hey there welcome to my channel where i take you on tours of tiny homes and share
stories of people living alternatively in today's video we meet a large family who
decided to downsize to live full-time in a renovated rv with their four young children
so what is life really like for an american nomadic family
well you're about to find out and if you like these kind of videos make sure that
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make this house
hi i'm leanna and i'm
just jason you and
we are made up of jason leanna constance bernadette musa and nelson and lola our
little puppy we decided together to move to zanzibar we lived there for six years
there were so many things that were intense about living there and trying to learn to do life there
finding ourselves in this lifestyle i'm referring back to those formative years almost every day
we kind of came back from zanzibar in a rush it was all coveted related
very quickly we found ourselves just back in the flow of normal middle class american life
thankfully we both felt like what are we actually doing
jason and i both together have always had this value for trying to live intentionally and build
the life we want we started to communicate to our family well we're talking about taking a trip
we decided okay let's just kind of get something turnkey we'll do our trip we'll see what happens
we shopped and shopped and eventually found this on auction it had a clean title
it said something to the effect of runs and drives we bought it for twenty eight thousand dollars
when i think about remodeling the rig and making it cozy making it functional for us those things
are all really important on the other hand for us getting on the road was important
i think what we realize now is this lifestyle only works if it works for our kids
i think that's a constant conversation and when we see something that's not working
it's like let's talk about that it's been interesting to hear the kids
responses shift to less like oh i'm liking this trip and more like i'm liking this life
welcome to our home on wheels we are a large family we like our creature comforts and so
we ended up going with a large vehicle that suits those needs we've got a 2004 alpha the model is a
see ya it's a 40 foot total length it's powered by a caterpillar c7 diesel pusher in the back we're
heavy we tow a minivan behind us on a car dolly our total gross weight combined is about 38 five
one thing we feel like they nailed which we honestly haven't seen too often
is this is our garbage can access and so we can pull it right out here as you can see
it's got a opening hatch from inside the kitchen and they did a great job with storage i'm a
handyman kind of guy like to have my tools like to be able to work while we're on the road so
it's got really deep storage on that side and then it's got a full pass-through storage on this side
very conveniently designed again big family we've got our pantry and then mass amount of storage
it's a pass through you can access from the front or the back so that's been very very nice
underneath here we've got a three cylinder 7500 watt diesel generator we have enough solar
and battery capacity that we don't run it too often unless we're going to run
some really high powered appliances we run the instant pot at 1200 watts a lot
and if we're gonna run the air conditioning units we still have those connected to the generator
rather than to the battery bank so we have a 2 000 watt inverter that was here when we got the rig
right now it's working and working great i wired in 2 400 watts of solar we've got
six 395 watt panels at max capacity we're 80 volts at about 30 amps
we realized that we were going to be chasing the sun
we were going to be eating outdoors a whole lot more than than what we were used to
so it was a bit of an investment but we bought this camp chef grill and we bought multiple
attachments we've got the barbecue on here now we love to host this has been so much more than
a means of cooking food it becomes a social kind of centerpiece we've been really happy with it
all right come on inside and we'll show you around
as a family of six thinking about full timing and living on the road it was super important to us
to have a big rig so we figured 40 foot would be a no-brainer and we really wanted slide-outs
the other factor is that my husband is super tall he's 6'5
so he immediately googled what is the tallest class a that's what led us to this model the alpha
so something we love to do is to host and to have people in our home the alpha has a four foot slide
in addition to the eight foot body so it gives us this really nice big living area we have had big
groups of people in here and it's really cozy and it's comfortable the couch actually is a sectional
and it provides some extra storage under here and it can pull out to be a guest bed so that's great
so one of the things we do love about this rig is that it comes with a lot of storage space
you've got the upper cabinets and a ton of kitchen cabinets
another thing that is really cool is they put the trash here in the counter with these little
covers handy dandy covers and you can access it from the outside which is really awesome we
didn't do many modifications we did cover over the kitchen window this specific rig has so many
windows which we love it lets in all this amazing natural light it's actually i never thought i'd
say it but almost too much light i realized i want some i want some wall space too i want places to
hang pictures and things like that with the slide out we do have you know almost three times the
average width here which for our family really really helps there's a constant flow of chaos
but there's a place for it to go through we had a couple priorities in deciding if we could pull
this off in a way that worked for everybody and one of the things we really wanted was to have a
table space that we could all fit around which is tricky because it's a lot of people so jason came
up with this idea to stick a table top on top of a freezer so that we can also food hoard and so he
made this little contraption and we love it this allows us to just head off into the wilderness and
have plenty of food honestly we eat most of our meals outside so this ends up being more like the
prep space and the the gather space the kids eat here but as a family we do typically eat outside
so we did change out the fridge we replaced it with a residential fridge full size it's great
for my very tall husband but i do have to get on a stool to access my freezer
you might notice the theme of food being like everywhere in our house we it's a priority
we we love our food so we have a great huge
pantry here which is awesome it's about as much pantry space as i had in a normal house
this divider here um separates the living from the bedroom area and we love having that there
just once the kids are in bed shut that door so back here in the bedroom we've got a lot packed in
we've got the separate sink and toilet and shower all in their own areas which we love
as a big family it allows everybody to be doing their things at the same time in their own spaces
another thing we love about this rig is that it really does have a nice big shower
and it even has a little bathtub on the bottom it's about a four or five inch tub and we use
that thing all the time we thought about a lot of different sleeping arrangements where do you fit
everybody we just landed on building four little bunks into the wardrobe area so we have the three
bunks on the one side and then the little bunk on the other side and that one has actually a
door on it that we slide shut and that's where our little guy is and he loves it it's his little den
when we had the plan to make their bunks like this we started realizing these are not just
sleeping areas these are actually their rooms and it's actually really important to them that they
like that space and that they feel good in that space and that they have an area for their things
and so we decided to wallpaper them i let the kids all pick their own wallpaper
we built some little shelves in there even though the space is tiny it has really given
them ownership and they love being in their spaces which i think is the cutest thing ever
this is my bed it has dinosaurs
i'm born a dead and this is my bed i get the middle bed because i'm the middle
person not family i have two of these but one's a donkey see hi my name is constance and this is
my bed i sleep up here and we have a stool that i can get onto my bed my wallpaper are cranes
these stars glow in the night and i have a box that i can put a bunch of things in play-doh
my sticker we've got the queen-size bed here it lifts up there's storage under there there's
storage behind it put all of our hanging clothes over here in front of the window
and we built in a little storage rack above that that pretty much does that
for clothes storage we put a tv on the wall here and we turn this into movie zone and
you know the whole family can pile on the bed and watch a movie together
just
oh