Times they are a changing...and so do our minds almost daily!!!

The house sold (no changing of our minds there) and we have been sorting and selling and deciding what to keep... hence comes the changes of mind!

We decided to sell our house and move to Ontario where we can buy acreage which is more affordable then here in BC. We want to build our Earthship and still be able to afford to travel in the winters. Since we would be living out of our Surveyor travel trailer for a couple years while we build the Earthship we were planning on selling almost everything we own; keeping only the bare minimums and sentimental items instead of paying to move them and then store them for a couple years.

We pondered the possibilities... and changed our minds on almost a daily basis and sometimes two and three times in the same day!

Since selling our businesses over a year ago we have been investing in rental properties in Ontario. Originally we planned on buying acreage right away to start building our Earthship but since we want a large acreage and the bank wants 50% down payment on land, we have decided to buy a rental which needs some work, fix it up to improve it's value and then look for land. Since we don't have typical jobs any more we will have the time to do this once or twice and be set to start the Earthship and continue to not have to work :)

With this change though we realized that selling off of our furniture was silly as now it would need to be replaced since we won't be living in the RV for 2 years while we build. So we bought a small trailer to load up the furniture that we wanted to keep. I say a small trailer because we needed to find a trailer that could be shipped since our truck is pulling our RV (we want the trailer to store tools etc on our land while we build and use it for maintenance on our Ontario rentals).

So we started to plot out what furniture we could take with us by mapping it out on our floor :)

The original quote for shipping the trailer full was reasonable but then the fees kept going up as we had to pay by pound...not such an economical choice after-all...and we already bought the trailer! So once again we put on our thinking caps...do we sell the trailer we just bought and go back to shipping things by pallets with our friend at Air Canada, pay by pound to ship the trailer or do we rent a truck and pull the trailer???

In the end we decided to rent a truck and pull the trailer. Yes we will be paying for gas in two trucks now to move but in the end we know roughly what the cost will be and have budgeted for it. It feels much safer then hoping we are guessing correctly at how much our possessions weigh (our bedroom suite is enormous). I have heard horror stories from people where their moving costs doubled or higher due to weight and we can't afford to take that chance!

Now we had one last decision to make...our hot tub! We and I mean the whole family loves our hot tub and we use it many times each week. We put it on craigslist to try to sell it but it was very expensive to buy even second hand when we bought it and selling it for basically nothing breaks our hearts! Since we going to be living in one of our rentals for a couple of years we have decided we should take it with us. As luck would have it, it is a couple inches too big to fit inside the rental truck! Still it is more economical to pay to ship it then it is to sell it for nothing and replace it in Ontario. So yeahhhhh we get to keep our hot tub!

So as the days disappear and we have less then a month before we leave BC things are finally solidifying and our decisions are starting to feel real! Some more sorting, selling and packing and March 30th will be here before we know it! If I am lucky... Ontario's winter will be over when we arrive...I'm already looking forward to travelling next winter and getting away from the dreaded cold winters in Ontario!

Pinterest plus RVing :)

I just read THIS post on Rick & Paulette's RV Travels about using

for RV'ing and I just had to share it! In between cleaning and sorting and preparing to sell our house I have been totally addicted to Pinterest. I how ever have only used it for craft items, recipes, earthship ideas, things for the home, natural living etc and never even thought of the RV possibilities.

How many countless blogs do I follow? How often do I loose a blog post that was very informative, or a great camping review, or a place you read about on a blog and want to go there next time you are in that area? I loose ideas all the time and Pinterest is a great way to save all those ideas and know how to easily find them again.

I highly recommend you go read Ricks post if you aren't familiar with Pinterest...but beware...pinning is addictive!

I quickly went and made new pinboards HERE and pinned all my campsite and boondocking reviews from our 4 month trip last summer and can see many more pinboards being added soon :)

Crossing our fingers

Our house didn't end up on MLS until last Wednesday and on Thursday we has 3 showings. Seven hours after the first showing we had an accepted offer!!! Now we cross our fingers that everything goes well with their financing and their subject removal so we can make this a done deal by February 6th. In the meantime we are left continuing to show the house for back up offers just in case...and crossing our fingers it could be so easy!

