Delivery Day! The Waiting Is Over, And We Welcome Our New Home!

Actual delivery date; June 4, 2014

It's hard to put into words the level of excitement and anticipation that happens with the delivery of a new RV that has been custom ordered and is the symbol of a whole new and exciting chapter in your life. It's not just a beautiful new coach. It's not just a new house.  It's not just "moving". It's not just taking a trip. It's sort of all of that rolled into one, and with the multiplied excitement of each of those things added on! Gosh we were happy! Not since the birth of our children have we been this ecstatic!

It was a long 12 week wait, and we were busy the whole time.  There was SO much to do; selling belongings, donating, and taking things to the trash.  The painful process of getting rid of nearly everything we owned because we knew that we would not have the capacity to haul it along with us.  There were preparations to make as to where we would be parking our new fiver, and what those arrangements would look like.  Of course there was all of the financial planning as well.  I don't think that is ever fun, but a necessary part of being realistic about what your next chapter in life is going to look like.  It's a brave thing, actually: You have to look cold reality unblinkingly in the face, and be prepared to deal with whatever comes back to you.  We did it.

There She Is! Our First View Of Her!

There are other things too. I had to deal with a lot of guilt.  I think it's from my upbringing, but when something good happens to me, I feel guilty.  I felt guilty about uprooting the only home my children had ever known, the place they had grown up, swung in tire swings from huge trees, played in the grass, swam in our pool, had parties, cried over boyfriends, the whole gamut.  Still, the voice of reason (and Todd) kept telling me that this was the PAST and moving into another future doesn't change the past. It felt like I was deserting my family.  I wasn't, it just felt that way.  Thankfully, our children were always very supportive and understanding of this extremely unconventional and uncommon thing we were doing: Moving into an RV as our HOME.

The long period of waiting (about 3 months) gave us plenty of time to be exceedingly ready when we got the call that our new coach had arrived.  We had our money all ready and our insurance.  We had our truck fitted with a new, very heavy duty 5th wheel hitch.  We had purchased new items that we needed for the inside to help ease the transition, things like lightweight Corel dishes, and plastic drinking glasses and things like that.  I had packed up pretty much all of the kitchen stuff I wanted to keep and hoped would fit well in the 5th wheel.  I knew that it would be an ongoing thing to decide on a new way of doing meal preparation.  Almost up until the very end, I was preparing meals for at least 4 of us, and often many more (we have 4 children, all with spouses, so dinner can get big quite quickly.)  All that was left was to DO IT.

Some of our kids went along too! Our first looks at our new "home"!

We drove down to the RV dealership to take delivery.  I have to congratulate myself, because I had thought of everything.  What often takes all day, only took us about 2 hours to finish.  Before we knew it, we were hitching up our new trailer and with one last desperate catching of our breath, threw the truck in "drive" and headed out.  It was a prophetic leap into the future of the unknown, and the scary and the exciting.  Rarely in life do we get to experience this outside of a theme park!


Again, as luck would have it, the ride home was easy and uneventful.  We had towed a large 5th wheel before in years past, and this ride was smoother than any we had ever done before due to the new powerful truck we had and the much better suspension and air-ride hitch pin on the trailer.  We got her home ok.  First we stopped for a quick photo of our maiden voyage at the local truck stop service station near our home.  We knew that everyone would want a good picture of our new rig, so we did that.

Isn't She Lovely?

We drug the heavy trailer 800 feet up to our home and got it parked in our RV spot (we had a 50 amp post installed on our RV pad, so we are lucky there.)  Then we heaved a huge sigh of relief.  It was like running a marathon.  We were both emotionally exhausted and couldn't wait to just GO TO BED! But no, that's not what we did.

All of the carefully packed crates of stuff were loaded out to the trailer.  Putting things away was interesting.  First of all, it was a stark reminder that the cabinets and drawers, however "residential like" in an RV, are NOT "residential like". They are narrow, shallow, and short.  I swallowed my fear as I tried to think of a rational place to put my crock pot.  Well, the living room cabinet I guess.  Pretty soon we were just stuffing things everywhere.  I thought: THERE IS NO WAY I am going to be able to find anything.  Once again, I was right about that too!

A Simple Silverware Caddy

Still, there were many things that I planned right and I am still using them today.  For example, I decided to use a silverware caddy on our buffet table rather than sacrifice a whole drawer to store silverware.  That turned out to be a great decision.  It holds napkins, silverware, steak knives, salt and pepper, and oil and vinegar for salads.  Sitting down for a meal is easy.  I usually just add plates and food!  There are so many things you can do to make your living space bigger and more efficient, and I will go into a lot of those here on this blog.

So, with delivery in the books, it was time to get moved into the 5th wheel, our new "home" and then move to IT'S new "home".  How soon would it "feel" like "home"?  Would we get everything in?  Stay tuned dear readers!  I will reveal all!