The Shakedown

It’s been 2 months since our last blog post, and we’ve progressed with the skoolie enough to have our first trip out in the woods: “the shakedown.” Last weekend we packed up the bus and ventured out into the Willamette National Forest, and “glamped” at Sacandaga Campground which is south of Oakridge and along the beautiful middle fork of the Willamette River. We had a fun time hanging in the bus and exploring nature, and we learned some really good ideas to make the bus more functional and comfortable. Looking forward to more skoolie adventures to come this summer! 🙂

Bus work and how it’s looking inside:

And below- enjoying beautiful Oregon!

The Interior Starts To Take Shape

Hi this is the skoolie blog post. This time we are starting on only doing photos.

Dinette

Wheel well box

Bunk bed

Dinette

Bathroom walls

Wheel well box

Window Pain

Windows are a pane in the butt! We just finished re-caulking our bus windows and removing the old caulk, so that the windows won’t leak when it rains. We added a tarp (now we can remove the giant tarp!). Before window pics are below:

After the windows, we started to build a wall for storage next to the parents’ bed area near the back of the bus.

Some new things we added to the bus are new LED headlights.

old light

New light

Some of the other projects that still need to be done are heaters, more walls and putting the dashboard back together. This is Jace, signing off!

And… We’re Back! Our School Bus Conversion

It’s been just over a month since our family purchased a “midsize” 27 foot school bus! We are converting it into a simple “recreational vehicle” that we can use in Oregon and beyond for family camping adventures, road trips, etc. We’ve already made quite a transformation from a school bus filled with seats to a blank slate for building on.

BEFORE we started the conversion:

AFTER 1 month of demolition and building:

Over the past few years since we moved out of our tiny house, our family has grown to include our wonderful son Jace! Jace is 11 years old and in 6th grade. We now live in a “big” 1,000 square foot house in Eugene with a back yard that’s big enough to park our skoolie in while we work on converting it. Jace is great at many things, including building! Recently Jace has been honing his skills using a screw gun, nail gun, and more. While sometimes he just wants to stay in the house and play video games, at other times he is very helpful and into our new family project!

So far, our main tasks on the bus have been to remove all the bus seats, heaters and coolant lines, wheelchair lift, etc. Then we put rigid foam insulation down over the existing bus floor, and then plywood subfloor over that. We removed the old insulation in the walls under the windows, along with many rivets and the metal wall panels. We installed new insulation (sheep’s wool!) under the windows and then finished off those walls.

We couldn’t do this build without the many tools that we’ve borrowed from Eugene’s fabulous, nonprofit tool-lending library – the ToolBox Project. Check them out and donate to support this great community resource! From the angle grinder to an electric impact wrench and more, their tools have helped us out a whole lot with our skoolie.

Here are some photos of demolition and building over the past month:

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Some of our next steps in the conversion process will be to re-seal and caulk the many windows, start building our heating system, do an oil change, and build a couple of interior walls. Stay tuned to see more skoolie progress!

~The Ray Family

On to the next chapter

It’s with excitement, sadness, and so many memories that we said goodbye to our tiny house on August 13, 2018. It’s the end of a tiny house chapter in our lives, and the start of new adventures as we adopt! We sold the tiny house to a young couple in rural Washington state who are planning to live in it and make it their own.

We want to say a huge thank you to our amazing family and friends who made our tiny house dreams a reality. They spent countless hours building with us and offering their expertise when we didn’t know what the heck we were doing! Our house certainly could not have been built without all of that support.

We spent 2 1/2 happy years living in our tiny house, starting right as we finished building it in New Hampshire and then honeymooning in it across the country to move to Oregon! We learned that yes, a couple can live in a tiny house and still be very much in love. It’s certainly not for everyone, but it worked well for us. The tiny house allowed us to own a home, have the financial freedom to pay off the house quickly and end up with some cash, and live simply. We’re grateful to have been able to build our own tiny house and have so much fun living in it.

