Hey, I'm Elsa
and I'm Barron
and today is our one-year anniversary of living in this Scamp trailer.
We were living in a one-bedroom apartment about five years ago
when Baron brought up the idea to me.
The obvious thing that I had on my side
was that houses are just stupid expensive and this was a way that we
could pay off the house for an amount of money that actually makes sense.
We were draining away $700 with that apartment and $900 for a house from a family friend.
And that's just rent like utilities and everything--
and that's just Kansas City, too.
With Barron I started doing some research on tiny houses
looking at YouTube and forums.
I would just find the highlights and then bring Elsa all the
highlights of the cutest one or the one that was like the most..
something that she would dig and then over and over again..
They're really freaking cool.
Tiny houses are SWEET.
Fall of 2015 we decided to take a trip to Portland.
We'd been looking at some tiny house builders.
We thought that we would get a tiny house built for us
so that we could save time.
We wouldn't have to pay rent living in a space
as we were building our tiny house.
We like the idea of a tiny house because we could build something custom.
So we could get exactly what we wanted
laid out how we wanted. We could have workspace, a nice bathroom,
all the things that we needed. --Or thought we needed.
Ironically we wanted a space
where Elsa could set up cameras and have like a good place to do tutorials and stuff
and it's kind of hilarious because we have 3 cameras set up right now
and we're doing it right here.
So, we toured tiny houses and after
we left Portland we loved them, like we were all in. I thought it was a great idea
and then we got home and looked into loans, like how we were gonna pay for it
because they were anywhere between 50 to 80 grand depending on how you did it
which was still a lot cheaper than any of the houses we could've bought in
Kansas City, so we were still like, okay, we can own a thing--
Then we thought about it and we could do so many things with fifty to eighty thousand dollars.
That's a lot of money and that's a lot of commitment
We've both been self-employed for several years, so getting a loan with our
variable incomes and self-employed tax returns wasn't gonna be easy.
It's also amatter of is it an RV loan? Is it a house loan?
The other thing was we couldn't find anywhere to park it legally.
In Kansas City especially.
There was nowhere that we could legally do it aside from an RV park.
But then we would be paying rent to an RV park every month
and living in an RV park in a tiny house which was not super sensical, no.
Tiny homes also are very heavy, so you effectively need a semi truck to pull them around
and they're not meant to be towed all the time.
So we needed a place to park this thing and to not move it unless we had to.
And then all those combined
brought us to the idea of RVs.
People mentioned it often like, why don't you just get an RV?
We stubbornly clung to the tiny house thing because it's cool.
RVs are generally pretty heinous looking they look like something
out of that 70s show, like intentionally.
And we just thought we needed more space, too.
We thought that an RV wasn't gonna cut it.
It started making more sense
that RVs are made to be traveled in,
RVs are significantly cheaper it was
It was easy to get a loan on them - yeah they're legal.
My grandparents have been living in their RVs
through the winters for I think my entire life.
They're snowbirds and they would go down to Mexico so we drove up to Iowa
and with them and toured a bunch of RVs.
We went to some RV retailers to look at some used RVs
and we looked at toy haulers, for example, and utility trailers
Like an empty UHaul.
Because because they were convertible we could do whatever we wanted to them.
We also looked at truck bed campers with the camper in the truck bed of a truck.
and we looked at some other tow behind trailers.
We really couldn't find anything much smaller than 20 feet though.
Yeah, and we were looking for something smaller.
Primarily so that we wouldn't have to get a giant truck.
Elsa's grandpa, Huck, insisted that we have a truck over and over again,
"You gotta have a damn truck!" He wouldn't let it go
Well because for most of these you do
and we would have, so that was gonna be an added expense.
An expense that was probably gonna cost more than the camper itself.
While we were in Iowa, we were also on Craigslist trying to find
some other places to look for trailers
and up finding a teeny tiny little fiberglass trailer
in my grandma's neighborhood.
It was the first Scamp that we had ever seen and we toured it but it was really small.
