Truckdwelling

I’ve always thought I was the sort of person who really sunk their roots into a place. Not a light-travelling, minimalist or temporary sort of girl. Yet I’m finding myself surprisingly at home in temporary and mobile structures this year. I wonder what that says about me, if the places you live in shape who you are?

First we were in the big canvas tent. Then we moved to a little shack, while I treated the tent for mould. And when I didn’t get that completed before winter, and the shack was no longer available, we moved into two housetrucks.

They had been vacant for some time, storing surplus and spiders. Their respective owners cleared out the stuff stored inside to other locations, and my son and I gave them a good scrubbing.

I had my soapmaking gear stored in the hayshed in plastic tubs, but this wasn’t easy to access and they were getting dusty. So I set up one housetruck as a soapmaking studio. First I spread out all the ingredients and containers inside the shack, and sorted the tubs out so I could find things more easily. I did set aside a tub of things to get rid of, too!

Then I moved it into Delilah.

Delilah has been many things in her life, including a homebase for forest protestors to save native forests from logging in the nineties. She’s enjoying housing my fragrant concoctions now.

I find it a relaxing space to create my natural bodycare products, make up handwritten labels, and assemble my orders.

After months of tenting, it was good to have a solid wall in the shack to stick my son’s drawings on. The housetrucks have some small wall spaces, but I have to choose my very favourite pictures to display so it doesn’t look cluttered.

The other housetruck became our bedroom and living space. We even have two kitchens now, which is luxurious after living in the tent all summer. This is the housetruck that we currently live in, before I had moved our stuff in.

I have to leave the gas disconnected however, because Mr Seven finds the easy ignition knobs too fascinating to leave alone. My clothes hang right next to the stovetop, so it’s absolutely off-limits to him, but words alone are not enough of a deterrent! I have a blog post coming about raising boys!

It’s become a cosy space. It’s much more colourful with my things in it! My son’s toys and books are stored in one half of the kitchen cabinets. There is also storage underneath the sofa.

It’s not heated, but we have warm rugs and hot waterbottles and we do just fine. I keep flowers and candles on the bench.

We still use the common space building for most of our meals, laundry and bathroom. We do have a bar fridge in our living housetruck but I haven’t plugged it in, as it’s not needed.

It’s been interesting setting up these little dwellings over and over, with the core common space unchanged. What do I want to see every day? What’s important to me? What do I use? I still have some boxes packed away. I have more letting go to do yet!

So this is where we hang out these days. We’ll only be here for one more week, then we’re taking a housesit in town for a few months. That means temporarily leaving the community, and shifting from the country to townlife. Thus the next adventure begins!