We decided a long time ago that we wouldn’t have a lot of “stuff” once we move into the trailer.  We had a few garage sales the last few years and really pared down our stuff.  Just before we moved into the trailer full-time we had a moving sale and everything that wasn’t going to be in the trailer with us got sold.

Once we sorted through our belongings, clothes, dishes, books, etc., and stacked it all up in the corner while we had the moving sale I was worried that it wouldn’t all fit into the trailer.  It was a pretty big stack!  But, it all fit and we even have extra room!  The difficulty we face at this point (still early days as a fulltime RV-er) is finding where we put certain items.  Especially Jeff since I’m the one that packed the trailer.

We’re trying to live by the motto “A place for everything and everything in it’s place”, but we’re not quite there yet.  Mostly we’re having to search cupboards and storage areas to find something we need that we’re sure we have somewhere, but we don’t know where it is.

The trailer came equipped with a TV mounted on the wall but we wanted to have our larger TV.  Jeff very carefully measured the space and announced that our larger TV would fit…just barely!  So, while we were in Three RIvers we bought a kit for mounting a TV to the wall and he dis-mounted the smaller TV and mounted our larger one.  Not that large – a 32″ but bigger than the 24″ that came with the trailer!

So now we have a larger TV, but where’s the remote?  I know I didn’t sell it, I would have put it with the other items to take with us into the trailer.  We looked and looked and looked again!  One day we spent two hours and went through every nook and cranny in the trailer (ha! It took only 2 hours!).  Not anywhere!  Since we need that remote to do a lot of the functions on this TV, we ordered a new one and figured we’d have to wait a few weeks for it to get shipped to Tx and then forwarded to us.

The very next day Jeff was going through the bag that contains the instructions manuals for all the devices in the trailer (stove, furnace, water heater, awning…there’s a lot of devices in here!) and lo-and-behold out fell the remote!  Dang, I’ve been into that bag over a dozen times and never felt around in the bottom of it.

Well, all’s well that ends well.  It’s a good lesson that in a small space where things must be stowed for travel, you need to REMEMBER where things  should be stored and make sure they always get put back in that exact space.  It also helps to store similar items in a similar place.  Our electronics get stored in the same place, our extra batteries are all in the same drawer.  Important papers are stored in one place, and papers we reference a lot (like those instructions for the devices of the trailer) get stored in an easy to reach place.  It’s also important to store things you use a lot in handy places to get at, while things we don’t use very much (like our winter coats while it’s in the 80s and above)  can be stored under the bed.

Living in a small space also means we have to be careful to not fill it up with new “stuff”.  We have another rule we’re trying to live by “if one thing comes in, one thing has to go out”.