It was closing day.
The papers were signed and it's time to head back and hook on to our 5th wheel and move to our new space! Our new space that truly was OUR OWN. As you can imagine the excitement and the feeling, we could not get out there fast enough!
Our land was virgin land. We didn't have an address yet when we bought it. It literally was addressed as TBD and then the location. We were actually lucky that there was already a driveway put in place when the owners subdivide to sell off the different parcels.
By this time, we had already been living in our 5th wheel for a year, give or take a month or so, on our friend's property (if you haven't read the last post leading up to this, read it here)
We decided to make that first week on our new property extra fun for the kids and us. We did not have any utilities yet, so we called it camping out! The kids LOVED that. And we truly did make it camping style. We went to store and bought all of the essentials for a full-course campfire dinner- Hot Dogs, Buns, a can of beans and of course S'MORES. We went to bed at sundown (thank goodness it was summer lol) since we had no power, we had flashlights and battery powered lanterns, we told "scary" stories, we made some really nice memories.
We didn't rough it for long.
We had just enough cash left over from our savings to purchase 2 out of 3 utilities. Alex was amazing and let me decide on which ones I wanted. Since our plan was to do every step out of pocket, we weren't quite sure yet when we would have enough saved up for the 3rd utility to be put in.
It sure didn't take me long to decide which 2 utilities where the most important, to me. WATER and SEPTIC! I did not love the idea of having to haul water every time we needed more, and I most definitely did not love the idea of having to drive our 5th wheel every week to a dumping station and dump the RV tank every week either.
Electricity to me sounded like the easiest utility to make do without.
We have friends who live just a couple of miles up the road from us that had no occupancy in one of their rental properties and they allowed us to head up there as we needed for showering while we waited. Within 3 or 4 weeks, we had water running, a septic tank and a leach field engineered and installed.... And it was glorious!
We only lived without electricity for a couple of weeks. It really wasn't roughing it for long for us. We did not have enough to put in for a pole and meter and have power ran from the grid, so we went solar.
I'm going to be honest, solar was a lot of work. The way we did it anyway. Sure, it was "free" power but the work of maintaining it through snowstorms, charging batteries and running generators on cloudy days, it was work. We did learn a lot about different appliances and light bulbs and how many watts they used- probably learned more than what I wanted to lol.
To wrap this part of the story up, I'm going to say that this chapter of our lives was A LOT of work. A lot of hard work, a lot (LOT) of sacrifice, a TON of patience to do it slowly and not get caught up in our very easily distracted ways of putting the cart before the horse. We have received a lot of remarks throughout the years from people about how lucky we are- those are hard words to hear. No really. The reality of it is this was by no means "luck". Maybe an unpopular opinion here these days but nothing like this is luck. Working this hard and sacrificing as much as we did was dedication, determination and being all-in with what we decided was best for us.
Guys, we literally ate beans for 2 years- lunch and dinner- beans. We had eggs for breakfast, sometimes oatmeal because that was the most affordable meals while we pushed hard to build as quickly as we could to get our kids out of the 5th wheel off of the floor and into a bedroom, they can each call their own. Please don't others who have worked their butts off for something that they are lucky -xoxo
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