7 Things I Wish I Knew Before Moving into a Camper

Some days I look around at our home on wheels in the middle of the desert and I still can’t believe we did it.

Moving into a camper was something that we always talked about but we always had excuses. It wasn’t the right time or it wasn’t the financially smart thing to do. We always talked ourselves out of it. 

Until one day we didn’t…

We listed our house for sale and before we knew it, we had a camper and a dumpster sitting in our driveway as we decided which of our belongings would go where. 

It took one leap of faith and a lot of strategic decisions to turn our dream into reality but it definitely came with some hurdles along the way. 

It was going to feel hard to get rid of your stuff, but ultimately feel free. 

We had no idea how much “stuff” we had until we started sorting through it. In fact, we had to keep clearing things out of our home until less than 12 hours before it closed because we thought we had it under control and we just didn’t. 

What we thought would be a quick and easy process became prolonged over memories, differences of opinions, and wondering if we were making the right decisions. 

You don’t realize how many emotions and memories are attached to items until it’s time to get rid of them. Everything from the coffee mug you got on vacation to the outfit you adored putting your newborn in to craft supplies you used once and never touched again. 

It can be challenging to physically watch those items end up in the dumpster and you constantly think “Will I miss it?” or “What if I need that again?” And those thoughts can be intrusive and repetitive. 

Now, looking back at it… I couldn’t even tell you what items ended up in the dumpster. I don’t remember what coffee mugs we had (which is my favorite example because I was an avid coffee mug collector).

To be honest, I had forgotten about most of those items before I even “rediscovered them” and now that they’re gone, I’ve forgotten about them for good.

And that feeling feels amazing.

It’s nice to look around our camper and realize that everything we have in our home has a purpose besides collecting dust. 

People are going to judge and call you every name in the book.

Let’s just say that people weren’t shy about their opinions of us moving into a camper and those opinions varied drastically. 

The people who knew us best were excited for us. They know how much we love traveling and they know that this decision makes us happy.

But since we are fairly public with our lives on social media, we of course had the nay-sayers too. 

We were called hippies, gypsies, and every other name in the book.

To so many people, living in a camper is not only a downgrade in size but a downgrade in life. People are ultimately so concerned about their “social status” and how big their homes are and what years their vehicles are and to people who care about things like that, this idea totally confuses and baffles them.

How could someone give up their 2,200 square foot home voluntarily to live in a camper? 

People have also questioned our decision with this as we are parents to a two-year-old boy, Easton. They were concerned that he wouldn’t have his own room, he wouldn’t have his own privacy, and he wouldn’t have enough toys or social interaction. 

We’ve noticed that since moving into a camper, all of those things have become better.

Easton has his own room that he adores playing in that gives him more than enough privacy (that he doesn’t even want yet because he’s two…), his toys, for the most part, have purpose. And we’ve gotten to know our neighbors better than ever because they are also our co-workers. 

He plays in the world and has developed a natural love for the outdoors while having an indoor space all for himself as well.

Buying a truck from a dealer with a warranty is crucial. 

Those who have been around a while know that we had a terrible time buying a truck. We purchased one from someone off Facebook Marketplace who provided receipts for engine work that we discovered, after tearing the entire truck apart, wasn’t actually done. 

This led us to a several-month delay, canceled road trip plans, and a lot of tears. And it took us months to get this situation resolved.

We were ultimately trying to save money but getting a reliable truck can’t be negotiable. 

This ended up being the most emotional part of our journey and of course gave our nay-sayers a reason to say “Well, I guess this life wasn’t a good idea anyway.” 

We came out of this situation with some extremely valuable lessons - we just wish they weren’t such expensive ones. 

No matter how much you plan, things will go wrong and flexibility is key. 

This naturally leads to my next point of… Things will go wrong. In our relationship, I’m the planner. And this was especially stressful from my point of view.

While Tyler was working on logistics to figure out how to resolve our truck hurdles, I was worrying about all the memories we were missing out on. 

I’ve always had the mindset of “life is short, conquer your dreams NOW” and when now was pushed off, I became extremely anxious.

I had spent so much time carefully selecting our locations and our timeline, our sleeping arrangements and our activities and every time we thought we were experiencing a delay, I had to redo everything. 

And then of course once our “delayed” plans turned into “canceled plans,” I was devastated. 

Looking back on everything, I wish I had been more patient and more go-with-the-flow because the amount of stress I put on myself was out of control and totally unnecessary. 

Sometimes, Plan A doesn’t work out. And neither does Plan B or Plan C or Plan D. And while we still don’t quite understand why everything worked out the way that it did, we trust that there was a bigger picture and we encourage everyone else to trust that, too. 

There’s a large difference between being at an established campground and living off-grid

From the beginning, utilities were something I was very confused about. Our future supervisor was telling me what our situation was, my husband was explaining it to me, and something about it never registered in my brain until we were living it.

