It goes like this when you’re downsizing, or at least this is how it went for us. We accepted an offer on our stationary house, and in-between that and the closing date we had a 60 day window to purchase the van since it is apparently difficult to get an RV loan if you’re using it as a primary residence. Loan companies like to see that you have a primary residence so they know where to find you if they have to come after you for their money. So its an ultimate catch-22 of needing the house to get the RV loan, but needing an RV loan because we still had the mortgage on the house. Since we wanted to have a van before we closed on the house in order to get our stuff moved in and determine what we can actually fit/use in the van, we knew that we would have to get a loan for a month before paying it off from the money we got from selling our house after it closed.
Moving Mess & Chaos. Since we got married while we lived at this residence, we had a lot of nicer, more breakable stuff. #Adulting at its finest! We used only the finest Home Depot Wrap. Alas, the New York Yankees plastic stadium cups didn't make the cut...Humz's demand, not mine.
More Chaos: Packing up the Basement
We sold a lot of the furniture we knew we didn't want to take with us including (4) bookshelves, our sectional couch, lamps, and backyard furniture and we also donated or trashed old clothes, hand-me-down kitchen appliances/dishes, etc. But we still managed to fill our 10' x 10' storage unit to the gills. We of course set aside the stuff we thought we wanted to use in the van prior to filling the unit and hoped for the best that something we needed wasn't deep in the back. After inhabiting the van, we now have a bunch of boxes labeled "Vanlife Rejects" of things we thought we would use but don't, or things that we can do without.
Unfortunately, we hit a snag when we were actually ready to pull the trigger on the van purchase. After it was clear that the sale of our house would go through, we called the dealership to get the ball rolling on securing our van. To our horror, the next Travato available wouldn’t be ready until 2 weeks after our scheduled closing as we had missed out on buying the one on the lot by one day. Drats! So we decided to go after that one, knowing that we could be homeless for 2 weeks and we would just visit one of our families during that time. Our dealer, Colonial RV in Lakewood, NJ said that if we confirmed our purchase with the manufacturer than Winnebago could expedite our delivery, provided they had all the parts they needed to finish our van. As luck would have it, our van was not only on time but about 4 weeks early, ie: 2 weeks before closing. On top of that, all the worrying about it not getting there in time was for nothing when our closing got pushed back 10 days. We then had about 3 weeks of having to parallel park a 21’ long monster van on the busy street in front of our house, also another task I designated to Humz, who parked that sucker each and every time like a champ! He only got 1 parking ticket for accidentally parking it in a street sweeping zone.
How many people can say they can fit their 2 houses in the same photo? We can!
Ready to go, just in time for closing! (Barely...even with the 10 day delay in closing.)
- Katharine