Starting Full-Time RV Living: Our First Months and Challenges

Last updated on December 16th, 2024 at 03:11 pm

Last week, I took to Instagram/Facebook and asked what you wanted to know about full-time RV living. Boy, did you guys deliver! Thank you for all of your questions! I’ve now got Q&A topics for days! This question, though, the one asking what has been the most challenging part of RV life so far, well, I was most tempted to write on that topic.

As a bonus, my answer will give me an excellent opportunity to paint you a picture of what the first couple of months of RV life were like for us!

Initially, I thought the switch to RV life would be a piece of cake, and in no time, we’d be living a carefree, delightful life on the road. (I tend to live in the clouds sometimes.)

The question at hand:
What was the most challenging part about transitioning over to RV life?

The short answer: Going from purchase to full-time living immediately and being unable to retreat to our old lifestyle in times of stress and defeat.

You guys – we knew NOTHING. I mean, we’d been reading books and blogs and getting as prepared as possible, but we had no hands-on experience except for a few camping trips in a Roadtrek for me as a kid and a few in a popup camper for Barrett as a kid.

At Camping World, they recommend you take the camper on a few trips here and there before living in it full time. But winter was closing in on us, and I did not have the patience to wait around for spring.

Now, four months later, after many lessons have been learned, I can honestly say I understand why the people at Camping World made that recommendation, and I agree with them.

So, let’s rewind to the beginning of our RV journey.

We were just starting to turn our lives completely upside down. Here’s how it all began:

Before the move-in phase, we had spent the previous couple of months selling or donating 85-90% of our possessions.

That period included selling our cars, returning a third car to Barrett’s dad, and hunting across multiple states for the best possible truck to tow our new home.

The purging of our “stuff” was an emotionally draining effort all on its own that I will be sure to blog about at another time.

(And yes! I used Marie Kondo before it was even cool to use Marie Kondo! Her method really is that good and life-changing! But I recommend reading and using her book rather than watching the show.)

The Move-In Phase

Next, we started moving all our remaining things into our Fifth Wheel at Camping World, including everything we would store near my family.

We had four days set aside for the move. We lived about 30 miles away, and since we only had one truck at this point, it would take a few back-and-forth trips to get everything there. The whole move took us four round trips in the pouring rain.

Another thing about the first two days is that we also had some required downtime for a few install appointments.

These appointments involved installing a gooseneck in the truck, installing the Anderson on the truck and the camper, and then getting a general overview of how to use everything from the kind people at Camping World.

Here’s the very first picture I took in the RV from my temporary workstation during those installs:

Last Two Days at Camping World

During our last two days at Camping World, though, things started getting messy…

• First, we got hit by another RV. (Yes, our home had been hit before it had even hit the road.)
• We took our last truckload of stuff to the camper to get there and realized we left the keys to the camper behind at the house.
• We failed to install a backup camera quickly. It was supposed to take minutes; it took us half a day.

On that last day, though, we were feeling pretty pumped! We were excited to start our journey. You can see the excitement here:

But our excitement on that day was brief because time had caught up with us, and before we knew it, it was dark. I sat with Barrett as he practiced driving the fifth wheel around the dark parking lot for about an hour or so. What followed was a moment I did not realize would be oh-so frequent in RV life.

Barrett wanted to take off. I thought it was way too late and dark for our first venture onto the road. Also, we were too tired; we had been working all day.

After some back-and-forth, I convinced him we should spend one more night there and then start our trip in the morning. I stepped out of the truck feeling super proud of our teamwork and of my abilities in persuasion.

But my ego was quickly checked as we walked into the camper to find out we had managed to run out of propane while it was 19 degrees outside. We had been running the propane since we were handed the keys, not once remembering it was a limited resource.

Little did I know that this moment would define much of our RV life experience initially.

The first few months have been full of little wins, followed by moments of being knocked right back down on the ground. We’ve been learning lessons and fixing problems as quickly as possible, over and over again, all while becoming better partners and campers along the way!

That night, I thought I was going to cry. I balled myself up in all our blankets and lay next to the electric fireplace space heater while Barrett went to buy anything that could keep us warm for the night. He also came back with chocolate and Taco Bell.

What a guy! Eventually, the RV got warmer, and we could fall asleep.

The next morning, we woke up and took off! We successfully got everything to our first stop near Barrett’s family.

