Our New Piece Of Paradise Called Home

This picture really sums up the feeling of our new place to park.
As well as this one :)

Any way I will stop teasing you and share some photos :)

These are our neighbors :) There is a family in the bus right up the end, that is owned by the people living in it. Then the orange/yellow one and the blue & white one are owned by the owner of the property and he rents them out.

 Miss Personality discovered a swing in the tree, and decided to try it out :)

 Miss Personality is showing me the hens. Little did we know, that a few days later there would also be some cute little chicks to hatch.
They actually belong to another family who live in a house on this property we are on.

Sorry about all the shadows, it was a bit of an overcast morning.

But this is the fruit orchid that we are free to help ourselves to the fruit.

Can't wait for summer :)

 The fun job of getting our bus into our spot. Thank goodness for grandad's help :)

 The challenge of getting the bus backed through this tight spot, without breaking anything.

 Lots of stopping and starting, and turning, and backwards and forwards to try and get it to fit.

 Everyone hold suck in your tummy :)

Finally made it with out breaking anything, YAY!

 Bus all parked up where it is suppose to be.
Sun came out to welcome us to our new spot :)

 We are allowed to use any firewood from the chopped down trees around the place.
Our bus doesn't have a fireplace, but it will come in handy for when we get around to making a bbq or fire pit of some sort for toasting marshmallows on :)

I know it doesn't look like much, but it nice to have a piece of land we can do what we want with.

Landlord is going to build us a little shed/ sleepout for storage and a deck off it.

Then we have plans of a vegetable garden and some outside furniture, that I plan to make our of wooden pallets.

Never done that before, so that should be some learning for me :)

Will share more photos later as things change.

But totally happy with our new piece of paradise.

Oh and Miss Personality has made friends with a family that live over the fence from us.

Guess what, they are home schooled too.

They are a family of 7 children, so Miss Personality won't be at a loss for play friends.

TO BE CONTINUED.................

We Are Moving :)

The motor camp where we have been staying for the past 12 weeks is just wonderful.
Aside from the fact that it is family orientated, one of the other things we have been enjoying is the fact that it is winter and there are not many people around.
I should actually do a blog post just on the motor camp, because if you are ever in the area, it is wonderful place to stay :)
Any way, we don't want to be here in the summer when it is super busy, and our whole idea of living in a bus has to be, finding some land we can park up on for a while and make it our home.

We put an advertisement in the local paper and got 2 phone calls.
The second one was the perfect place for us.
We went and had a look at it on the weekend and fell in love with the feel of it straight away.

Now it's not as flash and new as the motor camp, it has a lovely rustic homely vibe to it.
This lovely man had a few acres and has turned that back part of it into a place that people can park there buses up, for as long or as short of time as they like.
There is room for 4 buses and you get a fenced section to do what you like with (with in reason of course).
We can be connected to power, water, and have a place to dump waste.
He is setting up a cubical, that will have a regular toilet, shower and washing machine to use.
In our section he will be building a little shed with a deck for each bus and we can plant our own vege garden if we like.
We also have access to a fruit orchid with lots of different fruit trees.

Now that we have found this place, we can't wait to move and settle in.
But it won't be happening for another month yet.
Sorry I can't share photos yet, but trust me, once we have moved and we are all settled in.
There will be not stopping me.
So watch this space, and in a months time you will get to see our new place to park and call home for a while :)

Oh and I will do a blog post on the motor camp we have been staying at too.

Questions? Anyone?

Lately we have had a couple of questions, in regards to our new way of living.
It got me thinking that some other people may have questions too.
So I thought I would write about the ones that have been asked so far, and a couple of others that I can think of.
Please if you have any questions, I would love to hear from you.

These are a couple of questions we have been asked :)

1) How do you deal with living in such close confinement, especially during the crappy weather of winter?
I found this questions interesting and a bit hard to answer.
I guess it is the first thing you think about when you go from a 2/3/4 bedroom house to a bus.
When we chose our bus, we really wanted one with a bit of personal space, so that if we all just wanted to chill out on our own, we could.
There are not a lot of campervan, motor homes, fifth wheelers, house buses, that cater for families.
Which is a bit sad in my opinion.
It would put off a lot of families from giving this kind of thing a go, even if it was just for a holiday.
Any way, at the back of the bus is mum & dad's bedroom, we have a proper wooden door, with a lock on it, if needed.

That's our area behind the door.
We have a hanging organiser for putting anything and everything into.
Then where those pink curtains are, that is actually bunks with 2 beds on each side.
Since we only need to really use 2 beds (lower ones where the curtains are), the top 2 are used for storage.
I put curtains on the lower 2, so that the kids could have their own private space to retreat to when they want too.
Miss Personality loves snuggling into her bed and watching a dvd on the portable dvd player when she just wants to veg out.
Miss Blondini (14), loves hiding out in her little private space as well, so she can do what ever it is she does on her cellphone at night.

Then there is another door, that can be shut to seperate the bedrooms from the living part of the bus (kitchen/ dining/ lounge area).

2) Why would you pay the same amount as what you would to rent a house, but chose to live in a bus?
We didn't have the cash to buy our bus outright, so we found an opportunity to rent to own.
So at present it works out the same (roughly) as what we would pay to rent a fully furnished house.
But to us, we will own this at the end of 2 years.
If we rented a house we wouldn't own it at the end of renting it.
We look forward to the day when we do own our bus and have less money to pay out each week.
That is our goal, well one of many goals for what we want to achieve in the next 10 years.
But it's not just that, we have embraced the opportunity to live a simplistic life.
Does not mean we go with out, all though sometimes having restrictions on internet can feel that way.
But there is more to life than endless supply of internet, power, and water that you don't have worry about how much you have, when you need to full up, or how you will empty toilet tank if the pump doesn't work,lol (been there, done that).
We are learning so much about ourselves and that we don't need a lot to be happy :)

Some questions I thought you might like answered :)
1) What do you use to cook?

Our kitchen looks like any body else s, just smaller :)
Gas stove to cook in, which is run by a gas bottle that we fill up every 2 weeks.
Everything that we need to eat off or cook with fits into the drawers in our kitchen :)

2) Do you have a television?
We haven't watched regular television, since everything went digital in New Zealand.
When we lived in a house, we just paid for extra internet and watched everything online.
Now we have a television, but we chose to use it just for watching dvd's.
The local library has become very useful for this, as you can rent a dvd for a week for fairly cheap.

3) What do you use for internet?
At present mobile internet is pretty expensive in New Zealand.
So we chose to pay for a little bit extra on our mobile phones and use them as hot spots.
Telecom also has this awesome deal, that if you are near one of there 700 hotspots in New Zealand, you can access 1GB of free data every day. So we certainly make the most of this option when we can.

Any way that's all I can think off for now.
But if you have any other questions of curiosity about our bus life, I would really love to hear from you :)