Here's our finished yellow door...I'm still not sure if I LOVE it but heck it's better then the blue.

You can click HERE if you'd like to go check out our listing and see our home. Any of you locals looking for furniture? Most everything you see in the pics will be sold.

So the sorting and selling continues...thank goodness for Craigslist as it sure makes selling thing easier :)

It's official...

Our house is officially on the market

Since Christmas we have been busy little leavers...

When we closed the store in September 2010 and sold the daycare we basically piled up everything in every nook and cranny in our house.

Spare bathroom:

Upstairs hallway

So in September 2011 after returning from our 4 month Maiden Voyage in our travel trailer, I stated unpacking and sorting and selling off all that stuff.

Remember when my living room looked like this

I am happy to say that by January we were able to move everything that was left into the garage and my living room now is back to normal again :)

And my hall even though the walls need a wash still is beginning to look like normal again.

After removing all the "stuff" from the spare bathroom, Ian tiled the floor. About 7 or 8 of the old tiles were all cracked and old and ugly looking so in a couple days we now have a beautiful new floor. It was on our to do list for a few years...funny how when we decide to sell we finally get around to actually doing the things we wanted to do for so long!

And the spare bathroom now looks like this

Even though we've had a cold streak here for the lower mainland BC we managed to get our front door paint this week finally. We took our inspiration for the front door colour from these Black Eyes Susan's in the fall against the freshly painted brown...the yellow was so pretty.

So yellow we went (One door at a time as it's snowy and cold right now so we had to remove the door and bring it inside to paint)...

To be honest I am not sure how I feel about the yellow now that it is painted...it's a bit brighter then expected. I'll try to get a daylight photo tomorrow and post in in a few days as I didn't take a picture when the door was finished.

So as you can see we've been busy...not just ignoring the blogs...just no time to sit down and play :) So we have a couple days before our listing actually shows up on MLS and then hopefully we will get some showings and have a quick sale! Until then...I'm off to wash walls!

Welcome 2012!

This year brings lots of changes for us! We take on living another Year of Choice and are making lots of big choices and changes!

First though we hope you all had a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! We had an amazing 2011 with our 4 1/2 month trip touring the US and Canada. We made many memories and are looking forward to making many more in 2012.

We started off the new year with a yummy dinner inspired by Gordon Ramsey. We enjoyed a wonderful roast turkey dinner with lemon, parsley and garlic, roasted potatoes with chili and tumeric, and brussel sprouts. For desert we had Strawberry Margarita shots. I found the recipe HERE and they were sooo good! You can't taste the Tequila however they were quite potent as I put the left over jello mix in a container and when you ate it alone it was strong! The sweetness from the strawberry made them so yummy and you couldn't taste the Tequila at all. We will definitely make these again in the future!

With 2012 here now we are all set to live another year of choice! We look forward to it. We haven't set resolutions as usually they get broken. Instead we have decided to live our choices. We are embracing 2012 with all of it's possibilities! We are open to change and to all the hard work to get there.

January 1st means we have less then 4 months to clean up this chapter of our lives so we can move onto the next chapter. For some the changing of the years means cleaning and organizing...for us it means thinning out and getting rid of the majority of our belonging so we can hit the road in our RV again for a few years. During this time we will look for land and then take a few years to build our Earthship ourselves (so excited to be one step closer to our Earthship dream)!

Each day we will have to decide what is important enough to keep and what can we live without. We will chose to keep those things around us that mean the most, and let go of all those things we collect throughout our lives that we really don't need... you know all that "stuff" that piles up here and there and before you know it you have a room full of "stuff". We'll purge, we'll sell, we'll give away, we'll donate...we'll chose the life we want to live and go for it! It's amazing how powerful making choices can be!

Why 4 months? We have friends in Toronto who are getting married in April and we are choosing to sell off everything to be at their wedding and not have to come back here to tie up loose ends. So we have 2 weeks to get the house ready to sell and listed and then hopefully sold in time to allow us to be ready to leave and make it to the wedding on time and not look back! Celebrating a wedding seems like a grand way to embrace our choices and begin our next journey in life as well.

