This article was republished from Blog.GoRVing.com with their permission
We’ve all heard horror stories about housing in big cities like one bedroom apartments with five roommates and a sixth in the bathroom. More and more frequently, people are paying to live in crawl spaces and walk-in closets. If they’re lucky, they get enough room for a bed and a coffeepot. It sounds crazy because it absolutely is crazy and a little extreme. We are adventurous small space dwellers, but we aren’t living in someone’s closet — we are RV dwellers! Specifically, we’re in a Sprinter RV, and we’ve been living in all 110 sq. ft. of it full-time while adventuring and working across the Western U.S.
While living in the RV, we’ve learned a lot about how to maximize our time and our enjoyment on the road. We wish we had the benefit of someone slipping us a few tips before we hit the pavement, but we had to learn them for ourselves, sometimes the hard way. So, we thought we’d pay it forward and give y’all some tips on how we manage to live in such a small space and not go completely crazy. We broke it down into some very important categories: Food, Adventure, and the Nitty Gritty. Hopefully, you’ll see why, and how, we traded space and stuff for better adventure and travel.
#1 Food
Limit single-use items
With very few exceptions, most of us have RVs that are smaller than the homes we live in on a daily basis. The most noticeable impact from the decreased space is storage. We found the best way to handle a smaller living space with smaller storage capacity was to use things that have multiple uses. For example, a bottle of wine can double as a pretty usable rolling pin. Get creative with how you can use items in different ways, and save your space for other things.
Buy in bulk to avoid the bulk
No, we’re not suggesting that you go out and buy 65 rolls of RV-safe toilet paper that will last you and all of your RV friends until the end of time. We’re actually suggesting that you buy items that have minimal packaging and don’t take up unnecessary space (notice a theme here?). Instead of purchasing that bag of pre-cut broccoli or a plastic tub of salad mix, find the bulk bins at your grocery store and purchase only what you’ll need. You’ll make less trash, and you’ll save space in your cooler or refrigerator that you can fill with other things that you’ll enjoy. We suggest filling that extra space you just made with really great local craft beer!
To read the rest of the tips, read the full post at Blog.GoRVing.com