Packing Light | How Do You Fit in an RV?
“Packing Light” is a series celebrating simplicity - the spaces we inhabit, the self-care we undertake, the tools we find helpful in the every day. Each edition welcomes a new facet of every day life as it relates to our journey living on the road. Having traveled the globe in his childhood and having learned the art of caring for your tools in the military, Daniel offers insight into the organization of systems and processes. With growing children, shifting weather, and traveling on a budget, Lauren hopes to demonstrate that all can simplify and welcome adventure at the same time.
Family travel is such a privilege, a gift. Still, the process to pack can be harrowing. When we decided to box up our home and pack up what we thought we’d need for the next year of life on the road, I was both nervous and excited for the challenge.
My father’s favorite expression to me is, “Lauren, slow down, when will you stop trying to put ten pounds in a five pound bag?” With two small children and two full time working parents, our life had little room for surprises, but when COVID struck, we decided to make a change. It’s just my nature to have started this adventure from a 3,300 square foot home and thought it would be a fun challenge to try and fit our family into a 200 square foot home.
We only had one month, but I was excited at the prospect of having less and living more. As we packed for our current road trip, I realized there are a few habits we have developed over the years that help planning and packing for the road feel smoother and more approachable. I jotted down our process on how to downsize your home below for you to borrow and make your own.
visualize the new space \
When you downsize you are forced to take stock of what you have. Once we pulled the trigger on the Living Vehicle purchase, we obtained every dimension imaginable and mapped it out on the floor with painter’s tape. Knowing we were unable to bring everything, this process quickly showed us how paramount simplifying needed to be. Seeing measurements on paper is one thing, but as we walked through our “mock up” of the Living Vehicle we laid to rest a lot of ideas like bringing our espresso machine. Clearly, it wouldn’t fit on the new kitchen countertop.
mapping the rooms of the Living Vehicle on the floor
snapshot of a typical day \
Have you ever thought through what a typical day looks like for you and your family? I’m an avid memory keeper and seasonally take photos of a single day to remember our life during that time. The kids change, our routines change, what we do and need in each season also changes. By breaking down a typical day, you can get a feel for the things you need to make your routines possible in your new environment.
For instance, we spend at least one hour at the breakfast table in the morning reading and enjoying conversation. So, I write down on my packing list in detail everything I need to make oatmeal (cinnamon canister, honey dispenser, flax, and containers or oats). Then I write down that I need to gather picture books, a few chapter books, our children’s Bible, and the white boards the boys use for copy work. I go through this system for every aspect of a typical day: morning, noon, and night. In this way, I have a master packing list of what we can’t live without to make our routines as seamless a transition as possible.
This system also works in reverse. In visualizing how you think you’ll spend a typical day on the road, the kinds of things you’ll do on a rest day, the places you may go to for adventure, you can begin to formulate a packing and needs list. I will use another blog post entirely to speak to packing lists.
a typical morning with the boys
simulate the real deal \
My husband is an extremely good packer having traveled his entire life. We decided together that we would take a week’s worth of clothing on this journey. You can do a lot with a week’s worth, so it became my task to find out what that looked like for each family member.
One month out we downsized our closets to just what we thought we would need. We bought one wardrobe box each at Home Depot and packed everything else into them. The two wardrobe boxes stayed in our room, just in case we needed to add or take away from them over the next month. What was left over, which we expected to use on the trip, we kept in our closet. We started to use just these items in daily life. The holes in our wardrobe became apparent immediately. In doing this process items may stand out that you need to purchase - add them to your master list and highlight them as needs. Then, on a separate evening, you can easily see the list of needs and can use your budget to shop, order, thrift, or borrow.
You could do this with any aspect of your packing list. I did this system with my boys’ clothes and my husband did his. Two weeks out I completed this activity with our entire kitchen. We bought moving boxes and packed up everything we knew we wouldn’t take or need. We lived on the dishes, utensils, and kitchen equipment we wanted for the trip/new home. By wiping out everything, and starting with a clean slate in whatever room you choose, you can simplify more efficiently and know what you need to add to your packing list right away.
Wardrobe boxes for storage
a look into our closest after pairing down to a week’s worth of clothes
see a snippet from our master packing list: red = buy now green = buy at a later time
create staging areas in your home \
Creating staging areas allows you to quickly survey your belongings and get an actual visual on how much you’re actually bringing. Prior to downsizing your things, set up staging areas in your home:
for donated items
for items you’re taking with you
for items that will be stored
all our children’s clothes (from birth to current age) we were not taking stored in a closet
\ store \ need \ purge \
Set aside an entire day for each room of your house
Grab post-it notes & label with: store, need, or purge make these piles obvious in different corners of the room
Go through each item in the room placing them in one of the three piles
May need to label furniture but in our case we didn’t take furniture
Immediately take the purge pile to your staging area for donated items (ours was our guest room) which made it easy to take photos of the donated items for our records before sending to Goodwill
Move the items you will need to keep with you to your staging area for the trip/or move
Storage items was our last and largest pile, so it remained in the room
On a different day box up your items labeled storage in each room. Any large pieces of furniture will then be labeled for movers if need be
a video showing my process for boxing up my kitchen including our inventory system
creating an inventory \
My husband, the master of spreadsheets, set up an inventory system for our belongings. With both of our military backgrounds and multiple cross-country moves we have found this is the best way to track our possessions over multiple locations. Here’s the supplies we found handy: barcode stickers, sharpie, packing tape, boxes. A note on boxes - stick to the same sizes of boxes so they stack nicely in your storage area. Home Depot and Lowe’s both sell packing boxes but they are slightly different shapes and sizes.
When it’s time to pack up your possessions - remember, we started a month in advance - we opened a new Google Sheets document on the computer and titled it, “RV Trip Inventory and Storage Sizing.” We used this for both our Storage Inventory System and our RV Trip Master Packing List. You can do this by creating multiple tabs at the bottom. We used categories for our inventory list such as: Box Number, Box Name, Item name, Value Estimate (for insurance) and Location. Even if your possessions are only in storage for a few months you tend to forget what you placed where. This also may come in handy if you have multiple homes and wish to track your belongings more effectively.
a snapshot of our inventory list for storage
a note on storing your belongings \
The first question I had to answer when getting a storage unit was "How much room does all our crap take up?" I honestly had no clue, and while every self-storage company gives rough guidelines, I wanted to be sure whatever I got would fit without being wasteful. My plan was to measure out all the big items like furniture and visualize each piece like a block that I could drop into a grid, tetris-style. I used a spreadsheet to make a grid with each cell representing 6in x 6in, and then merged cells for each big piece of furniture based on its width and length. I knew from previous moves that if I could get all the furniture into the floor area of a truck/container/storage unit, the boxes of loose items could fit on top/around/under with any vertical space left over. While the location of each item didn't really matter, it ended up being a good estimate of how much spare room we would have in the 20 ft x 30ft unit we rented.
a visual representation of our storage unit created in Google Sheets
Whether you find yourself gearing up for a cross-country move, organizing your mountain and beach homes, or wanting to try life on the road, I hope you have gleaned some useful tips from our first post in a series on Packing Light.
