What is your threshold for chaos?
This has been a tough year for Shawn and I. We have had to weather family crises, the death of my grandmother, a tough work assignment, shifting locations, and a medical leave of absence to focus on my health. On top of all of that, we finally found an old Bluebird Wanderlodge to restore and live in.
And by we, I mean, me. For some crazy reason I fell in love with the bus, and after coming so close to buying three other buses that fell through at the last minute, we bought it sight unseen and Shawn flew out to Oregon to bring it back.
Since then we have been busy repairing, we haven’t even gotten to the restoration part. While we took many pictures so we could write about the process later, after six months of work we are finally at a place where that can happen.
This first post is from my perspective, the wife that wanted this particular ‘bird, but had zero abilities to assess the quality or effort it would take to restore her. Nor did I understand how much chaos would be added to our lives, as we bought this as I was slowly working myself into a health crises.
The two pictures below I snapped with my phone one day as I was moving everything from one room to the other so we could do work. Take a moment to take it all in.
Exposed plywood floors. Shop vac. Power tools. Other tools. Dogs. Exposed metal floors. Ripped wallpaper revealing leaks and mildew. Piles everywhere.
Now, imagine living this way. For months. Where every day you deliberately take everything in your house and pile it up so you can do work. Where all of your piles get covered with construction dust. Where every day it seems like something else breaks or you find some other system that is badly in need of repair. Where you may have to deal with some or all of the following:
Leaking water tanks
No floors
No toilet
No water
Rotting walls.
No shore power. No heat. No shower….. The list goes on.
Now, put you and your family in this environment. You have to live, work, eat and sleep like this for the foreseeable future. During all of this, life still happens. People get sick. Finances are strained. Relationships are tested.
Now, ask yourself, “Could my family do this?”.
I think we all see the before and after pictures of RV restorations (or house, boat, whatever) and get caught up in the romance of it all. We know it will be hard, but we believe that the adventure and excitement will keep our relationships afloat until everything is finished.
I hate to be skeptical, but the reality is that you will probably do more damage to your relationships than you thought possible. Shawn and I have a super strong relationship, and this effort has been tough for us to weather. There were many times when we wanted to call it quits and walk away from the bus, just to ensure we would stay sane. The fact that our relationship is more important than anything else enabled us to consider walking away from tens of thousands of dollars that was all of our savings and more.
My point is, make sure you really take stock of yourself and the people you live with before trying something like this. There is no shame in saying “not me, not now”, and going another route. Save more money and buy something newer. Hire someone else to do the dirty work. Whatever.
If you do decide to take the RV renovation plunge (or full time RV living), just remember what matters most. You and your loved ones. And have an exit plan, just in case you need one.