Our Version of Minimalism

Minimalism is a hot topic right now, and one we're glad to see trending. We hope it sticks around and that more people begin to think about the impact human beings have on the earth. We're often asked for our advice on living with less, which makes sense. After all, in the past four years, we've downsized twice and have lived (off and on) in 160-200 square feet. Yet when we share our "methods", we notice the crestfallen looks. We don't have a one-size-fits-all methodology or a hard and fast rulebook. 

When we decided to travel, it wasn't an experiment in living with less (meaning minimalism wasn't a driving factor). In our case, our reasons for traveling full-time were from a deeper, emotional place that wasn't tied to the amount of stuff we had filling up our home. It wasn't until we began the work of eliminating the clutter and excess so we could downsize to live in a tiny home that we began to notice how much lighter and freer we felt. Now, that's our story. Your reasons for minimizing may be tied to deep, emotional reasons, and that's one-thousand percent okay. 

The important thing to remember is that you don't have to follow KonMari or live with only 33 things to be a minimalist, though if you are the type of person that needs a structure to get started, we highly recommend finding a guide that best suits you. We've definitely read Marie Kondo's book and flipped through Project 333's guidelines, but we find that our particular way of doing minimalism doesn't look very minimalist. We love thrifting and have a constant in-and-out of beautiful ceramics, wooden implements, art, rugs, and textiles that we pick up and then sell. We travel with a truck load of tools for work. Our Airstream home is rarely clean or organized, and if we each lived with only 33 items of clothing, we'd only wear ripped, stained, and threadbare work clothes because most of our job is physical labor. Yikes - not into that. 

What does work for us is keeping our home tiny, along with other things I'll go into below, and to accept that minimalism is a practice, not a destination. We are constantly learning and reminding ourselves of not only this, but that it's okay to want things sometimes. It's okay to sometimes have an impulse buy. It's okay to have a dress in the closet that I only wear once a year because I love the way it makes me feel when I wear it. It's okay to love thrifting, but to be mindful of the purchases when we go...and that keeping a little vintage shop on the side to sell some of those finds is really fun and serves a purpose for us.

Minimalism should look different to everyone, but we find that the driving factor behind the practice is sustainability. We have friends who practice zero-waste, while my insanely busy life and demands keep me happily recycling as much as I can and taking my own water bottle with me to yoga class. For yet others, minimalism is voting with their dollar: buying only fair-trade, ethically produced clothing and wares for their home as opposed to fast fashion, while some shop purely secondhand for clothing and wares. For the record, we buy secondhand more often, as that's what's in our budget, but I do buy cheaper clothing sometimes for my kid when I can't find a secondhand item she needs. She goes through clothing so fast, it's hard to rationalize spending $100 on a dress for a growing child. We donate the clothing she grows out of to local charities wherever we are. 

When buying an item, I do think about it's use, though it doesn't always have to have a specific function. The use, for me, may be making me smile or bringing warmth into my home, like a framed vintage photograph I found of the mountains and saguaros here in Arizona, taken the year of my birth (1985). I am a collector of pieces like this, found buried in stacks at flea markets or secondhand shops, artwork created by someone once and likely changing through many sets of hands before finding its way into mine. 

Minimalism can be an incredibly therapeutic and mindful practice, yet I'm 4.5 years into my minimalist lifestyle, and I'm still learning what it means to me, and I still slip up even within the rules I've set for myself and the rules we've set for our family.  If I had a big house again, I think that I'd likely be more of a maximalist and fill the space, though I'd maintain my personal goal of not buying mass-produced things and instead wait for the perfect vintage, secondhand item, just as I do now in my tiny space. There are times where I feel overwhelmed with the amount of vintage I've accumulated, and I know it's time to host a flash sale for it all. I go through my two drawers of clothing about four times a year and pull out pieces to donate, and we've digitized all of our bill-paying and the majority of our business, save our business cards and postcards, which are printed on 100% recycled paper. Even our client contracts are digital, and we use DocHub for signatures. Some of our decisions are influenced by our tiny space: our daughter reads like crazy, and can go through a 150 page chapter book in a day. Getting her a Kindle and a subscription for Kindle Unlimited keeps stacks of books from piling up around the Airstream. In my case, however, I can't read on a screen for anything and I buy used copies of the books I want to read, and then pass them along when finished to friends. These are just some of things that we do, which are quite intentional, to hold ourselves accountable to the standard of minimalism that we've set for ourselves and to maintain our own practice, which ebbs and flows just like anything else does. 

