Plan B... living in the camper is out, living in a cabin is in (tinyhouse living)

The logistics of camper living was really on our minds, and we couldn't realistically imagine living in our camper for a month, much less a year. Five people, all adult-sized, a cat who had to live indoors (he's a cripple), two dogs that had never lived outdoors, we might be able to manage a week before we were ready to kill each other. The upside of the camper is that it is all-in-one, had heat and air, a kitchen, a TV, some storage space, and a bathroom, all we had to do was hook it to electric and septic...the downside...it was CRAMPED!

Two bedrooms, one a master that you could barely get around the bed, the other had three bunks and a little table. Shannon would have no privacy, and a teenaged girl needed her privacy, teen boys, too. The kitchen would never hold all the pots and pans I'd need for cooking, much less ingredients. And the bathroom was a foregone conclusion, it'd never work. Plus we'd have to skirt it to keep the pipes from freezing in the winter.

Plan B is now in the works...a new neighbor had sold her motor home and purchased a small storage shed that she'd run electric to and plumbed. It was cute, but tiny. It wouldn't work for our sized family, but something LIKE it might work. Jason and I took a drive and found a storage shed display and looked at the biggest one they had. It might work. We went home and did some drawings (Jason is very good at space utilization and using CAD programs). We sat the kids down and had a talk. This wouldn't be permanent, but it was something they needed to realize we had to do. The economy wasn't getting any better, budgets needed to be cut, sacrifices made, and some day we'd have a piece of land with a house we'd built with our own hands, and it would be OURS. The kids would be leaving home soon and we had to consider what we'd do when we were emptynesters, too.

Plan B would work...we'd live in a storage shed (cabin) while we built our house. We hoped it'd only be a year and that we wouldn't want to kill each other in the meantime. We ordered our cabin to our specifications, and continued work on the lot while we waited for our cabin to be delivered.

Jason took the tractor and leveled the building site and had a load of gravel delivered for the driveway. We rented a trencher and found the old septic hookup (a mobile home had sat on this lot before, the people had lost the land and mobile when the dad lost his job). We trenched the water and septic lines, and the electric lines. Water and septic and electric were now run to the house site.