I Just Packed Up My Life and Moved to Idaho
The realities of living tiny on 10 distressed acres in the country are starting to set in.
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In December I wrote about wanting to change my life.
In mid-March my partner and I started talking about making a drastic change to make that happen — moving to the property I grew up on in north Idaho, ten acres of land in a distressed state with a crumbling double wide mobile home that needs demolition, an old garage/shop, and a well that hasn’t worked properly in a few years.
Nobody’s lived on the property in more than a decade. Big country McMansions have popped up all around it, but it’s just been sitting here, waiting for the land to win.
And it’s been winning.
The first week of April we found out that our rent was going up substantially due to our private landlord hiring a property management company that really doesn’t like tenants on month-to-month leases, even tenants who have been living in the duplex for three years.
We started talking about it a bit more seriously. We made a trip to the property to see if we could get the well going.
On April 6th we found a 33’ camper trailer that had been mostly gutted but was dry and sound and pretty much just right for our purposes — and that we could buy in cash. We moved it to the property on April 8th.
Three weeks later was our last full day in our old home.
In just three weeks we packed up our 1100 square foot duplex in Vancouver, Washington, and moved it into a 220 square foot camper and a drafty garage.
Today is our second full day in Idaho.
I feel a little insane.
I Guess You Can Go Home Again
My decision to take on this project — fixing a well, demolishing the house I grew up in, taking back the land from poorly channeled water runoff and overgrown everything — was relatively impulsive, like many things in my life tend to be.
