If you didn’t know, my husband and I bought a van in April of 2023, spent many months renovating it and then we finally hit the road in February 2024. It’s been quite the journey with many ups and downs, but I can am so happy we decided to give this lifestyle a try. But this wasn’t just something that we decided to do out of the blue.
Back in 2017, we saw a couple living in a converted sprinter van traveling from state to state, exploring all the cities and drive through towns in between. I fell in love with the idea of living on the road and that’s when we knew we absolutely had to do this at least once in our lifetime. Of course, at the time I was 22 years old and my boyfriend was 26 and although it seemed like something you would do at that age or as everyone says “get out of your system”, we had no money. I was working a job that I could absolutely not do from the road. I’m a hairstylist, by the way but was teaching at Aveda Cosmetology School at the time. My boyfriend (now husband) was going in person to his 9-5 corporate sales job that he was very unhappy at. So not having any money saved up and not working remote made it seem extremely unattainable. So we just kept doing what we were doing and always dreamed of this lifestyle.
It seemed like we could just not let go of this dream though. Every year we talked about odd jobs we could do on the road. Could we make ends meet with Door Dash, Instacart, freelance transcription jobs, customer service?? We even went as far as getting certified to teach English. Getting certified to teach English via TEFL would allow us to work remotely from our computers. However, we didn’t realize that you needed a college degree to do it remotely though because you technically don’t need one to teach in many other countries. My husband graduated with a bachelors in business so he would be fine. But I went to a trade school, so I don’t have a college degree under my belt. And with our debt load, and lifestyle, we couldn’t live off of just that income. Everything seemed too risky. So we just kept doing what we were doing.
So over the years we just did everything we could to save our money, pay off debt and try to get ahead. We were renting apartment after apartment in Nashville. I was working full time at a salon, slowly but surely building my dream clientele. If you’re one of my clients and you’re reading this, just know I am forever grateful to you and your support!!
Skyler and I met while he was working a bartending job at a restaurant here in Nashville. He kept the job for a while, but the late night schedule just wasn’t working for us. He decided to take his business degree and get a sales job. However, he absolutely hated working in sales. He thought maybe it was the company he worked for, so he tried a different one and hated it even more than the first. He was so miserable at all these sales jobs, (if you know Sky, you know he’s not a sales guy) that he just decided to go back into bartending for the time being for the sake of his happiness. This bar didn’t close until 2 am, so after 8 months of that lifestyle, he was ready for an escape. Skyler’s very creative, so I encouraged him to apply for a job that could offer a little bit more of that. He saw an ad for an opportunity in digital advertising and was interested, but not qualified. He had never done anything in the marketing world before, and they wanted individuals with experience. He applied anyway, and by the grace of God, he got hired. This was in January 2020.
Then the world shut down. Much like with everyone else, COVID 2020 hit us like a freight train. The salon I was working for at the time shut down, and Skyler went from going into the office everyday to work from home for the time being. Then the layoffs started happening. We were waiting for Skyler to get laid off considering he had no experience and has only been with this job for 2 months. We are so grateful that it never happened to him. The digital advertising wing of this company was booming, Skyler excelled at his job and they needed him. But, I was bringing in no money. I felt a little lost. I don’t know about you, but there is nothing that really puts the phrase “life is short” into reality like a national pandemic. We just wanted to travel and explore so it was time we put a plan in action.
But no, wait. Now I’m 25 and my boyfriend is 29. I feel like we need a safety net. We still have debt, and not much money saved up. We decided that within the next year, we were going to try our absolute hardest to have enough saved up to put into a fixer upper home in Nashville. We didn’t want to feel “stuck” by buying a house, but we wanted to have a home base and somewhere we could come back to if we hated van life. We also wanted something to generate a little bit of income while we were on the road. So Skyler picked up a part time job at a brewery after his day job and I babysat and did freelance hair for weddings on the side.
One of my friends and clients is a real estate agent in Nashville, so once we hit our savings goal, we started house shopping. She took us to tour a house that weekend that needed work, and they were selling it “as is.” Oh, and we toured this house at 11 am on a Sunday and all offers had to be in by 1. This was the first and only house we looked at. LOL. Crazy, I know. The housing market in Nashville was on fire during this time, and according to our trusted realtor and friend, the only way we had a real chance of getting this house was if we were willing to bypass the inspection and offer above asking. We had absolutely no idea what we were doing. So decided to write a letter, bypass the inspection and offer 15K above asking. There were 17 offers on the table and we truly did not think we had any chance of getting it. Also, to be honest… a little unsure we even wanted it? We got the call a few hours later that our offer was accepted and the only reason why was because we were willing to bypass the inspection and the seller just wanted to get out as soon as possible. We had no idea what we were doing this entire process, so much that I looked at Skyler, my now fiancé at this time and told him we got it. His response was, “so wait.. how long do we have to let them know for sure?” LOL, if only it worked that way. So there we were, knee deep in a home purchase that we didn’t even know if we wanted or not. Luckily for us, we bought that investment property right before interest rates skyrocketed and we’re so thankful we did.