Lessons learned about how to sell a tiny house

We learned that selling a tiny house is not simple or quick, despite all of the interest in small homes! Our house was on the market for about eight months before it sold. Here’s some tips if you’re selling a tiny house:

1. Craigslist is your friend, and no we didn’t get paid to write that. Despite the other types of marketing we tried (mainly online) such as Facebook ads and tiny house listing websites, the vast majority of interest that we got from potential buyers came from Craigslist. We posted the house in a few metropolitan areas in Oregon and nearby states.
2. Provide as much detail as you can about the house. Through this blog we were able to show the entire building process and we included plenty of specs, photos, and a video on our for sale page. Several people commented that they didn’t have many questions for us, since there was so much information already provided. This will also help you as the seller, since you’ll hopefully only get serious buyers asking for a showing since they will already know so much about the house. Which leads us to…
3. Vet interested buyers before scheduling a showing. There’s a lot of interest and excitement around tiny houses, but only a very small portion of the population who would actually buy one. We asked potential buyers to answer a few key questions before we agreed to give them a tour, such as where they were in the house shopping process (make sure this isn’t the first tiny house they’re looking at, on a whim), where they would put the tiny house (ensures they have a serious plan), and generally how they would finance it (if they don’t have savings or access to cash, have they looked into a personal loan or other financing options).

We’re now signing off on this blog for now, thank you for reading!  We will be back in a few years to share a future bus conversion and the year long field trip to be had!  Best of luck to all those out there who are on tiny house adventures…

6 Months Living Tiny

Jeremy and I have now been living in our tiny house full-time for 6 months, after arriving here in Eugene, Oregon with the house on Sep. 1, 2015. So what is it like to live tiny? (Read on, then see some photos at the end of the post!)

I have found it so nice to be able to relax in and enjoy our house, after spending a year plus working so many hours to build the house. There are moments when I look around and have a memory of building that part of the house, and it makes living in here feel really special. I am also amazed that two people with pretty much no construction experience (and a lot of incredible help from family and friends!) built a house that actually works- and then were crazy enough to drove it across the country!

There are lots of positive things about our lil’ house, including the fact that we’ll have our house loans completely paid off in a couple of years. However I don’t want to romanticize it too much. Most of the time it just feels like this is my new normal, it’s just a home (which it really just is!). While most of our house systems have worked very well so far, there are times when things fail and we have to do some dirty work which might not happen as often in a ‘normal’ house. For instance sometimes our graywater pump acts up, and Jeremy crawls under the house to get it working again. When our propane heater had issues firing up some weeks ago, we managed for a couple days with minimal heat until Jeremy was able to fix the issue. And on a daily and weekly basis we actually deal with carting off our human waste, rather than just flushing it down the toilet.

Then there’s the things that you don’t often see when you pore over online photos of a newly built (not lived in) tiny house, or get the chance to visit such a home in person which we did recently in Eugene at a home show. The tiny homes in those pictures look so simple and beautiful, because they are often so empty! There’s usually not someone living in the house yet, and there’s no clutter of the things people actually have in a home.  In our house we go through the daily motions of dealing with mail that comes in so that it doesn’t pile up, making sure dishes are washed quickly, moving things around when guests come over so that everyone can fit, etc. This is the tricky part of living in a small space and not letting stuff overwhelm your life. Similar to how stuff is dealt with in any house, just on a smaller scale.

Here are photos from the past few months of living in our house, to show what daily life here is like:

Jeremy cooking up chili in the tiny kitchen

A yummy brunch at home

Laura does yoga in the tiny house! Just enough space

Sometimes the dishes do pile up

A recent book club in the house, there was a record 8 people total in the house for 2 hours

Full brunch in tiny house

Plenty of room for a party

Making Friends with our Neighbors

I wake up in the sleeping loft, to the faint noise of a chicken clucking. Sun is streaming in through the many windows of the house. I carefully climb over my sleeping husband to reach the loft ladder, and make my way downstairs. Relieve myself in the 5-gallon pee bucket in the bathroom (yes, we pee in a bucket!) and then start a tea kettle on our 4-burner (formerly RV) stovetop. I open the window curtains, sit down on our small sofa, and enjoy the view from our house: sun is shining on the lush green leaves of grape vines and plumb trees, the sky is a mix of blue with many puffy little white clouds, and birds are flitting through the yard.

