A few years ago we purchased a 25′ travel trailer.  It’s a trail lite and its an ’00 so it’s not super fancy but it was in great shape and it had bunks in the back which was important to us because it would mean not having to fold the table up and down for a kid to sleep on.  We have loved having a trailer!  We camp often in the summer and though there was a time that a childless me would argue “camping in a trailer is not camping”, the me with 3 children really appreciates the ease of having a trailer that is fully stocked and ready to go at any time in the summer.  My other favourites about owning a trailer are having my own washroom, having a fridge, being dry when it’s raining, and being able to easily put kids to bed via closing black-out curtains and turning on a fan (or A/C-hey we are paying for electricity anyhow!).  Okay, that doesn’t really sound like real camping, so just call it something else; glamping, being at a mobile cottage, being wimps, whatever you want to call it, we like it!  Another fun fact is that we lived in our trailer for a month or so until we finished renovating the second floor of our house.

Our trailer was nice and clean, but it is from 2000 and trailer manufacturers tend to be behind the times anyway, so it was pretty dated.  This is what it looked like in it’s original condition.  I didn’t take any photos, so these are from the internet, but they look identical to what our trailer looked like except for ours did not have an oven, just a stove and a microwave.

At first I wasn’t going to paint the cabinets but after a few years of living with things the way they were, I decided to take the plunge.  And while I was at it I painted the walls, and had Aaron put new flooring in, and replace the countertop.

We decided to take out the stove because there was no counter space.  We rarely cook inside because we have a bbq and a portable propane stove and since we didn’t have an oven anyway we wouldn’t be losing that.  I also purchased an induction burner just in case I ever did need to cook something inside.  I sprayed the cabinets with the same colour as our kitchen island, because I had lots of it left over and it is really good quality Benjamin Moore Advance paint (the colour is gray horse).

We use the front wraparound dinette as our bed, we were able to squeeze in a queen size mattress.  The cabinet above our bed is used for our clothes, but if needed it folds down into another bunk.  I found the perfect storage boxes for under the bed from Ikea(where all the the storage/organization stuff came from).  They came in a pack of 3 and they are big and they exactly fit in the space.  One stores shoes, one stores outside stuff like rollerblades, paddles and kites, and the other stores toys that the kids haven’t seen recently so that they will hopefully be “new” by the time summer comes.

I made this “home is where we park it” pillow for a little bit of fun.  But it really is the essence of why I love having a trailer-everything we need, all our creature comforts and our little family are right with us wherever we go.

The kids bunks work wonderfully for us, and they are like a miniature room for them.  We just have a single over a double, so Myles is on the top bunk and the girls share the bottom.  It works great for now.  I put some of the leftover wallpaper from the girls’ room in their little bunk to make it special, and Myles’ owl duvet, which he had at our old house, personalizes his bunk as well.  I made him a little bed rail out of pine to keep him from falling on the girls.  The curtain to close off the room used to hang straight across the “hall” and when closed it blocked off half of the big storage cabinet as well as the bathroom- so when we had to use it in the night, we would essentially have to go through their room.  I changed the track so that it closes in their area, and we can walk to the bathroom without letting any light into their area.  I’m not sure why I didn’t do that earlier because it was a real pain the way it was!

When we are on vacation, we often let the kids watch tv before bed to get them to mellow out.  Previously they would have to lie on our bed to do this, because the tv was sitting on the little cabinet inside the door.  But I’d rather they not be in our bed because they make a mess of the covers and often they go to bed with bits of sand etc. attached to them from playing outside all day and I don’t want that in my bed.  If we had a couch I would stick them on the couch and move them when we went to bed, but because our trailer is 25 feet it doesn’t have a couch.  I ordered a cheap fully articulating mount online and then screwed it into the only real stud I could find in the wall, which was on the end.  By pure, unplanned chance, it turned out that the tv articulates right into the kids room and they can sit in their own beds to watch a movie.

I didn’t do a ton in the bathroom, just hung a new shower curtain and a shoe organizer to store shampoo, hairdryer etc.

I am so excited to go camping in our new digs!  How about you?  Do you like to camp?  If so do you go “real” camping or do you glamp like us?