So with that...we wish you a year of choice, we wish you love when you least expect it and we wish you much happiness in the year to come! Happy New Year!!! with LOVE from all of us :)

We'd like to give big welcome wishes to Michael and Dee of gonerving and to Heinzrvjourney who are just beginning their choice of life in an RV as well. Welcome and thanks for joining us even though we are parked at the moment :) Glad to have you along as we start this next chapter in our lives.

I'd like to thank you all for following us this past year and hope you enjoy reading about our coming choices this year as well. Things have been sporadic around here since we have been "home" but there are many more journey's to come and we'd love you all to join us!

Fall Fun at home in BC

Back home to reality and the selling off of stuff continues...I do hope to have my living room back for Christmas.

The rain has arrived and the evenings are cooling off so painting has slowed to a minimum...everything is basically painted except for the gutters and eaves troughs. We are looking into a couple quotes to replace them...if not they might not get painted until the spring as we have almost finished the front but the other 3 sides are still blue! The door will have to be painted too but should we do it a yellow or a red???

We have managed to get out and enjoy our beautiful province a bit...

We went to Richmond Nature Park and was thrilled to find these amazing Muscaria Mushrooms. I have searched for them every fall for years and have never been lucky enough to find them. This week I scored and knocked them off my wishlist of things I want to photograph someday!

We also went to the pumpkin patch and collected some pumpkins.

Yesterday we enjoyed a wonderful roast dinner here with family as Ian's mom arrived from Toronto this week for a visit and today of course we celebrated Halloween!

Hoping you all had a safe and Happy Halloween!!!

Happy Birthday Aayla and Happy Thanksgiving to all

Happy Birthday sweet Aayla!!!

We celebrated yesterday with a tea party with family and friends.

House painting is coming a long slowly but surely (the blue trim will disappear and become a dark brown, as will the gutters)

but now we are going to be taking a bit of a break. Today we will have a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner with family and then Ian and I are heading to Jamaica for a week of rest and relaxation all by ourselves!

So Happy Thanksgiving everyone and we'll be back in a week or so :)

House Prep...AKA getting it ready to sell

Welcome wishes going out to The Solla-Mates of Happily Hitched: An RV Blog. Thanks for joining us as we begin this next journey :)

In order to sell our home in the new year we not only are selling off all our "stuff" left over from daycare and from the store we closed last fall, but we are finally painting our house which we have wanted to paint since we bought it in 2007. We have always hated the colours. (It's funny how when you decide to sell your home you find the motivation to deal with the issues you haven't liked about it for others to enjoy instead of you yourselves!)

While away this summer both of our neighbours painted their houses so we called to get quotes to paint ours. One company wanted close to $5000.00 and the other wanted $7800.00!!!

We decided to try our hand at painting it ourselves so now with our own time and energy and $1200.00 worth of paint and painting supplies we have begun!

In between our West Coast rain showers we have been pressure washing 4 years or more of dust and dirt off of that horrible grey and blue paint which makes the colours stand out even more!

And masking off windows and eaves and beginning the painting process.

We are gradually working our way around the house in one LoooOOOoooog slow process but little bit by little bit the house is being transformed. We have most of the main colour done, just trim and eaves troughs to do.

So we have put sunshine on order but the 5 day forcast looks like this :

Short Term ForecastUpdated: Fri, Sep 30, 2011, 21:00 PDT

	Friday OvernightOvernight: 12:00 AM - 5:59 AM	Saturday MorningMorning: 6:00 AM - 11:59 AM	Saturday AfternoonAfternoon: 12:00 PM - 5:59 PM	Saturday EveningEvening: 6:00 PM - 11:59 PM	Saturday OvernightOvernight: 12:00 AM - 5:59 AM
	Mainly cloudy	Cloudy	Cloudy with showers	Light rain	Cloudy with showers
Temp.	11°C	11°C	15°C	12°C	11°C
Wind	calm	SE 5km/h	SE 5km/h	SE 5km/h	SE 10km/h
Relative Humidity	88%	87%	88%	94%	94%
P.O.P.	30%	30%	40%	70%	40%
Rain	-	-	less than 1mm	1-3mm	close to 1mm

So it doesn't look like much painting is going to get done any time too soon :(

what have we been up to?

It is hard to believe that we have been home for almost 3 weeks now and this is the first I have sat down to update the blog!