So small, it had a bathroom so that cut down on its whole size.
I thought that it could never be something livable, but it was really cool.
It was an older guy that had it and he
said that he had travelled the west coast up and down and back to Iowa
pulling the scamp with his Subaru which was really appealing to me.
That opened an entire new category of things we could live in
that maybe wouldn't require us buying an expensive truck.
We started looking into fiberglass trailers and at
this point we thought that a bathroom was a definite necessity so we were
looking at the 16-foot models of the scamp primarily.
And as we were thinking about it it was like, well if we didn't have a bathroom
we could go down to the next size in Scamps
to a 13 foot. Do we really need a bathroom?
And after a bunch of thought we kind of realized we didn't want to be pooping in our tiny space,
we didn't want to have to carry around all this black water, drain it, clean it,
that would take up a lot of space and also just be a huge pain in the butt,
and people shouldn't be in a bathroom more than 30 minutes a day, so why would we
dedicate 20% of our living quarters to a place where we spend such little amounts of time?
There's toilets everywhere. Everywhere! In every public establishment there's a toilet
and several in everybody's homes.
If we ever needed a toilet, or even now if we decide that we want one for whatever reason
We could do a composting toilet and just put it under where we have our shoes.
So then we started broadening our search online to 13ft fiberglass trailers.
We tried to snag like five of them-
If they're under ten thousand dollars they're gone or claimed in like, 2 days.
They hold their value well, we really had no idea that
there's such a market for fiberglass trailers.
They're awesome- yeah they're really cool.- We saw a guy in Minnesota selling his
for 4500 with some water damage. 1988, so a little bit older.
We borrowed our friend Jordan Mackey's truck and drove it all the way up an hour south of Canada.
When we toured the Scamp, it had more water damage than we had previously thought.
So, we talked to the guy down to $3,700 and gave him the cash and hooked up the Scamp
And drove it back!
20 hours total and then finally decided to stop at Des Moines, Iowa,
Walmart parking lot and stay the night
I cried.
Reality was finally kicking in like,
oh my god we're gonna.. We're doin it! We did it!
We just did it so, we're doin it
I felt pretty good because every time I looked in the rearview mirror
and saw our house that was completely paid off behind us I was like, okay.. :D
Yeah... -Elsa not so much.
We were planning on using my Pontiac Vibe, it's rated to tow about 2,000lbs.
I was on the phone with my dad, talking to him about whether we could do it with the Vibe
and he was like,
couldn't you just do it with the Mini?
I guess, maybe.
and we looked into it,
put a tow hitch on the back, took it on a test drive and the Mini Cooper became
our tow vehicle for an entire year.
A month before we moved into the Scamp full time,
I went with a friend to Vietnam and you stayed back and you worked on-
I worked on like all the water damage and just really made the Scamp livable.
And the day I got back to the US, we moved out of our house and
into the Scamp.. and it was a pretty big thing
At first it was very challenging,
it is a smaller space.
Another difficult thing was getting around
societal validation, to like keep doing our thing. It seemed like everybody that
we talked to was skeptical and would just tell us that that's not gonna work.
So to keep our head on straight and just keep pushing with our vision was
pretty difficult, especially initially.
--Right now we're kind of like, what should we do? We have our whole house
basically on our backs we can,
we can go anywhere!
But now after your practice we
are living full-time in nature, we have more time, we're creating more.
We're making so many new friends and connecting with people that we wouldn't have been able to.
And we have a cool place for our friends from Kansas City
to come out and hang out, too, which is pretty awesome.
We are absolutely so much happier living this way than I could have ever imagined.
I would have never guessed that this was going to be so incredibly perfect.
And honestly, solutions have come more easily than we previously thought.
As you do it, or as we do it, we figure out solutions to things more quickly
than I could have imagined, truly.
So now we're here on a mountain with our new Subaru
and a year of scamp life under our belt.
And so, our journey begins..
Again!
Thanks for watching and we'll see you in our next video! Bye!