Here’s the information I wish someone had told me:

You have three main utilities and here’s how they work:

• Propane - this is used for heat and depending on your camper, possibly your oven, stove, and/or refrigerator. I understood this part. What I didn’t understand was how much propane is in each bottle and realistically, how long each of those bottles could last. During the midst of winter (even though we were in Arizona), we’d fly through propane bottles. Our specific camper can hold two bottles at a time and if one runs out (even in the middle of the night in the middle of winter), the ONLY way to switch it is to go outside and manually switch it. While we can track some electricity and water levels inside the camper, we cannot check the propane from the inside so we constantly have to check it manually. Even if you are at a “full hook up” campsite, propane is entirely separate and will always be our own responsibility. Know where you can fill up propane nearby and make sure that when you’re going to town for groceries or anything else, you top off your propane bottles to prevent long, cold, and painful nights.

• Electricity - Obviously to use any electronics (lights, outlets, etc), you have to have electricity. This can happen in one (or more) of three ways in a camper - a generator, the camper’s battery, and/or solar panels. The tricky part is to understand which ones can power what. For example, we can run our lights off our camper’s battery. However, it isn’t strong enough to power our outlets which means we can’t charge our devices, we can’t watch TV, and we can’t use our blender or any other electrically powered kitchen devices. All of those problems go away when you add an additional electricity source like a generator. Generators are able to power everything we need. Sometimes if we have too much plugged in at once, our air fryer or microwave won’t be as powerful which only results in us needing to cook food for longer. But for the most part, we don’t run into issues with the generator with one exception. We learned that we cannot power more than one space heater and we’re thankful we aren’t in the weather where we need to worry about that anymore anyways! Some campgrounds don’t allow generators so it’s important to ensure that they’re allowed if you’re relying on them. The con of generators is that they need fuel to run and that fuel can get expensive. Lastly, the other option is solar. This is something that we are still very new at and don’t know a lot about. But the property we are on is testing solar panels and we’ve enjoyed seeing how they work. We hope to add solar panels to our camper one day, but that will be a possible investment down the road. For any of these electricity options, there are math and numbers you can use to figure out what you can and can’t do. But if you’re confused by it like I am, you just have to do trial and error (preferably in a controlled environment before you actually hit the road.

• Water - There are three different types of water in your camper. Freshwater, greywater, and blackwater. Fresh water is the water that you put into the camper to use. If you buy a filter, you can use this even as drinking water. But if you don’t have a filter, you can still safely use this water to shower, brush your teeth, and do dishes. Greywater comes out of your camper. This is water that comes from your sinks. It’s “dirty” water, but not the “black” water. Greywater can actually be reused for things like gardening and planting if you put in the work to collect it. Blackwater is water that comes from your toilet and this needs to be disposed of properly at a dumping station. Dumping stations can be found at most campgrounds and if there isn’t one there, you can commonly find them at various truck stops. There are different apps you can use to find the location of dump stations. All water levels need to be monitored and addressed regularly. If you are hooked up to continuous freshwater, you don’t have to be as careful about doing dishes or how long your showers are. But if you are relying on the water that’s in your camper, you need to pay attention to how much water you’re using and learn what you can/can’t do on certain water levels. 

Some costs vanished while others were simply replaced.

While camper life has overall been cheapER, it definitely hasn’t been cheap. 

We got rid of our mortgage which was by far our biggest expense. But costs like utilities were simply replaced.

There are large initial costs to start this lifestyle including buying a reliable camper and a reliable truck. 

After that, unless you have work-camping agreements as we do, parking your camper places typically isn’t free. You can join different memberships like Harvest Hosts and Thousand Trails that make parking your camper cheaper, but there are still costs associated with them and you typically can’t stay at those places for very long.

A great resource for parking your camper is the Bureau of Land Management. They own land throughout the country (primarily on the west half) that you can park for free for up to two weeks. 

We are work-campers which helps with this cost tremendously. We both work for the campground that we live at. My husband is full-time, and I’m part-time. Our first six hours of work each week are in exchange for our parking spot and we get paid for every hour after that. It helps bring in an income but also takes away a large expense for us. 

However, the two costs that have risen for us are gas/diesel and utilities. We are currently at a rural campground and we have to drive 35 minutes away for anything. So if we want to go to the playground or go grocery shopping, we have to pay for gas for our SUV just to make it there and back.

Also, pulling a camper obviously makes a truck work a lot harder than the truck driving without it which makes our diesel costs go up as well.

And just like I’ve previously explained, while we live without a mortgage or rent, we have to fill up our utilities frequently which has equaled out to a little bit more than what we were paying in our 2,200 square foot house. At our next assignment, all utilities are included in our work-camping agreement which will lower our costs even more. 

It’s the best decision we’ve ever made and we shouldn’t have been so scared

We spent so much time second-guessing ourselves and wondering if we were making the right decision. We had many hard days with many emotional nights but looking back at everything we’ve been through, we couldn’t be more grateful for the opportunity.

We’re proud of ourselves for turning a dream into a reality and for sticking to it, even when it got hard.

We sit around the campfire looking at the stars seeing our son run around with his toys and it fills our hearts more than anything else we’ve done with our lives up until this day. 

We know we will hit more hurdles along the way. But we’ve become a lot more efficient, confident, and empowered by this experience and we hope that we can inspire others to conquer their dreams, no matter what other people think about them.