We’ve been in our van over a month now. Long enough for the romantic notions of #vanlife to have been replaced by all the realities of this unconventional way of living. Sharing 15 square metres of space with another adult and a dog is a constant juggle. Nothing can be left sitting out otherwise the space gets cluttered super fast. Storage space is very, very finite. The grey water tank or the toilet always needs emptied, or both! The floor needs cleaned multiple times a day. And our whole home is constantly under attack of an earthquake every time we drive.

This lifestyle is not for everyone. I'll be honest - the first couple of weeks I wasn't entirely convinced it was actually going to be for me either!

But for all the realities and teething problems that inevitably arise when you try something new for the very first time, there are simplicities that I already love and new appreciations for what this lifestyle provides - which is less about the van or any material possession, and rather about life itself - getting outdoors everyday, seeing new places, having lunch with a view, spending time with people, and a new kind of freedom.

Is it stressful living in a confined space without so many conveniences? Yes, absolutely yes. It’s also been stressful just getting moved in and attempting to get it set up for living in.
I miss everything about our old home. It's only really in the last couple of weeks that I've stopped thinking about our old home with sadness on a daily basis. It didn't help that we spent almost two months in limbo with not much routine, in a shared space and during the colder months of the year too. I missed my cozy small home. I missed our fireplace. I missed my garden. I missed the call of the chickens when I stepped outside. I missed our bath. I missed how spacious 65 square metres of home felt. And I really missed our shower and all the hot water that just flowed when you turned the tap on.

Long, hot showers is a topic no van lifer online really seems to talk about. In fact many van dwellers don’t even have showers in their vans! While the shower is nice in our van, it runs beautifully hot with great pressure - there is nothing long about a van shower when you have such limited water! And a long, hot shower has become my new most luxurious treat.

Recently we visited a hot pools complex - while of course the steamy relaxing hot pools were an absolute treat in themselves, I was so excited to take a long, hot 'everything' shower afterwards without worrying about running out of water while I shaved my legs and shampooed my hair. ​

There is a heaviness I have experienced about closing one chapter in life in order to start another when I am very much aware that the chapter I’m leaving behind includes some of the best days of my life.

Last week we shifted out of Devon Cottage. After weeks of sorting, preparing and organising - it was finally time to shift the last boxes into storage, pack up the few things coming with us in the van and clean all the surfaces as we closed the door behind us one last time and said goodbye to Devon Cottage. We thanked the property for all it had taught us and given us over the last five years. Grateful for our time being it's custodians.

Change in life is inevitable and constant. We made the decision to build a new lifestyle here at Devon Cottage and now we’ve made the decision to create a new lifestyle on the road. They aren’t polar opposites; both give us simplicity and freedom of our time. But we also knew it wouldn’t work for us to keep a foot in each life, we had to make the decision to leave one behind for the other.

Our lives are a series of the choices we make, taking us down different roads and even indecision takes away other alternatives from us. 

Leaving Devon Cottage means closing the door on some of the best times of my life, on a lifestyle I still adore. I guess the heavy emotion that I've never felt before about closing this chapter is because I’m leaving one good thing for another very unknown thing. In the past change has often looked like leaving behind something that no longer served me for some new possibility. This doesn’t feel like that. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just a new kind of change for me. ​

And in serendipitous timing, the day we handed over our keys to the real estate agent we also received news that our van was embarking on a ship headed to the port of Auckland and hopefully we will be seeing it in just a few weeks time!!!

In no particular order...

​Long showers under the rain fall shower head. Mainly just the ability to stand under the hot, luxurious streaming water without worrying about water consumption because I know this will soon be changing. In the van we will have very limited water which we’re hoping we can live off for up to a week at a time - as we want to be able to get off grid as much as possible! So we’ll be implementing military style showers. And hair washing day will become one of life's absolute luxuries!

What have I missed? Let me know in the comments what you would add to the list if you were giving up your comfy home lifestyle for van life??

Here's an excerpt from my journal towards the end of 2024...
WE SEEM TO HAVE A KNACK FOR MAKING LIFE WILD...
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If you’d sat me down ten years ago to tell me that I would very soon be choosing to leave my career in accounting to go full time self-employed with my own photography business, that over the course of the next decade we would sell the new house we’d just built and downsize into a tiny home of just 65 square metres in order to simplify our lifestyle, that I’d become a self confessed ‘homesteader’ growing all our own vegetables & living off the land AND then on the cusp of a decade we’d decide to pivot once more, sell up again and look for even more freedom in our lifestyle by finding a way to travel full-time… well actually maybe I would have believed you but I could never have predicted this is where life would lead us!

Even ten years ago I had an inkling that I might not be cut out for a conventional life. We already knew by our mid twenties that children might not be on the cards for us and now in our mid thirties we’re contentedly childfree with a lifestyle that gives us unique opportunities. I grew up with parents who told me I could do anything I dreamed of and I happily follow my intuition over external voices so even though things like quitting a career to go self-employed, building tiny and dreaming of full time travel may be BIG life-changing decisions I’ve always jumped in with both feet IF it felt right for me.

Perhaps because I came from an ‘unconventional’ family I’m also not afraid to live outside the script of a 'normal' lifestyle. Growing up as an only child I had access to both my parents almost exclusively full time at home on our 2 acre block of rural land; my Dad was retired and Mum was a home maker. My childhood was filled with gardening, fishing, hunting, camping, crafting, cooking, making and exploring. It wasn’t until I was older at primary school that I realised other kids didn’t get to spend all day with their dads at home, tagging along with their hobbies and pursuits. It wasn’t until secondary school that I truly realised how little money our household (comfortably) lived on compared to others.

Time is a strange thing. It passes regardless. We never know how much we truly have of it. And yet I reckon us humans are very talented at wasting it. We use precious time up on worrying about what others think, on doing things that don’t bring us joy but are ‘expected’ of us, on working A LOT just to pay bills and have all the things this modern world tells us we should want. I guess it was my Dad who taught me that time is our truest currency and to make the most of our time on this earth. I don’t think he ever sat me down and told me this exactly but it was the way he lived his life and it has become one of my highest values in life; freedom of my time. When I became unhappy in my accounting job I quit rather than stuck it out because it was a promising career with a good income. When we realised our big new home had turned us into slaves working all hours to pay a huge mortgage, bills and of course upkeep the home - I proposed a change of lifestyle. And when Matt and I came back from every camping adventure and trip overseas wishing we could spend more of our time exploring this beautiful world the idea of a life on the road took root in our minds.

For two years we’ve chatted about hypothetcial ‘maybe one days’ of living overseas, taking off in Winter for months in another country, living and working on the road, our dream adventure vehicle, potential van layouts. Possibly the idea was first born during the Covid lockdown that we stumbled across YouTubers who were full time travellers as we sat at home dreaming of being able to travel again one day. And naturally ever since we’ve been influenced by #vanlife on social media.

The sticking point was always that we loved the lifestyle we’d created for ourselves with our tiny home and abundant backyard. Our simple lifestyle has afforded us so much; freedom from the shackles of a mortgage, healthier lifestyles, being able to grow so much of our food, less materialism and definitely more time for our hobbies. We discussed options of renting out our property or AirBnbing it while we travelled, even just locking it up for a few months each Winter and heading out on an adventure. Here we were in our mid thirties, childfree, with the freedom to choose a different way to spend the next chapter of our time on earth and the idea of traveling full time just wouldn’t leave us alone. But I loved my small home and my garden - surely I couldn’t possibly be considering giving it all up to shift into a van and be constantly on the move…

And yet I was.