Our First Stop

In the next couple of days, we planned to sort everything into where it belonged in the RV. Then, we would host a family potluck at the Jellystone RV Park we were at before heading down to the warmth of the south.

However, it didn’t take long for us to realize that everything we had to store was bulky and heavy. We decided we didn’t want to bring the weight of it all down south, just to store it in hurricane-central.

We were also anxious to have the room those boxes had taken up emptied as soon as possible, so we decided to find a storage unit in Maryland instead.

We were now six days into our RV journey, including the days at Camping World.

The next day entailed a whirlwind of moving boxes into storage and then hosting a Potluck.

The following morning, we were told of a severe snowstorm coming that evening. We decided to get the remainder of our items to storage immediately and start driving south in what we experienced as a torrential rainstorm, the first big blizzard of the season for the north.

We finally reached the south, and then the REAL fun began!

At this point, once we finally reached the sunny south, we were exhausted. But the real fun hadn’t even begun yet!

We still hadn’t even started to figure out much about the actual RV. The following are ALL fodder for new posts in the future, but we still needed to:

• Get an RV GPS so we don’t crash our home into any bridges or power lines.
• Flush out all of the factory winterization (this one actually ended up being NBD but seemed super important and scary to us at the time).
• Buy a water hose.
• Figure out how to dump our tanks.
• Buy sewer tank hoses.
• Buy second sewer tank hoses after the first one broke within a few weeks.
• Cut and sand the sides of our bed platform so we would stop scraping our kneecaps open.
• Figure out how to remove the stuff that fell behind the fireplace space heater.
• Get our internet set up.
• Get a weBoost signal booster so our cell signal is always boosted.
• Set up our cats with a comfortable living, travel, and litter box situation.
• Research and purchase a bike rack to get the bikes out of our living room.
• Build our desks so we have a separation between where we eat and where we work.
• Figure out how we get our mail to us.
• Realize our recliner was super uncomfortable. (We sold it on Facebook Marketplace and shopped for a new soft, fluffy couch.)
• Go Christmas shopping.
• Figure out where our license plates were for the truck and RV and if the delays meant whether or not we’d be grounded for a bit or free to travel on the road to our next stop.
• Spend time with family.
• Research and install a surge protector inside the RV to protect us in case of power issues at any campgrounds.
• Realize our fridge has an issue. (We searched everywhere for the proper fridge fuse. Finally, five stops later, we found the fuse and bought it in bulk. We then installed the new fuse.)
• Wonder if we should remove the glass shower doors in our bathroom so it would feel cozier. I walked in after a trip between Florida and Louisiana to find our shower doors had exploded into small glass pieces everywhere. Clean up the glass. Buy a curtain rod and curtain.
• Find a water filtration system that we could use to have drinking water.
• Fix a DEF Heater issue with our truck (which ended up being covered under the truck’s warranty; thank goodness!)
• Fix a Catalytic Converter issue with the truck (which ended up being covered under our extended warranty; thank goodness again!)

I’m sure you get the point by now. If we had taken Camping World’s advice, we could have slowly gone through the learning pains that all beginners must endure at a more casual pace while having the comfort of a brick-and-mortar home to return to in the evenings when the going got tough.

Instead, we only had our fifth wheel home. We were forced to figure out the answers to new questions at a rapid pace per day.

We were stressed! We kept trying and failing to get on any schedule or set any routines.

Needless to say, it was not the best of times. We ate out a lot. I got acne. Barrett got cold sores.

So, how are we doing now?

That said, I’m happy to say that we’ve finally moved beyond the “transitioning” phase of RV life. If we hadn’t made it this far, I’m pretty sure a brand-new fifth wheel would be listed on RV Trader right now!

While learning on the go was perhaps not the most intelligent way to start this journey, it strengthened our relationship as a whole and each of us individually.

We’ve both been tested in the areas of know-how and patience. Through trial and error, we’ve still learned how to be comfortable with this lifestyle. (Just a bit quicker and sloppier than recommended.)

Barrett has been more hands-on with maintenance than I’ve ever seen before. He used to be of the “call a mechanic” world. This lifestyle has introduced him to the “fix it yourself” world, which has been exciting to see.

Life is starting to look more and more like what we imagined, and we’re slowly learning what we need to survive happily in this lifestyle. It’s taken time, though. RV life is definitely NOT carefree, but its freedom is incredible, and I would still recommend it to everyone!