Knomad

On the Subject of Housing

2020-07-25

-2 Before RV (BRV)

In late 2017, early 2018, I was living in my ex’s mother’s house in NE Portland and aware that she wanted to sell in the near future. I was finally in a stable-enough financial position that owning a house was possible, but not in Portland. A fixer in a bad neighborhood sells for $250k+, and I would be stretching to afford $300k. In talking with friends it became apparent that if I was going to live 1-2 hours away from Portland, why not live 1-2 hours away from Seattle or any other major metropolitan area. This led to the period of time where I was considering housing in Bremerton. Bremerton is an island to the West of Seattle, about an hour away depending on whether you take the ferry or go around the sound. A lot of the appeal of this plan relied on friends living with me. I could afford the house on my own but it would be a quality of life that I wouldn’t consider ideal.

If memory serves, it was February 2018 that I started considering moving into an RV. Some friends may recall that this idea had occurred before, when my ex and I broke up, but didn’t get further than a fun weekend trip to window shop. First as a plan to possibly convert a school bus, but as I did more research it became clear that it would need to be a proper RV to provide the combination of amenities I needed because of my job and the requirements of RV parks. At this point I was mostly just toying with the idea, and my understanding was that most like I’d buy a house, but finding a place that met all the requirements I was trying to meet was proving difficult.

By late 2018 I had a falling-out with the core group of friends that I was planning to live with, and finding myself with no real tether to the Portland area and nowhere else that I both could afford to go and also had a compelling reason to go, I started looking around locally for an RV that would work, and by November I had purchased it. The speed with which I went from “maybe this is something I could do” to “this is definitely what I’m doing ready or not” wasn’t something I expected.

But this isn’t really meant to be the story of how I got the RV or what happened since. Technically, that story existed on another blog that almost nobody read which has been deleted, because I am terrible about archiving my writing. What I’m trying to do is set up some background about how I got to where I am so that what follows will hopefully make some sense.

So Why an RV?

  1. Because I can.
  2. Because I have always been slightly proud of being weird, and living in an RV is weird.
  3. Because I enjoy being a teller of stories, and this was sure to net me stories to tell.
  4. Because I haven’t been kind to my body, and the safe bet is not on a long life and comfortable retirement.
  5. Because I’m not getting any younger.
  6. Because the world is a very big place, and I am sad that no matter what I’ll only ever get to see a small part of it.
  7. Because it was the only way to be able to be near some friends, even if only occasionally, even if only for a little while.

I think all of those things are still true, but in the process I’ve also grown significantly as a person and learned some important things about myself.

  1. I want to be near my friends.
  2. I want to spend time with the people I love as often as I can manage.
  3. I want to minimize the time I spend interacting with “devices.”

I do not enjoy using computers. There was a time that I did and I’m not sure how much is that they changed and how much is that I changed, Almost certainly both. but now I find myself in the position where it’s the gateway to all of the people I care most about and also where all of my most valuable moneymaking skills lie and also the thing I use for leisure. I’m never free of the thing.

I don’t think that I ever will be entirely free of the computer, but I think that there are steps I can take to put it in an appropriate box. Likely you’ve already seen some of these steps, such as my recent migration to macOS and away from PC, driven in part by my preference for the macOS UI and in part by moving away from playing video games in general. There’s still a long way to go, and changing habits in adults is hard. I think if I tried to rip it all out and go cold turkey I’d fail. It doesn’t usually work for any other detrimental addictive dependency, and I don’t think it’d work here.

Enter SARS-CoV-2 (COVID19)

The pandemic has changed a lot of things for a lot of people. Some of those things, I think, will be changed forever. Some of those things I think won’t. This essay isn’t about my COVID predictions. There’s a very good chance that you already know what those are if I’ve got you mentally filed into the “this person won’t claw my face off for talking about the pandemic” bucket. I can’t not talk about it at least a little because it happened to land near the start of my second year in the RV and it’s had a huge impact both on this year but likely the next several years to come.

The existence of the pandemic has made travel somewhat tenuous. People are definitely still doing it, and I could definitely still do it, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. Or the right thing to do for the communities that would be impacted by my travel.

I’m effectively stuck indoors 96% of the time, with excursions only for groceries or food. I could probably be going out and doing more in the national parks but the reality is that I mostly don’t want to. The kinds of places I liked to go were more along the lines of museums and tourist traps. I love me a tourist trap. In Albuquerque I spent an entire Saturday at the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History and I’d go back any time. That’s the kind of place I only ever saw because of the RV. I can’t imagine any other circumstance where I would have found myself in Albuquerque with a weekend day to kill, and I certainly wouldn’t have flown in just for that.

