Hi, everyone has been asking how we are getting on living in the caravan. We have been too busy living in the caravan and adjusting to life without a house that I have not have had time to really update this. Life and work always gets in the way or I cant be bothered and watch a film instead!
This will only be a very brief update and I will try to update specifics in more detail as we go along a bit more regularly. According to the timer in the upper right of the blog page if you are looking at this on a desktop, we have been living in the caravan for 87 days now.
In reality the transition has been fairly easy once we had the initial moving out of the way. That was the messiest bit, storing stuff and packing and finalising all the post redirection and clearing the flat.
We have adjusted to living in the van fairly well, we have made some modifications to the van and a few minor repairs which I will go though another time. This was needed to make it more liveable and fix some things we did not realise did not work properly and needed updating. Living full time in the van means you really get to know it well and I have had to learn how everything works so that I can fix things quickly and cheaply. Its much harder for us to drop the caravan off to a workshop and leave it there as where would we live while they got round to fixing it!
We have stayed in a few different places in those 87 days, Mostly in Essex at our regular site with full hook up and facilities, http://colchesterholidaypark.com/
Then some time up in the lake district at a lovely site right by Blencathra. http://www.threlkeldhalltouringsite.co.uk/ really nice site with great views and easy walks onto the mountain.
Then we are currently on a really quiet site near Bury St Edmunds which we have been at twice now. It is pretty much us in a field behind a nursery with only one other caravan for company. This is a no facilities site with no hook up so we use all the van systems and charge the battery only with solar and run the hot water on gas and the heating and cooling on gas also. This has meant a little work on the van to install a 500W Pure sine wave inverter to run off the battery and run all the domestic office stuff we need. Things like the printer and laminator and laptops etc. We soon found out the 50W Solar panel we had would just about cope with things with very light use on a very sunny day but a few cloudy days and our battery was flat. We purchased an additional 100W solar panel and wired it in. The 100W panel copes with our needs and if we have more than a couple of dark days we add the 50W into the system as well and we are good.
In short we are enjoying living in the van an are coping fine, to be honest its just like a very small flat we can move whenever we want. I even like the sound of the wind and rain and it reminds us we are alive and much closer to the outdoors.
I will do an update on the inside of the van very soon
Lindley and Maxine