Minimalism can - and should - be your own journey and practice, just like ours is. It doesn't have to be perfectly lined up and matching organizers in a big walk in pantry and hangers spread finger width apart with clothes in color-coordinated order, no matter what blog or catalog is telling you it should be. You needn't be a fan of neutrals or black, white, and grey to be a minimalist. You don't have to have a capsule wardrobe or live in a tiny house or apartment. You can do all of these things, of course, but it's not a requirement for minimalism. Minimalism could be letting go of a deceased family member's clothing you've been holding onto that makes you sad, or streamlining your wardrobe to only the things you actually wear and finding your true style that makes you feel amazing. It could be cleaning out the clutter under your bathroom sink and purchasing less product, and finding the ones you do use and sticking to those. It could mean buying things slowly, waiting until you're absolutely certain you can't live another day without the item in question. It could mean downsizing your 3,000 square foot home to something more manageable, like 1,200 square feet (like my parents just did!), with less space to hide things away. 

Whatever your version of minimalism, practice it with intention and mindfulness, and give yourself grace and time. Minimalism isn't achieved in a weekend, it's an ongoing practice that often requires great diligence and emotional sorting in addition to the physical work. Start your journey by figuring out why you want to minimize, and identify small but definite steps to take to get started. 

To Renovate or Not: The "Right" Way to Get on the Road

Lately I've noted quite a few discussions in comment sections on IG, on blogs, and on profiles of Airstreamers/RVers/vanlifers over the past few months, and it's largely centered around how travel/adventure should be the reason for the rig (if you aren't using it as a stationary residence), and that the focus should be on the end goal: getting on the road. 

First Airstream renovation, April 2015. We were broke as a joke, which is a big reason our first build was so simple in execution and amenity.

I agree. 

I could be wrong, but what the discussions are skirting around (without actually coming out and saying it), is that it would seem some people are renovating for those juicy before and afters on Instagram and get their fifteen minutes. I believe that the critique largely circles around people who are using the RV/caravan/Airstream/#vanlife trend to get famous, and as RV life has skyrocketed in popularity the last couple years, there are people out there who are building out caravans for the sake of starting lifestyle blogs and getting big followings and free stuff.

Yet I also believe that there are far fewer of those folks than there are hard-working people who are full of hope and excitement and who willing to put in the crazy tough work and sacrifice to give this travel thing a go, and those people deserve understanding and support from anyone who has gotten on the road ahead of them, no matter how they got there. 

Ellen grinding rust off the chassis, June 2014. Shreds of subfloor RESTING in the belly pan, it was so rotten that it just fell apart.

The issue I take with people slamming everyone who takes the time to build their rigs out from the get go is pretty simple. 

Everyone's story and circumstances are different.

As I stated above, I fully believe that if your goal is to travel, that adventure should absolutely be the driving factor to live in any type of adventure-mobile. I also believe firmly that reasons to chase the adventure should come from the heart, not vanity or celebrity. In our case, we decided to travel before we knew we wanted an Airstream. The Airstream idea came into play several months into our research and planning stages to get on the road. The question that I posed to Ellen is right here on our website: 

What if we sold everything, bought a bus, and traveled? 

It was always, always about the travel and the reasons behind it. Hell, that's why we travel to our renovations now, which isn't as dreamy as it sounds. It would be a million times easier to have a studio and shop somewhere, but we want to live on the road, or at least get as close to that as we can, even while renovating. 

Four years ago, our reasons weren't much different than they are today: we wanted more from life, we wanted to find a place we fit (hint: we found it), we wanted to be together more, we wanted to explore, we wanted to create art and shape our own lives, to break the mold we'd been not-so-gracefully trying to fit ourselves into. During the stretches where it felt like nothing was happening toward our goal, even though we were working our asses off, all I could think about was what it was going to be like to finally get on the road and how our lives and hearts would undoubtedly shift and change. I would make lists of places we wanted to see, and hung a map above our bed that we studied at night. Everything I wrote was about the goal. Every song I listened to made me think about travel, and the word rolled off my tongue multiple times a day. Yet there were concrete steps that we had to take to get on the road. 

Was I jealous of other travelers who were able to buy new rigs and already had jobs that allowed them to be mobile? Abso-fuckin-lutely. But that was not our story, and those were not our circumstances. For us to travel, we had to figure out how to make it work in every aspect, not just one or two. We turned our ENTIRE lives upside down. When all was said and done, our new travelin' life was a completely different one than the traditional, "American-dream", convenience-filled life we left behind. We had different jobs, a hefty savings account, and an adventure-home we'd designed and built ourselves. That kind of change doesn't happen overnight: it took us a year and a half to slowly make change happen that would allow us to safely and responsibly get on the road. 

mE, ABOUT 30 POUNDS HEAVIER THAN i was when we finished the renovation. The work was so laborious that I shed weight without even having to go to the gym. Also, I remember thinking at this point there was no way this trailer would ever look good again.

In our case, I had just closed a photography business on a sad and indebted note. I was freelancing when I could and nannying part time for $400 buckaroos a month to make ends meet and build out our Airstream and save for travel. Ellen was teaching, and one of our (many) reasons for deciding to travel was largely propelled by our inability to have a life outside of working, commuting, and living paycheck to paycheck. That didn't go away with the decision to travel. We still had to live paycheck to paycheck...and now we had to figure out a way to bring in extra cash, buy an RV of some kind, and also figure out how to make money on the road! Ellen couldn't exactly bring the teaching job with us, and I couldn't be a nanny from the road either.