So What About a House Maybe?

This is where we find ourselves at the meat of an essay. The thought that’s been crossing my mind for at least the last couple of months.

Should I buy a house and move out of the RV?

It’s not clear-cut, and I’ve talked about this at length and in different ways with a lot of people, and what I’d like to do now is try to explore it out loud in a structured way that can maybe suggest the possibility space I’m dealing with, the factors I’m considering, and the reason why none of the “easy” answers end up being easy.

No One Knows What They Are Doing

It turns out that I can’t predict the future. [muffled catawampus] It’s possible you’re just now finding this out and if so, I’m deeply sorry for the confusion.

I’ve said it before but I think it’s important to repeat. At any point in my past if you had asked me where I’d be in five years I would have been wrong.

With that in mind I find it difficult to commit to plans that need longer-term planning. I can definitely afford a house, but I’d prefer not to take a huge loss on it because I only lived in it for two years. As it stands it’s looking like maybe I’ll only make it two in the RV.

Reasons Not to Stay in the RV

  1. The RV is a depreciating asset. It’s losing value every day.
  2. The RV is an expensive way to live if I’m not travelling.
  3. The RV is going to break. They all do. They’re not built to the standards of a house.
  4. The RV is a vehicle that I’m not driving, and like any vehicle that just sits that’s a problem.

Reasons Not to Buy a House

  1. I might not own it long enough.

That’s the whole list as I can currently envision it. Please if you can think of any other reasons not to buy a house, let me know what I’m not thinking of. But that’s the biggest single “con” that I can think of.

Reasons to Stay in the RV

  1. The RV provides a comfortable place to live that can adapt to the potentially changing geopolitical landscape.
  2. The RV is something I already own, and though I’m making payments on a mortgage staying in it is the path of least resistance.

Reasons to Buy a House

  1. A house is a stable living situation, and more conducive to bunkering down while the pandemic is ongoing.
  2. A house appreciates. If I do manage to stay in the same spot for a few years, there’s a reasonably good chance I’ll sell it for more than I paid.
  3. A house provides project space. This will be important later.
  4. A house allows for a garden.
  5. A house allows for exercise space. I’ve tried exercising in the RV. Yoga has proven too hard to do because I can’t stretch all the way up or all the way out, which impacts several poses. The best run was Ring Fit before the pandemic broke my good habits but that also suffered due to the lack of space to perform several of the moves. In theory I could exercise outside, and many people do, but that runs afoul of several body image issues and frankly I think it’s better to accept that it’s unrealistic to believe that I would than pretend that’s a real option.

Granted there’s no guarantee that I would actually get around to planting a garden. Or that I’d start taking exercise seriously. But those are options that become open if I have a house that I currently consider closed.

Let’s Go Ahead and Predict the Future Anyway

So I mentioned that living in the RV has helped me figure out some things about myself, including that computers are literally satan and that almost nothing matters to me more than time spent with the people I love. What does that mean for whatever’s next?

Given those constraints, what I think I should be trying to do is retire as young as I can. I’ve already missed the boat on 30, but 40 might be possible if I’m real aggressive about it. Certainly no later than 50 if it’s a true priority.

Is that the thing I want to spend all my money on? Do I want to give up on the idea of seeing the world if it means I don’t need to have a traditional day job? Is it possible that I could be wrong?

I don’t know. I really don’t. Hopefully I’ve established that I have no idea what I’m doing. Nobody does. Clearly I’m terrible at predicting what I’ll want in five years, but I find it pretty unlikely that what I’ll want is to still be working at a desk job that I don’t exactly hate but definitely don’t love.

I would have loved to make the travel pay for itself, but I never figured out how. Maybe someone with their finger on the pulse of the internet would have that on lock, but my desire to not be beholden to the computer means I also don’t really want to spend 20+ hours a week editing youtube videos, even if there’s a chance that I could have made a reasonable go of being a youtube personality.

On Projects

Let’s return to the idea of “project space” that I mentioned earlier. A house has room. Several of them, usually, no thanks to the horrors of “open concept,” the Aaron Burr of floorplans. And a fixed location. Over the course of the last year and a half I’ve come up with several ideas for potential businesses that could have worked from a fixed location but wouldn’t from the RV. There’s no way to know if any of them would have had legs long-term or paid enough to be worth the effort but without the space to try I never get to find out.

