Life before living on a school bus looked completely different for us, and we needed to make a big change! Basically we needed to downsize our life! We were living in a 5000 sq ft house with Gabriel working multiple jobs, sometimes working until the early hours of the morning building business for other people. When we had a large house, we felt the need to fill that house with “stuff” and once we did that, I found myself spending my days cleaning and organizing all the stuff we had! I even had an entire day (Friday) devoted to cleaning the whole house. When the kids got home from school we would all separate and go into different rooms of the house. Gabriel and I were both feeling like we were just running on the hamster wheel of life, doing everything everyone else told us would be ‘best’, keeping up with the life we had built as best as we could. We had become really disconnected in our marriage and knew that if we weren’t happy as a couple there was no way that we could grow a healthy and happy family. So we quickly realized we needed to change everything about our life. See the tour of our house below...can you believe we had that much space?!

One day I saw a YouTube video of Expedition Happinesson Facebook and instantly knew we would rock the tiny house on wheels lifestyle. Gabriel was a little skeptical but we were both knew that we were supposed to head to California so thought it would be the perfect way to reconnect as a family and head that way! Before we made such a huge decision, we had a family meeting where we went over the pros and cons of living in the bus versus renting a ‘normal’ house. We told the kids they would have less clothes and toys but they would gain traveling and seeing the country. They were all on board with making the decision to move onto the school bus and hit the road!

The downsizing process was quite emotional for us, I found that most of the difficulty was the sentimental things that we would miss. We separated each room into what we could give away, sell or bring with us, it took quite a few times going through our things to minimize the things that we needed to bring and it just came down to the things that we really loved! We had an estate sale of most of the things that we wanted to get rid of and each family had a ‘memory box’ that they could fill with things that were important to them and we kept it in a small storage unit. We downsized everyone's wardrobe to a ‘capsule’ wardrobe of a limited number of items and when we moved onto the bus we realized that there was actually much more room for clothes than I had thought, we had plenty of room! Getting settled into the bus was easy and we really enjoyed all the time we saved not having to worry about cleaning or our “stuff”, I think we were made for the minimalist lifestyle!

Here is (one of) our living rooms (we had two!!) and our house now...everyone loves a good before and after!!

People think that we must be so brave to live in such a small space with 4 children but we actually feel so blessed to live in this space. It has taught us so much about who we are and what is important to us as a family. The benefit of getting rid of all the other distractions in our life and figuring out how we want to live has any uncomfortableness that we feel from the small sacrifices we’ve made. If I could give any advice to someone wanting to switch up their life completely I would just tell them to start! Do not waste time worrying about what other people will think or if everything is perfectly planned. We get so many emails from people who are miserable with their current life and want to do something similar and there is always a BUT (well paying job they can't leave, family that disagrees etc) if you are unhappy with where you are at you are only ONE decision away from changing everything and you will feel so much freedom when you start living your life the way YOU feel called to live it! Sometimes starting can just mean minimizing what you already have, or not living beyond your means...taking any step in that direction will get your momentum going, you don't have to make a sudden big leap like we did! Trusting in your intuition and what you feel is the best thing for your family will always pay off! Living this way has given us an understanding and appreciation that everyone lives differently. And what works for one family may not work for everyone. We are focused on making the best possible choices that we can for our family in the future and we believe that everyone else should be free to do the same!