# Full Time Living In Outback 28Krs



## pilotalexander (Apr 23, 2013)

Hi everyone, this is my first thread and my first post.

I have lingered on this site for quite a few months now reading various topics and learning some useful things about my 2008 Outback.

A little background on myself and family...My wife, daughter, and I moved from Oklahoma to Florida for a short time from March 2012 - November 2012 for a little change and then decided it was too hard not having any family or friends around to share life with so we decided to move back to Oklahoma last November 2012. We actually drove straight back 1200 miles, 26 hours, in two vehicles (personal and moving truck) to surprise my wife's family on Thanksgiving evening. Everyone was surprised and excited, it worked out perfect (and we were just in time for an awesome dinner).

After being back for about a month we ran across a deal on 40 acres of property we couldn't pass up so we decided to buy the land and start making plans to build a house on it. We were staying with some friends at the time and trying to decide what our next step was...do we find an apartment or house to rent, or continue to stay in our friend's spare bedroom, or do we buy a mobile home and live out on our improved property, and then we came up with the idea of buying a travel trailer and living "rent free" while we improved our land and started our building project.

We bought our Outback in May 2013, about 4 months ago, and have been living in it full time ever since. We are staying in the backyard of my wife's family and are hooked up to their home electric. They have access to their septic tank outside of their house. This access is slightly uphill from where we are parked, but I had this wonderful idea that I could run my drain hose up the hill and then drop it far enough into the hole in the ground that it would be below the elevation of my trailer and once the liquid started flowing it would be like a siphon hose...nope. No details required here, but as we were told to open our black tank first, you can imagine the kind of mess I had to deal with to get that straightened out.

The following week I purchased a drain pump from amazon, you can find it here.

This thing has been a complete life saver for the issue that we had emptying our tanks. We can drain our tanks now with no problems through a separate garden hose with no mess and hardly no cleanup issues in less than 15 minutes.

So far since living full time in our trailer things haven't been too bad. We've added these Maxxair vent covers to all of our vents so they can be opened even when it's raining outside.

We have made our toy hauler area into a kind of room for our 2 year old daughter so she can have her bed and her toys all in one place, that has been working out okay so far. There is a sliding curtain thing that closes so she can be put to bed in private and us not have to worry about keeping all the lights turned off.

We also have 3 dogs living with us, Zero is our Siberian Husky, Bailey is our Boxer, and Tweeter is our Jack Russell.

We have a pretty "full house" here with all of our stuff to live full time plus the little one, and the dogs but we're doing the best we can to make it as comfortable as possible.

Sometime in the near future I will post pictures of our setup (the place is a mess right now) so everyone can get a better idea of what we have going on.

I wanted to start this thread and tell this whole story for a couple of reasons. First, I did a lot of searching on here and other RV type forums of people who, like my family, live full time in a travel trailer with children in an area that has very hot summers and fairly cold winters and wasn't able to find too much helpful information. I'm hoping that other families like mine can find this thread and learn of all of the things we have done to get through all 4 seasons.

We survived through the hot summer without too many issues, it was kind of hot and our A/C ran almost non stop, day and night but we made it through. Next year we are considering buying one of those insulative covers we keep seeing in the camping world magazines. In fact, we might look into getting one for the winter time.

It's just now starting to cool off here in Oklahoma so my wife and I were discussing our options for surviving the winter and what things we needed to do to keep our trailer livable and also from any damage. I found a couple of threads on here that have given us some good ideas on where to start...which leads me to the second reason I started this thread...

I'm hoping that others who have camped even part time or recreationally through the cold months can give some of their opinions on problems they've encountered that might help us avoid having the same problems.

Anyway, sorry for such a long post but I wanted to give all the details I could so everyone reading this would know what we're doing here and what our plans are. We are estimating that we will continue to live full time in our trailer through winter of 2014 before we are able to move into a livable home on our property sometime in the spring of 2015.


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