Choosing the RV

It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of the prospect of living in a different city every month or meeting new people every couple of days, exciting enough to allow the actual purchasing of an RV to slip to the back-burners, but eventually, if you want to live in an RV, you’re going to have to purchase one.

This will largely be the focus of our little website over the next couple of months as we go through the process from planning to purchase.

So What Do We Want?

Of course we’d spent time discussing what it was each of us wanted out of an RV over the past few months, but we hadn’t actually formalized anything, so I proposed that we both come up with a list of the features we feel would be most important to the two of us. Hence the following:

The Initial List

• An RV that has a bed over the cab, so that Tristan has a dedicated space for his “room.” I think this is important so that he has a place he can call his own, and so that we don’t need to take down the kitchen table or pull out a couch just so that he can get to bed. There will be times when we’ll want to be able to sit up and work or play later than he’s going to be up, and we won’t be able to do that if his space is another space as well.
• Something manageable for me to drive, preferably Class C.

The Longer List

• A full-size refrigerator.  Big enough to hold the majority of our foodstuffs, which are fresh. This will help us especially as we wont be able to grocery shop easily and will double up as extra kitchen storage space.
• Plenty of cupboard space to check we have space for all these essentials:
  • Tristan’s clothes. Bulky.
  • Tristans school books and supplies
  • Tristan’s toys. Bulky.
  • Linen and towels. Keeping this down to the linen we have on our beds with no extra’s, though an extra blanket or two, and two towels, 10 facecloths, 2 dish cloths.
  • Pots and pans. Very bulky. I was thinking of getting a light stainless steel pan instead of the heavy cast iron one we currently have.
  • Cleaning supplies / backup toilet paper /econo laundry detergents / for kitchen and bathroom Very bulky – possibly will take up all the storage space under one small sink.
  • Bathroom supplies cupboard
  • Cupboard for my clothes
  • Additional space for my socks, etc.
  • Cupboard for your clothes
  • Preferably a side table each to hold personal belongings
  • Storage for our printer, cables, printer paper and other supplies
  • My crafts bag

As you can see, my initial list was quite a bit shorter — I was picturing it more as a “must-have’s” — but after reading through the longer list it started to make sense that we should come up with a master list of everything that we’d need, in order to make certain we were realistically looking at enough space to keep us alive and in business for an entire year. We’ve lived in a small apartment before and it had its fair share of problems with small spaces. I’m personally hoping that, with all of America as our backyard, the RV won’t seem quite as small.

This was also a big point of contention: having all of the room we need vs. driving around a small town on wheels. Hopefully we can find something that meets both needs.