I’m not giving up on Nomadic Heavy Industries, and it’s possible that our product will be a computer game that ties me at least a little while to the computer, but I think given my interests and the people I’m working with it’s entirely possible that the end state of that company lives somewhere in the world of board games or tabletop. Or maybe something else entirely I haven’t even thought of yet. There’s still a lot to explore there, but I don’t want to put all my eggs in that basket.

Having access to a garage, shed, or even just a dedicated bedroom that’s not otherwise being used gives me the chance to try out some of the ideas that need space and a fixed location to ship from. Some of these ideas include things like Magic card arbitrage or a crazy idea to turn cheap card art from eBay into tabletop D&D tokens. A recent idea is to produce furniture and home decorations inspired by video games. I want to live in a Khajiiti house, and I’m willing to build my own bed to do it. Well. Maybe. The bed’s probably a terrible idea. But I bet I could do something interesting with tapestries and lanterns.

The point is that these are all things I can’t do in the RV that might open up career paths that provide me the freedom from my desk job that I crave. Some of them might be the first step down paths that lead me right back to a future RV excursion. Or maybe not. But it’s worth considering that maybe these are things that are worth exploring further and I can only explore them if I settle in a spot with the room to give them a try.

So Let’s Talk About a House

So given all this, even after typing it all out, I’m not really sure if the right decision is to buy a house. I think probably I’ll need to wait and see the shape of the world over the next six months to really make that decision. But let’s talk about what I’d be looking for in a house while we’re on the topic.

Low Cost of Living

I could afford up to $300k of house pretty easily, but that’s buying a lot of house I don’t need and / or paying a premium for location that I don’t necessarily care about. There’s an argument for paying that much if it gets me close to friends, but generally speaking it doesn’t. The fact that so many of you insist on living in San Francisco or Seattle is why I’m going to leave you out of the will. If a huge part of the point of buying a house is to potentially retire early then it’s critical to focus on getting a good deal on a house where it’s generally cheap to live.

Buying for the Known Knowns

It might be worth buying a house with lots of spare bedrooms if I thought people would move in. I think I’m deeply in love with the idea of a large house that I share with several of my closest friends. But I also realize that most of you aren’t going to move anywhere I could afford that house, and after having spent my life buying for futures that never came I think I’m over it. I only need one bedroom, but they don’t sell one-bedroom houses.

Two bedrooms with one bath would be ideal, but I’m willing to consider three bedrooms with two bath if the price, location, and amenities are otherwise right. This allows for the possibility of a future tenant but I’m not making assumptions based on what doesn’t currently exist and historically hasn’t either.

Near Existing Friends

This house needs to be reasonable driving distance from at least one friend. Ideally more than one.

Near Potential New Friends

This house needs to be near a source of new friends.

Near Necessary Dietary Amenities

I’m now a committed pescatarian, and I cook a lot of Asian food. Both of those things get harder to support the further you get from a major city. Which means within an hour’s drive of a major city. Access to Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s will do almost all of the heavy lifting. An Asian market would be nice, but I think the internet might be able to close the gap for me as long as I’m willing to order in large quantities. I hope you like zarusoba because if I have to order an entire crate of mirin it’s going to be cold noodles for weeks.

I currently know of one place that meets all of these requirements, and that’s the Dallas metroplex. I’m open to the idea that there are other places I should be looking at, and if you think you know of one I encourage you to tell me about it. As it stands, I think Dallas meets all of these requirements. Or more likely somewhere probably within an hour of Dallas.

So What’s Next?

Well. I don’t know. I’m still in Washington in an RV. There’s 2000 miles between myself and Texas, give or take, and a country that’s still undergoing a pandemic.

I think probably I can’t and shouldn’t make any big decisions about what to do next until I get back to Texas. I think that’ll be in December, but I haven’t actually worked out the logistics so that’s a back of the napkin estimate based on the route I think I’m likely to take. Kalama to Seaside via 26, then down 101 as in 2019 following the Thousand Trails network. This should get me at least as far south as San Francisco. Cut over to Las Vegas, then follow TT across the Southwest all the way home.

If by that time it looks like my estimates for the pandemic are wrong and we might be out of this in 2021, then maybe it makes sense to try to leverage my RV learnings into a cheaper RV situation and carry on that way. There are paths forward that are not this RV that are also not a house, but right now they don’t feel like the ones that are worth exploring.

Otherwise? Well. If you’re interested in moving to Dallas for some reason, let me know. I have visions of building a stock tank pool in my back yard, and board games under the covered seating area. D&D night. I would be glad to be the house everyone always comes to for nerdy social stuff. But I can’t make that happen, I can’t make people be interested in it, and I can’t buy a big expensive house assuming something that’s never been the case suddenly will be.

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