Hannah and I have started a major cleaning project of our house. This is step 1 of who knows how many in the downsizing process.

Hannah and I have started to mentally put price tags on everything we own. Which isn’t hard. We live pretty meagerly compared to most. Not counting our SUV or my main computer, we can sell everything and maybe get $3,000. The rest is junky toys and kitchen stuff you’re lucky to get a buck or two for at yard sales. Virtually everything we own is a hand-me-down that people passed onto us because they got something better. (I was grateful to receive everything that’s been given to us, but I want to be in a position in our lives to be able to give new stuff to people who are in need.)

Still, though, all this is our stuff. Once we get rid of our couch, we won’t own a couch. Same for our fridge. No fridge. Nothing to keep our food cold.

Then, there’s my computer. My powerful, lovely, upgraded Mac Pro. Purchased in February of 2007 with our tax return, my Mac Pro was our second Mac computer after buying one of the original iMacs for Maddy to play educational games on (which by the way still runs better than most PCs I’ve used).

I love my Mac Pro. It can do anything I throw at and still have unused CPU cycles. It’s got two dual-core 64-bit Xeon processors, 5GB of RAM, 1.5TB of internal hard drive space, two DVD writers, one of which is Lightscribe. This things tears through video rendering like a warm knife through butter. I love this monster.

But I have to let go and downsize. That’s part of the adventure, going smaller, trimming down and teaching ourselves just how little we can live with. Last week I ordered a TB external hard drive to put all my video projects and stuff on. Today I finished transferring everything. The drive is almost full.

So now I’m going to inventory everything I have for this computer and sell it off on eBay or Craigslist (hopefully Craigslist to avoid shipping charges and eBay & PayPal fees). I’m downgrading to either a used MacBook Pro that I can still get an extended AppleCare warranty on or a MacBook.

I am leaning towards getting a MacBook just to come out with more cash in the end.

Anyway, that’s my computer story. I’m basically selling my third child. If anyone reading this is interested in it, don’t hesitate to contact me.

As my wife and I take inventory of our lives (literally and figuratively), we have decided to start being a little more green. We as Americans are, as a whole, a very wasteful bunch. Nationwide, there is a growing awareness of “going green,” being more environmentally minded, and basically taking care of our planet.

As Christians, Hannah and I cannot find any place in the BIble where God said it was O.K. to trash the Earth and treat it like a giant garbage dump. Instead, he told us to take care of the place.

Anyway, to that end, Hannah and I decided that one small step we can make is to start using reusable cloth bags when we go to the store. We do most of our grocery shopping at Aldi and I was in line the other day picking up some stuff for Makayla’s birthday party when I saw that Aldi was selling eco-friendly reusable bags. They had one in the checkout line and I asked how much they were — $1.99 — not bad, and the bag was pretty big. I tugged on the seams and saw they were constructed pretty well, too. So I thought the one I had been looking at was for sale, so I put it with my stuff. The clerk politely pointed me to the location of the bags and said the one I was looking at was for display.

Ah, ok. So I put the display back and bent down to get one. And was instantly struck with a dose of irony:

Yep, Aldi’s eco-friendly canvas bags come packaged, for no apparent reason, inside a plastic bag. I picked the bag up and chuckled as I put it with my items. “Only in America,” I said, “would a store sell an environmentally friendly bag packaged in a plastic one.” The clerk laughed because she had never noticed and we concluded that there was no reason for the canvas bag to be in a plastic bag. Kinda defeats the purpose a bit.

Earlier this evening, my wife and I had one of those moments when you’re reading something, think about what you just read for a second or two and then your brain goes into overdrive with new ideas and realizations.

See, the spreadsheet I’ve been working on to crunch the numbers for the lifestyle we’re about to embark on checks out. With our current income, we can afford it, but just barely. There’s one column that dwarfs all the others combined.

Fuel.

Whether we go gas or diesel, it’s going to be expensive. Really expensive. I’ve read other traveler’s blogs and a lot of people are spending $1,500, $2,000, even $3,000 a month on fuel. That we simply cannot afford.

That was until I once again hit the ole’ Internet to do some more research. One of the blogs I subscibed to last week when I started planning all this was the Live Lightly Tour. Well, the light bulb went off for my wife and I when we read about their rig.

We’re still trying to decide on whether or not to buy an older RV that needs some TLC in October (when the lease on our house is up) or find out some other kind of creative living arrangement through February when we’ll be able to buy a $15-$20k RV. If we stay in our current house after our lease is up, we’ll be esentially throwing away $1,000 a month on the increase rent (month-to-month costs more) and utilities.

If we have to buy in October, we’ll have about $7,000. In February we can do a lot better. We’d like to wait until February to buy, but need some suggestions about where to live from November until we can buy the RV. Anyone have an RV or trailer we can live in at a park somewhere? We’ll take real good care of it for you!

Our little one Makayla turns 3 this week and we celebrated at my mom’s house with mine and my wife’s families. Our little princess had a great time!

Another great quote:

“…not all those who wander are lost…”

~ J.R.R. Tolkien

I just posted a rather lengthy tale about how we arrived at our decision to become a family on the road. Be sure to check it out, as it fills in a lot of gaps that aren’t obvious in the blog posts.

Hannah and I came across this quote during one of our late-night information-gathering internet sessions. This will be hanging somewhere on the walls in of our new trailer when we get it.

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

~ Mark Twain

So I was surprised to receive an anonymous comment earlier today that chastised me for wanting to make our kids “homeless.” This struck me as odd because the only place I’ve mentioned this site is full-time RV forums. Which means there’s someone trolling full-time family RV’ing forums who is against full-time family RV’ing. Go figure.

Anyway, to be clear:

We won’t be homeless. We will live in a home that we have the joy of being able to move anywhere we want to. If our daughters have a science project on sedimentary layers, we can move to the Grand Canyon and go see some great sedimentary layers. If they have to learn about alligators, we can move near the Everglades and go on an airboat to observe them in the wild. Or if they want to have their birthday pary on houseboat, we can move near the Mississippi River and live there for a while.

If this person believes that everyone needs to settle don and buy a house, fine. But that’s not our American Dream.

Wow, I never thought I would come across a topic so passionately debated in RV forums. One forum I frequent has a 183-page (and growing) “discussion” on the matter that I skimmed and got no useful information out of.

We’re still a couple months away from trying to swing a trade with our current vehicle for the truck we are going to use, but now is the time we need to figure out which way to go. It will affect what kind of trailer we’ll buy, if we can even consider a 5th wheel, how much we’re going to pay for fuel on the road, et cetera.

If you have any tips form your personal experience, or can point me to a website with more info (I’ve found some), I’d really appreciate it.

See you on the road,
Aaron