Dear Ones,
So much has happened since we last posted anything here! We have had a full, busy, and beautiful year. We finished working on The Hope Project in June, and hit the road immediately after so Kate could write The Modern Caravan book. The book will chronicle twelve families who have designed and built stunning caravans from the ground up and have incredible stories of determination, patience, and grit, and will be published in Spring 2021.
Our life is intertwined with every facet of what we do: we eat, live, and breathe Airstreams. As we write this, we are currently renovating the interior of our Airstream home, and Kate is finishing final edits on her manuscript. In the last five years, we have renovated eight Airstreams and worked on one school bus conversion. When we began renovating that first Airstream, we had no idea what our story arc would be. From there to here, this isn’t exactly what we’d imagined for our life, though truthfully, we don’t make grandiose plans. Instead, we hone in on specific goals, unsure of how long they may take, and work until they are completed. In this way, we keep ourselves open to opportunities and new ideas and trajectories, and this is what led to us starting The Modern Caravan and so many other things that make our life feel full and right.
A lot of people don’t know our history, why we began this work, or even that we’re still only a team of two, renovating Airstreams in backyards across the country. We’ve never had a shop or employees, and most of our renovations have been done while on the road. Our “shop” is a truck bed full of tools that we’ve carted from place to place, our “office”, a humble table in our Airstream home. Living on site with our work has presented it’s own set of difficulties, but we also believe that it kept us grounded and present and set us apart from other renovation companies. We’re right in the trenches with the first-timers, making do with what we’ve got. Working this way did indeed teach us so much about ourselves, and it helped us grow, stretch, and overcome. We now know that we can build beautiful things anywhere and everywhere. As of late, we have been renovating our own Airstream on mountainsides, in deserts, in friends’ driveways, and parking lots across the States.
When we first began TMC, we had the goal of creating a community-based website where we could come together as a community and share our stories, our spaces, our renovation woes and triumphs, resources, and ideas. We were able to keep this up for a little while, but as we began renovating for clients, we no longer had time to spare. We were both working seven days a week without holidays, breaks, vacations, or sick days. We were homeschooling our kiddo, living in our Airstream, and moving to new towns for the duration of the renovation where we didn’t have a support system or childcare. Time was a commodity we just didn’t have.
Our hopes and goals for this business were dashed in a myriad of ways. It was all we could do to finish the renovations on warp-speed deadlines…anything else we’d hoped to contribute, do, or be for this community just wasn’t possible. If there was any time leftover in a day, it was spent researching and planning for the next day. Our mental and physical health took a sharp decline, and our marriage went through a long, rocky patch when we were unable to spend quality time together. We’d started TMC with so much promise and hope and passion, and as we drove into my parents’ driveway on a mid-November night on fumes (literally and figuratively), we felt completely defeated by what we’d given of ourselves and what had been taken from us. There was no promise we’d ever return to who we were before.
We spent the winter in active trauma, returning to Indiana to seek safety and solace after we were assaulted and abused on a job site. We knew something had to change, and that despite our best intentions with our work, living on site with our projects was no longer an option. Our safety was compromised on job sites where there was an imbalance of power, and we knew it was time to make drastic changes to our business model. Yet without a vast amount of resources available to us, we had to take it one step at a time. We started with The Hope Project, which was aptly named, and took on our first investors.
It was a wet spring, but we worked for three months on a full, shell-off renovation of Hope. We worked out of Kate’s parents’ driveway in Indiana. Kate’s book contract had been signed in April, and as we finished up the renovation on Hope, Kate was planning out the remainder of our year, sending emails to potential participants, scheduling shoots, and mapping out the eight months we’d be spending on the road, gathering stories and photographs along the way. We took off for three weeks in June, leaving a half hour after we finished up the renovation on Hope to make it to the first book shoot in North Carolina.
It’s been a hell of a year so far, and we are nearing the end of our third year in business. So much has been accomplished, and so much has changed. We are both working on healing. Kate does yoga and meditates daily, and Ellen began to hike solo. We are scheduling hours for ourselves to work, and also take breaks as needed, learning to find a healthy balance and to set and maintain boundaries. We spend a lot of time together as a family, and we are actively creating healthier ways of living for ourselves and embracing a life separate from work.
We know that in order to continue our work at TMC, having balance and boundaries and health (physical, mental, emotional) is crucial. While our life and our work is intertwined, it doesn’t mean that we have to be our work. We are people. Human beings. Mothers and wives. We are daughters and sisters and friends. We are more than just Airstream renovators, and refuse to be boxed in.
Through a lot of thought and conversation, we realized that the best option was to take a step back from full-time client renovation this past year. We are did this in order to heal from the trauma that we biologically associate with our work and we both needed to grow in new ways and explore new things and opportunities. We made mistakes in our first years of business, like many do, and are learning from those mistakes. Now that we are returning to our work, our priorities are health, safety, sustainable growth, and fair pay. Personally, we are prioritizing our attention to the things in life that matter most to us: the love we share with one another and our daughter, taking care of ourselves, and having a simple, quiet life filled with beauty, love, and joy.
We are so thankful for all of you who have believed in us, supported us, and cheered us on. You have no idea how much it has meant to us both, and we are always humbled that so many people have cared for us and found our work and story inspiring.
If you are interested in signing up for our 2020 waitlist, please click here and fill out the form at the bottom of the page. We will have one project coming up for sale in early spring, and are discussing the best ways to move forward with other services and offerings in mid-2020.
Onward,
Kate & Ellen