We’ve been living full time in our tiny home in Eugene, Oregon for 4 weeks now. There are still boxes piled up in our living room, bare trim-less windows, and many more little projects to finish up – but we have everything we need to live comfortably here. Sometimes I marvel that we dreamed up this home, we had the crazy idea to pull it across the country to Oregon, and those dreams have come true! There is a nice simplicity to living in this little house. Most things are within an arm’s or a step’s reach, and there’s not many places you can hide if you want to get away from your partner. We’ve learned some important small living lessons so far, these are most relevant if you have neighbors in close proximity (not so much out in the ‘country’).

Make Friends with your Neighbors! We have met so many friendly people since we got to Eugene. However one surprise came soon after we pulled the house onto our rental lot in a city residential neighborhood: we completely surprised one of our immediate neighbors with our home, and changed the view from their house. What ensued in short was some un-neighborly exchanges, repositioning our house multiple times to try to satisfy all parties, anguishing and fretting, and finally a convening of us with our landlord and this set of neighbors. Turns out feelings had calmed by then and everyone was quite friendly and accommodating, and we all agreed on a final position for our house that would provide privacy and aesthetics for everyone. If you have a small home on wheels, consider these lessons:

• If you plan to move your mobile home to a new spot, talk with the closest neighbors beforehand to warn them- a surprise house suddenly pulling in will likely make the situation worse. Tell them what the house looks like and its dimensions (for instance it’s taller than a typical camper). Most neighbors will likely be fine with it (that’s what we experienced).
• Find out beforehand if they have any reasonable requests as to how to situate your house on the lot, but also realize that you might have to reposition more than once after the house is actually on site. Scope out your lot and how your house could be viewed from nearby, also consider how you can have the most privacy from your neighbors.
• Know your own requirements for the positioning of your house (e.g. south-facing solar exposure) and stay true to those throughout any compromises that are made.
• Aside from the actual position of the house, be ready to make other adjustments such as screening measures for added privacy.
• Be neighborly! The last thing you want to do is move into a neighborhood and start making enemies, because you’ve got to live near these people. Tensions may be high at times, and you might feel like “Hey, this is my house, I’m going to put it exactly where I want it so screw you” (sometimes we felt kind of like that). Better instead to breathe deeply, be patient, try to hear everyone’s input and concerns, and see if a workable solution can be reached. We managed to get there, and we feel much better for it!

When situating your tiny home there will of course be many other things to consider (How will I access the front door? How will I make my home fairly secure? Where are my hookups/utilities? etc.). But we hope you can learn something from our experience about how to be a good neighbor throughout the process.

Our New Home in Eugene

We made it to our new home of Eugene, Oregon this week! The final days of our honeymoon adventure were filled with fun. We had a lovely visit to Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve in Idaho, definitely worth a stop. The lava fields and lava tube caves were awesome, and it was neat to learn about the history of American pioneers near there on the Oregon Trail. The next morning we rose with the sun and visited a quiet little natural hot spring. We had a really nice hot dip there, a great way to start the day. Then we drove drove through Idaho and made it into Oregon, hooray! We enjoyed the sights of eastern Oregon’s desert lands, and had one last night on the road at a campground in Burns, Oregon. Finally had our last day on the road (sad, but exciting too) and made it into Eugene, Oregon by late afternoon. We were greeted by my very excited twin sistah, Amy, and her lady Katie. After a few exhausting hours of maneuvering the tiny house (and tearing down a fence), Jeremy backed it into our rental lot like a pro. Whew! The past few days we’ve been settling into our home and exploring Eugene. We’ve met lots of friendly folks and are having fun discovering interesting things in our new city.