Arriving at home after traveling for over 4 months and over 29,000km's was bitter sweet. The last days before arriving I was not excited at all. Our maiden voyage was coming to an end :(  Boo hoo I just wanted to cry!

However our trip this summer has solidified a couple things for us.

1. Our dream to build an Earthship... is destined to be more then a dream. You can read my post HERE about our time we spent in Taos at the Earthship community. We have been dreaming of building an Earthship for a couple of years but after spending time in an actual Earthship during our trip we now know for positively sure that we WILL build one. We just have to finalize if it will be built in BC or Ontario.

2. Our desire to travel...is not over. We spent just over 4 months on the road and LOVED it so much we decided before even returning home that we couldn't go back to life as we know it. We want to travel more and see more of what this world has to offer. So few of us are able to live our dreams when we are young; I feel so very fortunate that our business and hardwork creating them enables us to live our dreams now.

Building an Earthship also helps our travel goals as once built we will be able to travel in the winters and afford to leave a "home" behind while living on the road for 6 months of the year. Our Earthship home will take care of it'self and we won't have all those hydro and gas bills anymore to worry about and get the best of both worlds :)


Yes it is good to return home to something solid but home is really where you "make" it and our trailer while travelling was our home while on the road and we can't wait to live in it more permanently. We learned to adapt to living in a 35 foot trailer and didn't miss our 3600 sq ft house at all. After returning home and getting back into the swing of "normal" living there was a brief moment of "oh do I really want to sell our home?" but that lasted all of 1 day.

So now the selling begins...and in my living room which once looked like this

Our living room a couple years ago when we were considering selling
and then decided not to so the picture shows mls in corner :)

Now is full of all my supplies and equipment left over from one of our centres we closed a couple years ago and all my theme boxes I have been collecting and adding to for the last 22 years in the childcare field and looks more like this

And this doesn't even show everything...our foyer is full too!

SooOOooo as you can see I have been busy this past few weeks since we've returned home and have neglected this blog. I do plan on writing posts here to keep semi up to date on how the sale of all our stuff is going, how fixing up the house to sell is going, our decision where we want to buy land for the Earthship, then of course it will continue on with life in our RV for the next 3 or so years as we gradually build our Earthship, and then as we travel in our RV every winter after our Earthship is built...so as you can see we have a few loose ends to take care of before our next journey but we hope you stick around for the ride!

Some humour for today :)

Yesterday we went to IKEA to get some bedrails for the bunk beds and while there I found the perfect little garbage can for the bathroom in the trailer. It will fit nicely in the corner.

It came complete with directions:
Put lid on bottom bin and you are finished.

That's pretty silly but not the funny part!

I couldn't help but share them as the two diagrams at the top are what made me laugh.

1) Confused?

2) Call IKEA and they will explain it!

Ha Ha I think they could have saved the trees on these directions! Hopefully they will make you smile too :)

WELCOME WISHES going out to Levonne of A Camphosts Meanderings: An RV Adventure. She has some amazing photography!!!

What do you do with all the DVD's?

I have to admit...our children love their DVD's and they have way more then probably necessary. With Meadow I always limited her TV as a child and I never imagined that I would be any different with Sierra and Aayla but they get to watch a lot of movies and TV's. My husband and I have our own favourite shows so it makes sense they would have theirs too and Friday night Family Movie nights just wouldn't be the same without a movie to go along with the popcorn...    :)

With our upcoming departure approaching very quickly I decided we needed to find a way to make their movie collection more compact.

I took this stack of DVD's

and placed them all in a large DVD/CD travel case.

In order to protect the DVD's from little fingers I then took out all the cover pages from each DVD case, cut them in half and added them all into a binder. It was a tiny bit time consuming but will save us from having to replace scratched DVD's on the trip and well worth the time invested. They are also much more compact now for the trailer and there is less clutter in the house with all of the cases as well. A win win situation all around.

Even if you don't have kids, you most likely have some movies or CD's and if you are short on space this might work for you to!

Welcome to these recent followers:
Michelle of M&M's Ranch
and lucky #13 who was none other then my MOM! She doesn't have a blog or a profile to send you to but I am glad she is going to join us on our journey. Love you mom!