Homes being built today are considerably larger than homes built just a few decades ago. In fact, homes are on average 1,000 square feet larger today than they were in the 1970s. These homes are big and expensive, and more people are shying away from that.
And for good reason! It’s hard to manage a huge home, the utility bills are enormous, and there’s a tendency to just fill it with stuff you don’t actually need. And who needs that?
Enter Andrew and Amber, a couple from New Zealand who renovated an old RV Bus into a sleek, beautiful mobile tiny home.
A lot of the time when we cover stories like these, the individual or couple or family will talk about how sick of a big home they were and they just wanted to downsize. But that’s not the case for these two. In fact, their decision was birthed from cataclysm.
In February of 2011, a 6.3 magnitude earthquake struck the city of Christchurch. At the time, Amber and Andrew lived 25 floors above the ground in a building that was close to the epicenter. It was severely damaged, and their reaction to the trauma of the experience was to live a little closer to the ground, and a little more simply.
“We were wasting our lives going to work everyday, putting our kids in daycare all just to have a nicer car, comfier couch, bigger TV and flashier house. So, we have decided we want out. We want out of the prescribed life, we want to be free. Free to spend as many of the hours we have left together. Watching our kids grow up, having amazing experiences and truly living.”
The bus is fully solar-powered and has a 250 liter fresh water supply. It’s equipped with a flushing toilet tank and a greywater system that allows them to reuse non-drinkable water in their toilet. The renovations cost a total of $15,000 which they mostly did themselves. They did not install the gas fittings.