We were a bit reluctant to end our honeymoon road trip and return to ‘the real world’ but it feels good to be in one spot and nest into our home. I am amazed that we drove 4,000 miles across the country with a roughly 12,000 pound house behind us, and that we had no major catastrophes! Aside from replacing our truck tires, having some preventative work done on the truck, and getting pulled over by the Quebec Provincial Police, we really didn’t run into any trouble. Jeremy got more and more skilled at trucking as we went along and could handle any situation we got into. And we didn’t even have any big blowup fights with each other (only some minor squabbles…)! It was great to have the freedom to journey to whatever places we wanted, discover interesting spots along the way, talk with lots of nice people, and have all of our homely needs in one self-contained vessel. While we didn’t exactly plan to haul our tiny home cross country when we started building it, it was road worthy enough to make the trip and we got to enjoy living in it along the way. Now we’re off the road for a bit, and settling into the small life in Eugene!

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National Park Wonders

We’ve been enjoying some National Parks lately! We spent a very nice 5 days in Yellowstone. The climb into the park on our first day made the truck heat up a bit, but we took our time and made it to the campground safely. We toured all over the park seeing the sights: geysers, mud volcanoes, and other hydrothermal features; wildlife including buffalo, elk, pelicans, etc.; and the amazing landscapes which you can see from the photos.

Yesterday we trucked out of Yellowstone southward into Grand Teton National Park. We were surprised and amazed by the towering Teton Mountains! We relaxed at a beach right on Jackson Lake, with a direct view of the Tetons. The water was a bit chilly but worth it. Then today we headed out of the Tetons and made it into Idaho, where we hit some windy weather so we found a nearby campground (we don’t like chancing the winds with the house). Tomorrow it’s on the road again, and just a few days from reaching our destination of Eugene, Oregon!

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Windy Wyoming

Greetings from Wyoming! It sure is windy here today, we’re a few hours from Yellowstone (in the town of Sheridan) waiting until tomorrow to drive on to the park once the winds die down.

Since our last post, we’ve been to quite a few places. We left the Upper Peninsula and enjoyed driving along Lake Michigan. Once in Wisconsin we saw lots of big fields of corn and soy, and stopped at the lovely Necedah Wildlife Refuge to see birds, butterflies, etc. Then on to Minnesota, which had more corn and soy as well as some large fields of wind turbines. We checked out the wind project in the small town of Grand Meadow, Minnesota. The turbines were pretty ominous when we stood right under them, I was scared! We had lunch in town at the local diner which was packed, and had the pleasure of sharing a table with a local 101-year-old woman and her niece.

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Next came South Dakota, and our first national park of the trip. We made it to Badlands National Park one afternoon, just in time to snag a site at the park campground. We set up house with a view of the amazing rock formations, and enjoyed an evening program presented by park rangers. Next morning we visited the nearby Minuteman Missile National Historic Site, and toured inside a missile launch center that was manned during the Cold War. Thankfully no missiles were ever launched! We then visited the nearby and famous Wall Drug for doughnuts, coffee, ice water, and postcards. We continued our day trip towards Rapid City, SD and noticed that we had a flat tire- luckily we didn’t have the house in tow and we made it safely to a tire shop. A couple hours later we were on our way with 7 new tires…! We visited Crazy Horse Memorial, which is quite an amazing and huge sculpture project honoring the native people that have been killed and displaced from their homelands. Definitely worth a visit. Then we drove by Mount Rushmore, and called it a day.

The next morning we left the Badlands via a beautiful loop drive through the park, with great views of the rocks and some cute prairie dogs. Like the windy day that we entered South Dakota, the forecast was windy once we got into Wyoming. We pushed on to Sheridan, WY and hunkered down for a blustery night. This morning we visited a local dealership and had them do some work on the truck, since hill climbs were heating the truck up yesterday. Hopefully we’ll be in good shape to cross the Bighorn and Rocky Mountains! Now we’re just waiting out the winds, and looking forward to spending some time in Yellowstone soon.

We continue to meet lots of interesting folks along the way, especially with the tiny house as a conversation starter. We even met some folks in Badlands who are considering their own tiny house and had visited our blog before- shoutout to Britney and family! We’ve also had lots of folks snap photos of the house, and we’re hoping that someday we’ll see some of those pics… send them to us via this blog if you’ve seen us on the road!

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