We had a real mountain to face, and knew that our expenses weren't going to be drastically cut because we were traveling: we had to figure out how we were going to make travel AND building our rig out happen financially. Living on the road isn't as inexpensive as one might think: sure, you get rid of your mortgage, but you pay for campsites (BLM land isn't everywhere, there are portions of the country where you've gotta suck it up and pay, especially with large rigs that aren't exactly suited to stealth camping in public places). $30.00/night x 30 nights = $900.00 (that is more than our mortgage at the time, which was $680/mo.). You get rid of your bills, but you've gotta have mobile internet and pay for gas. You still have to have insurance and for us, we had student loans and credit card debt as well. 

The only way we could afford to get on the road was to buy a cheap trailer and then cheaply fix it up over time without a single amenity on board: we had no hot water, no heat, no AC, no fridge, no stove. We couldn't afford those things. In order to buy our first Airstream and get started on the work, we held a series of yard sales to sell all our stuff and sold Ellen's 1994 Toyota pickup truck. The sale of the truck was $4k, and that's what we bought our first Airstream for: $4k (we haggled down from $4800). We bought a 1957 Airstream Overlander in terrible condition because that's what we could afford and that's what we could find. 

It's important to see perspectives and stories outside of our own.

There are reasons that you may not know for why someone may have to spend a year or even longer renovating before they even get to get on the road. In our case, we'd work as long as we could on the money we had, stop, save more, work again, stop, save more...you get the idea. 

If we'd had money up front, we could have done things differently, like buy a newer rig that didn't need as much work (though we live in a 1994 now, and it needed to be fully gutted, just FYI). If we'd had money up front, we likely would have been able to finish our renovation a lot faster. There were months that would go by where we couldn't work because we couldn't afford supplies. There were many weeks as we got closer to finishing the Airstream renovation and our house was under contract that we had to eat on $25 a week for a family of three (which meant Ellen and I didn't eat breakfast or lunch for weeks on end so our daughter could) just so we could buy supplies and make our dream happen.

Some people have to sacrifice a lot more than it may look like from an outside perspective to go after their dreams. I think that a good bulk of people who do their renovations up front do so because they have to, and it's not just the renovation that they are transforming over time: it's their entire livelihoods and lifestyle. I think that's worth commending and respecting. 

I took this picture in March 2015, after we'd been working toward our dream for a little over a year. we'd sold almost everything we owned, had an interested potential buyer for our house (they'd later back out), and we'd taken a dilapidated old trailer and turned it into this. I remember just sitting on the floor with grateful tears pricking at the corners of my eyes.

I think it’s admirable when one must have patience and puts in the work to get to where they want to be. That doesn't make someone less of an adventurer or full-time traveler. It might - just might - mean they wanted it more, because they had to wait for it and strive for it and deal with the emotional rollercoaster that is transforming an entire life and an old trailer for a long period of time. It's easier to give up when you have to wait a lot longer than others had to and your work and efforts aren't paying off yet. There isn't instant gratification, and that can be trying. Pushing through the tough lot over and over again, like we had to, isn't an easy thing to do. We admire those who have to do this tremendously, because we've been there. Hell, we're still there. We're still not making very much money and we are still working toward the freedom to travel where we want, when we want. 

On the road, July 2015. We'd made it, and we had a beautiful home we loved. We'd accomplished everything we'd had to, and we'd overcome all of the obstacles we'd faced. It felt surreal and we had just incredible gratitude for it all, and pride for our gumption and hard work. It had been worth every single trial to wake up in places like this.

If you're someone who got to get out right away or quickly (i.e., a few short weeks or months after deciding to travel), your circumstances were likely different from someone with less mobility in their job/a smaller budget/kids, etc. You're perhaps waiting to renovate later on and make your space reflect your tastes after you've gotten some road life under your belts, while someone else may have to save money and work to find a mobile job and build out their rig over time and on a strict budget. There are pros and cons to each way, and not having to wait doesn't make you better, it doesn't make you a superior traveler, it doesn't mean that you're right and someone else is wrong. It just means your story, your circumstances, your budget, your job, your family life...looks different from someone else's.

As long as someone is getting on the road and doing so for real, heartfelt reasons...it doesn't matter how they got there, or how long it took them, and it really doesn't matter that it looks different from what you did.

Have a beer around a campfire with the ones who had to wait when they finally get out on the road, victorious and fresh and excited, and let them share their story, and you share yours, and then all agree that half the adventure is getting to the adventure, no matter how long it takes, and the adventure is worth every step it took us to get to it, and then raise a glass in gratitude that we are all just living our versions of our best and most beautiful lives, and working to keep them alive, no matter what.