We’ve survived one month of tiny living

My wife, Jenn, and I have lived in apartments all of our adult life. Knowing we had to keep the apartment just the way we found it or pay out the nose for people to paint the walls and clean the carpet makes a place never feel like home.

When we looked into buying a house, no bank would give us a mortgage because of our student loan debt. I also made too much money for those charities that help a person build their own home, and they also weren’t fans of our student loan debt.

Enter the tiny house movement. Bells started ringing. Neon signs pointed to downsizing and minimalist living. We read blogs, watched TV shows, and read news stories. After weighing pros and cons we decided to turn a bus into a home and redefine the American dream.

Over the last year we’ve worked hard to make our skoolie livable. We’ve now been living in our bus for a month. Is it everything we thought it would be? Had a load finally been lifted off our shoulders?

Yes and no.

Our home is still under construction so there is the stress of the next thing we need to fix. But there is a great joy in knowing that this is ours. Bought and paid for. No one can take it away or kick us out.

There is also the issue of space. We moved in before we were really ready so there are boxes that need to be put away, but we have to build shelves to put the things away. Also two adults have to move carefully around each other if one is coming and the other is going.

Using phones for entertainment and for work has made our data usage sky rocket. By the end of the month it takes forever to load a video or website. We visit my mom once a week so the kids get to hang out with her, we get to do laundry, and download videos off her Wi-Fi.

So far the first month of tiny living has been a good one, but we’re still in the honeymoon phase. Can the skoolie love last? Will living tiny turn into a giant nightmare? Will we wish we never got on this bus? Answers to all that and more, same bus time, same bus column.