Move in week!

When putting our house on the market on March, 2022 things happened fast. We had been making some renovations to our home with the plan of listing later on, however, we took the advice of our agent and listed before all the work was completely finished. A few days later, we accepted an offer but thankfully had written into the contract that we would be staying till the kids were done with school in July. This thankfully gave us time to plan a bit leading up to our move.

While ideally you would set up your RV before moving out from your home (and only send to storage what didn't fit), we knew this wouldn't be the case for us. We had a few things to take care of before getting started with our adventure and wouldn't have the time to research RVs, much less purchase one before July. We thought we'd start in the fall (which looking back now was optimistic! lol) so packing our house for storage would mean that we'd have to label the items we'd want for the RV so that we could later have those shipped to us once we were ready. Talk about complicating things!

Visiting an RV show gave us a general idea of how much storage we'd have in our RV. However, we visited the RV show in February and didn't start packing till May so our memory was fuzzy at this point. Now here is where social media comes super helpful. Both Paul and I had been following other full-time RV'ers on Instagram in order to learn from their experiences. When it was time to pack and we had any doubts we reached out to a few of these... well mostly one - shoutout to @chaoskidsandharmony - to help us figure things out.

We packed. Crossed our fingers that things would fit and that movers would ship to us what we needed when the time came. Fast forward to January 26th, 2023. We landed in Fort Lauderdale. Drove south to Miami to get our brand new truck and then north (with one stop at IKEA for the one project we wanted to undertake immediately - more on that later!) to Fort Pierce, which was where we had the RV stored. The following day we drove to get the RV in order to take it to our VRBO only to realize we didn't have the keys. When we had the RV delivered to the storage facility in November we asked them to ship our keys to the GMC dealer where we purchased the truck. While it crossed both our minds when at the dealer, we forgot to ask. But the keys weren't in the truck and when calling them, they confirmed they never received them. When calling the RV dealership to see what had happened we realized they sent the keys to our old house. Mind you, we asked them to delete this address when signing the papers in person! So we couldn't get into our new RV and couldn't tow it to our VRBO. A bit of an inconvenience.

Thankfully while we purchased our RV in Orlando, our contact at La Mesa in Fort Pierce was super helpful and connected us to their service person who lent us a master key while we had a new set shipped to us. The movers arrived on Saturday and boy did we feel (ok, maybe mostly me) overwhelmed. So many boxes. So many things! How on earth would everything fit?! (Video below was taken while in the midst of these feelings.) Then, as we got to the last few boxes we realized a couple of the boxes being unloaded from the truck weren't marked for the RV and a few that were in the inventory were missing. What we feared... had happened. This was on a Saturday so we'd have to wait till Monday to figure this out with the moving company.

Once the movers left, we headed over to the RV storage to tow our new home for the first time. Following other RVers advise, I previously created arrival and departure checklists - you can look up samples on line. So following these steps we hitched the RV and nervously (but also full of excitement) got going. We did a few laps around the storage facility before heading out on the road but as I anticipated, Paul did great and except for a few broken plants at the entrance of our VRBO, our first tow was a success!

With our RV and (most of) our things finally at the same location, our move could finally get started. Leading up to Monday we realized that the best solution to getting the items missing from storage was for us to get them ourselves. We also had to break in the truck, so a few days later Paul made the trip back south to storage, while in the mean time, the kids and I worked through the boxes.... unpacking and placing things directly in the RV. The more boxes we unpacked, the better I felt about storage. It's truly incredible how much can fit into an RV. We were able to nicely fit every single item into our new fifth wheel. All our kitchen appliances (blender, Nespresso machine, toaster, toaster oven), all the kids toys (which I was certain would be too many to take with us), Paul's tools (leaf blower, drills, saws, etc), all our clothes and shoes (I might have over packed a bit.. but it's all here!).... it all fit and we even have a few empty spaces. Phew! To say we were exhausted once we were done is an understatement! It was an intense week with a few challenges but we made it work and on February 5th we hit the road running!