We have officially made it 6 months (183 days) of living in our trailer. If you would have asked me 6 months ago if I thought it was possible for our family of 7 to make it with our sanity in tack, living in a trailer for 6 months I would have not thought it was possible, but here I stand corrected.
Has it been hard, YES! But, hard is not bad, instead I have seen the joy, contentment, family relationships, and simplicity rise from this new living situation. Our trailer is housed on our friends property which is probably the biggest blessing to be found in this who situation. For us to be able to receive the generosity and true example of caring for those in your community. SUCH A BLESSING!
Here are a few things that have REALLY stood out to us during these last 6 months:
Some days feel incredibly normal and other days feel cramped.
Out of the 180 plus days some start to feel normal and easy but then all of a sudden a day will come when we long to not be cramped and back in a house of our own. Some weeks I will turn to Darren and say, “Wow, 6 months have gone so fast we could totally do this another 6 months.” And then as if some funny joke the next day I will turn to Darren and say, “I won’t make it another 6 months.” But isn’t that just how life is – filled with ebbs and flows. You have some days you win and some days you lose but thankful for Gods grace and that His mercies are new every morning. It is ok to recognize the hardships but not dwell on them, keeping your focus and mindset on things above creates moments of joy instead of dread.
No days off when it comes to organization!
When we were living in our home prior to moving into the trailer, I could easily delay putting things away, organization, dishes, laundry, etc. But when you move from 1500 sq ft to 300 sq ft (a combination of trailer and cottage), if you neglect any in the moment cleaning or organization you FEEL IT! You can imagine with me cooking and eating for a family of 7 without a dishwasher you simply have to do the dishes after every meal or else you have a mess and no dishes for the next meal. But it also extends past that as well into other areas of the trailer, if we don’t put away clothes, toys out in their places, or simply take out the trash you can start to feel like your space is closing in on you. So we have learned there is no days off when it comes to putting things away and organizing our things. This is a lesson we are constantly teaching ourselves and kids and one we hope will continue on into our new space (one day.)
Being close together grows relationship and closeness.
My friend gave me this sign to put up in our cottage space which truly reflects what we have learned and experienced during these last 6 months living in close quarters, it says, “Love grows best in little houses, with fewer walls to separate. Where you eat and sleep so close together you can’t help but communicate. and if we had more room between is, think of all we’d miss. Love grows best in houses just like this.” We personally have found so much closeness being created from the mere fact we are forced into togetherness. While you will see in the section below this has also brought about more training, there has come with a lot of positiveness as well. One funny thing we have noticed is that when we go to our parents houses and give the kids free range of the house to play, but when we will turn around we see all the kids are literally playing side by side, even though the space is limitless they have grown accustom to playing next to each other.
We have experienced that there has been way more opportunity to train and correct our kids.
As I alluded to previously the closeness has brought many, MANY opportunities to train and correct our kids. Darren and I passionate about trying to find the blessing in being able to see our kids sin and correct them on it. We view it as a blessing because if we didn’t see the sin, we wouldn’t have the opportunity to expose and correct them on it, thus creating perpetual sin and habit-forming sin. Simple proximity to each other has given us the opportunity to see and train on more in our children’s lives. This is a lot of work, and it is hard and exhausting at times but SO, SO important, to which we have been grateful for the opportunity to bring more awareness to issues we didn’t know before.
So where do we go from here? What is the plan next? This is a GREAT question and one we get asked a lot! So here is the simple answer: we don’t know. I mean we have ideas and plans and prayers of what will transpire but we are holding all of those dreams with hands open to where God leads us. Right now, we are in the final stages to close on our building loan, we are excited about finally breaking ground on our property in Idaho and hope that once ground breaks we will be able to move in there between 6 months to a year. (That seems so long but we are just not sure with all the world crisis situations how that will affect our building). In the meantime we are 2 weeks away from our first camping trip of the year. Yes, I know we literally living in our trailer so we are daily camping haha, but our goal is to go see some other places and create memories of this time in our trailer that extends past our current location. Here is some of the destinations on the docket:
March – Seaside, Oregon (1 week)
April – Bend, Oregon (1 week)
May – Washington tour (2 weeks)
June – Eastern Idaho (1 week)
July – Eastern Idaho (1 week) and Darren and I are doing a solo trip to the San Juan Islands, WA (1 Week)
August – California Redwoods, Lake Tahoe, and Yosemite (3 weeks)
September – Tour through ID, UT, NV, AZ (3 weeks)
(We do think with these trips it will make the next 6 months go by quickly, and hopefully during this time we will see our house build progress.)
We are excited to share our adventures both here on the blog and on our YouTube and Rumble accounts so make sure you subscribe to follow along on the journey.
It is going to be an adventure! We are excited!