8-31-09 – More BOL updates

Our 1989 Nomad Fifth Wheel

Inside of the trailer, just to give you an idea...

So now what, we talked about the land, the clearing and the driveways. We looked at the Grid-no-Grid decisions and even the, snivel-snivel, WELL drilling debacle. What do you think comes next??? That’s right, decisions, decisions - do we keep staying on the property in the “Fabulous Fifth Wheel”? Yep, that’s right, I had gone down to the RV dealer and bought MY family the finest Fifth Wheel they had… You jealous yet? “Prepper just throwing his money around” bragging the whole time… Well, lets come back to reality, I never went to the RV dealer to buy any trailers. We did have a fifth wheel we were using to stay in. Fabulous, “HARDLY”, it was 21 feet of well used camping trailer at its best. We had purchased this 1989 Nomad from a friend of ours who was upgrading. We got it in 2004, I think? So it was 15years old when we got it, it was clean and it was ours. We traveled to a couple of campgrounds with it and then it made the pilgrimage to the property and never left. Don’t get me wrong it worked fairly well for our small family but was still a little cozy. It was the bug out place we could currently afford and so that’s what we had. All the necessities were taken care of in one fashion or other. Let me digress for a minute, this RV had a shower or so that’s what it was called. This shower was more like a very small closet you would find in a 1980′s  home bathroom where a couple of towels might fit along with the plunger and maybe a few extra rolls of toilet paper. I’m a stocky full sized American man and thus would NOT be comfortable in such conditions. However, my wife and daughter both being petite fit alright. If TSHTF I would have been so glad to have even this but short of that I wasn’t going to be using it. Other than this one issue it would handle pretty much whatever we threw at it. Running water, microwave, propane frig that worked most of the time and padded boards to sleep on. I should probably stop knocking it because it really wasn’t bad at all, cheap living quarters and WAY better than tenting it. I know many of us preppers like the tent camping game but although I have gone that route on many occasions, RVing is better. Call me a Wuss if you must but real walls and a ceiling make me sleep alot better. We used it pretty hard but tried to maintain it and take care to not allow it to fall apart. I believe we paid $2,800 for it second hand in 2004and we just sold it in the last year for $1,850. For what it was we got it cheap and the next folks got a good deal as well. Now lets do the math, $950.00 for around 4 years worth of use… Not bad, less than $20 a month over that time period? Back to the story at hand, we had to decide what to do next as far as the “Shelter” was concerned. I think that I may have already given it away, having said we sold the RV in 2008? Well, we decided to sell the fifth wheel. That is after we had the other “Shelter” in place. Like many reading this I had big dreams of building the ultimate retreat complete with covert stocks of Zombie wire to put in place when the time came… Also, like many of you, I had to deal in reality! Fortunately, I married a lovely woman and she’s on board with the whole BOL/weekend getaway property. However, we DO NOT have an unlimited budget to work with. We would have loved to build a stick built home here, but even doing alot of the labor ourselves would have massively broke the budget. This is where I cry again about the DEEP DARK HOLE I had just experienced, sob-sniffle… We considered building a good sized garage with living quarters above. Even a small cabin that could eventually be converted to house guests later… Everything we seemed to come up with was going to use the remaining budget several times over? Previously, a family member had pointed out to me that some mobile home parks were closing in their area and the homes had to be moved but they were just about giving them away… Thanks but no thanks, we really want to go with stick built, blah, blah, blah. I hadn’t even thought about  it again in over a year and then as usual one day I get this great idea? Why not get an older singlewide mobile home? Yes, this family member DID point out the fact that this was not MY great idea! You can always go round and round about where a great idea came from but I never saw the point… I had this great idea to look into! I wondered if Mrs. Prepper was going to go for this as there seems to be a stigma surrounding these homes, some people won’t even consider em – go figure? Well, we discussed this and she thought it was a great idea as well! Success, now to just locate one of these little golden nuggets.

This is a good place to stop for today as there is at least a full days post on what we went through locating the right home to have moved on to our land. I think that this will even be inspirational to all the open minded folks. We started out thinking this was going to have to be an old, smelly fixer upper if we were going to get it for the price we would be happy with. You will, I think you will, be happy to see what we eventually found… Stay tuned as I will bring you the rest of the story, to quote Paul Harvey, later this week. Actually it won’t be the whole rest of the story but at least this next chapter.

I included an extra picture of the interior of the trailer, I have a few more so let me know if its something you want to see. I complained about this RV but for one or even two people this would be an option worth looking at. I have seen many viable RV’s with really cool setups out there right now for almost free, price  is always subjective… If you have a BOL area that doesn’t get terribly cold in the winter months I think you could be quite comfortable. I know that you can find units with larger showers as well, nullifying my largest complaint!

Prepper