We spent the next two years fixing the house up. We had 3 weeks of overlap in between our apartment lease running out and getting to move into the house. During those three weeks, we wanted to get the messiest jobs out of the way before we moved all of our stuff in. So we scraped the popcorn ceilings, ripped up the carpet, refinished the hardwood floors and painted all the walls white. Although I grew up with parents who flipped houses, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. We had no idea that the house we bought would consume every free moment we had for 2 years. It truly was blood, sweat, and tears.
Skyler and I worked on home improvement projects after work, before work, on the weekends and every free moment we had just to make this house livable and a desirable rental. My parents who have lots of experience with DIY home improvements, unfortunately live 7 hours away. We are so grateful to them as they would visit us every few months to help us with little things here and there. Here’s a fun little quick story to share why you should ABSOLUTELY get an inspection. So our house was built in the 50s, but there was this bonus room that was added in the 90s. We always thought something was a little off with this room, but we didn’t realize the severity of it. My parents had come into town Labor Day weekend to help us rip off all the old paneling and hang up drywall in the sunroom. Once we took the paneling down on the exterior wall, our worst nightmare happened. The entire wall of studs were dry rotted. There was no way we could hang drywall up. We literally had to rebuild the ENTIRE back wall of the house. Yay….
Enjoy the scariest photo of our once broken home.
We saw van lifers save up a few thousand dollars, travel until they ran out of money and then go back home to save up again. That just seemed risky to us. We knew that if it was a lifestyle that we really loved, we would want it to be sustainable so we didn’t have to stop doing it. I was no longer happy at my salon job, but still really loved doing hair and adored my clientele. So I decided to leave the salon I was working for and open my own business and worked it out to get all my clients on the same week so that everyone was on the same schedule. I decided that when we left for full time van life, I would fly back solo every 3 and a half weeks to stay for 8 days to service my guests. Crazy, but it works. Skyler got a promotion within his company working for the west coast market, so he transitioned to permanently working remote. Everything truly was aligning for us to fulfill this dream we’ve dreamt about for so long. We finished the home renovation in the spring of 2023 and immediately bought a van. We had a few potential sales fall through, but then we finally scored a Ford Transit Passenger van. The guy who we bought it from renovated it to use it for weekend trips, but never full time living. It was functional, but not in the way we needed it to be. We gutted the entire thing, and spent the next 10 months renovating it.
Oh, and we got married 🙂
We flew to Italy in October 2024 to elope and then honeymoon in Greece. (PSA- if you fly from Italy to Greece, flights are only $75/pp!) We always knew we wanted an intimate, international elopement. Fun fact, you can’t legally get married in Italy as an American, (or at least they make it nearly impossible) so we did a symbolic ceremony which is what we consider our wedding date on October 1st. We spent almost 3 weeks in Europe between Italy and Greece, then flew home to have a backyard wedding celebration. My dad officiated the sweetest intimate ceremony in the afternoon of October 21 with all our immediate family. A few hours later, all our friends showed up to celebrate through the evening with us. It was absolutely perfect! We truly got to have the best of both worlds and I would recommend it to anyone who is thinking about it! It was a perfect evening in our backyard… In the comfort of our own home that we just spent 2 years renovating, we celebrated our love.
Our original plan was to leave for van life immediately after our wedding weekend celebrations. Like all things we’ve learned over the years though, HAVE A FLEXIBLE TIMELINE. The van wasn’t ready, and as much as I wanted to just be like “Oh, we’ll just finish it on the road.” — That wasn’t realistic. Also, not to mention the holidays were right around the corner so it just seemed right to wait until after the new year when we didn’t have any plans/events coming up. It was the busiest time of our lives!
Since our original plan was to leave right after we got married, I already transitioned all my clients to the new schedule. So in between the weeks of working, I hustled to just finish tasks on the van to make it ready so we could hit the road. Finally, February hit and our departure date seemed very attainable so we got it done. We had the house rented out for the first of March, so we truly had no choice but to get out. The cleaners had already come and made the place spotless, so at the time we were literally sleeping in our mostly finished van in our own driveway because I wanted to house to stay pristine for our renters. lol!
February 13 hit and as cheesy as it sounds, we said “Let’s go spend Valentine’s Day on the van!” So we threw everything in the van, ready or not and hit the road to drive south. We left for our van life adventure during the cold, gloomy winter months and all we knew was that we wanted warm weather and sunshine. So we headed south, spent a lovely Valentine’s Day in Fairhope, Alabama then drove along the coast through New Orleans with a goal to be in San Antonio by March. And that’s where our van life adventure began…
