went back and forth from our storage units (plural), loading and unloading, trying and discarding, figuring out what we really needed, what we could get by with, and what had to stay.
In a lot of ways, even after a year of living in the van and traveling the US, we’re still trying to figure it out.
I think we’ve gotten to a fairly good place with it, but we still, occasionally, have to reassess. I have a backpack full of production gear, for example, that I’ve barely used. A backpack. And I’m still considering taking out only the things I’ve used and putting the rest in storage, the next time we pass through. The same goes for some of my clothes, some of my tools, and a few other odds and ends.
You’d be amazed at how little it takes to get by, out here. Living in 70 square feet wakes you up to the fact that all the living space is outside.
And cooking...
Well, we don’t want to eat out all the time. But cooking in the van is a very challenging event. We do have an induction cooktop, and we have pans and pots and utensils. We have a tiny little fridge, though, that can’t hold much more than a meal at a time. So the cooktop ends up being our coffee maker (we heat up water in a kettle and use French presses).
We do have a microwave, but we don’t use it much. Most of our food is lighter fare, things we can eat straight from the fridge or the pantry, supplemented by the occasional pick-up meal. We avoid fast food, so a lot of those meals come from Whole Foods and grocery stores, and sometimes restaurants.
I’ve taken to cooking on a camp stove, though, which is fun. We do that maybe three times per week, and we typically pick up whatever we’re cooking the day we’re going to make it.
We aren’t starving.
So living in 70 square feet, we get a lot of comments and questions. “Isn’t it kind of cramped in the van?”
Yes and no.
We’ve learned how to live in this space. We’ve even learned how to be “apart” in the space. Kara tends to work from her bed, where she can set up like a sofa. I tend to work from the passenger seat, which turns around and allows me to kick my feet up on a camp stool and use my lap desk. It works. It’s enough.
But the real breakthrough is that point about all the space being outside.
We don’t feel cramped in the van, because the van takes us to places that are expansive, wide open, vast. I work outside sometimes. We take walks and hikes. We visit historic sites and tour monuments. Things have started opening up out here, so we even go to those cafes and restaurants and coffee shops we were missing.
It’s pretty amazing, how much space you can get out of 70 square feet.
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