minimalist vintage living room

[music playing] >> kathleen: i think our lives will foreverbe changed by this experience. i don't think we'll ever be comfortable ina big house. we're just more comfortable in a smaller spacesurrounded by nature. that's where we feel at home. >> greg: living in the camper is very powerfulin the sense that you hear the rain on the roof, and you feel the wind blowing through thecamper, and you can feel the crisp in the breeze.

it's nice. >> kathleen: we're in colorado and this isour 1969 terry camper trailer that we live in so come tour our house. when you first walk in we have our closetspace for storing our clothes. this is my closet. greg has the same just right across from me. his is a little bit smaller. next up is our bathroom.

inside you'll see we use a composting toilet. if you're not familiar with a composting toilet,basically what it is... it's the same as a normal toilet, it justdoesn't use water and it separates number one from number two. number one goes in this container, numbertwo, you open the hatch like that it mixes with a soil amendment to become compostable and you can put it in your yard and use itas fertilizer. same with number one.

currently we don't use our water, or our showerbecause we're not connected to a water source. we shower at the gym instead. and when we do use water, we use gallon jugsinstead and i'll get to that in a little bit. so this is our main area where we have livingspace and our bedroom and our kitchen. we have a basket for all our fruit and otheritems that we want in there. silverware and other miscellaneous storageareas are below. you can see this camper actually has a tonof storage space. up above we have our cups and glasses, and plates and seasoning in here.

our spices are along the top here. and when we're ready to cook a meal we willwash our fruits and vegetables in the sink but we use a gallon jug instead of actuallyusing running water. behind me is our bedroom. we sleep here and then we store things uphere. when we don't have any guests, we keep thisclosed, but when we do, this can actually come outthe full size of the bed and someone can sleep up here and we can moveeverything down below our bed

for storage which is really nice. we've had some guests who have actually sleptabove us. >> greg: before we bought the trailer, we wereliving in capitol hill, in downtown denver in an apartment kind of doing the standard downtown denverlife and i had been talking to kathleen about doingthe van life for awhile and she wasn't quite ready to do the van lifeat the time but she met me in the middle with a camper. >> kathleen: it's a 1969 terry trailer.

we bought it for $1800. >> greg: at the time we justified it as 2months worth of rent basically. it was kind of how we equated that. eventually we realized we needed our own space,and to have our own backyard is really nice. it's also really great to have a space tohave chickens and a garden. >> kathleen: when we first moved into thecamper, i had a really difficult time, to be completely honest. you know, i had to make some adjustments likeusing a composting toilet, shower at the gym,

cooking in a smaller space. man those first couple of months were prettyrough. >> greg: yeah and at the beginning we weren'tquite adjusted yet. we hadn't insulated everything and situatedeverything the way we wanted it. >> kathleen: now that we've been living smallin some form for the past 2 years i feel really silly that i made it such abig deal in the beginning. now living this lifestyle doesn't seem sohard. >> greg: it's actually been even more amazingthan i could have ever imagined living in a camper would be

and it's the perfect size really. we built these insulation blocks to fit inthe windows so that we could live in here in the winter. it also comes in really handy in the summeras well. they're made out of styrofoam and radiantbarrier and they pop into the window just like this. and now we're insulated. what prompted us to come up with the insulationblocks is the camper is really a three-season camperby design.

it has a furnace but these insulation blocksreally make it a four-season camper and allow us to live in here in the winter, and in the dog days of summer. >> kathleen: here's our gallon jugs. after we use them we hang them up here and then we go back to the store and we goall at once and refill our jugs. as you can see we have some of our essentialitems in here like my guitar, my computer,

notebooks, journals, and all the books thatwe want to read are down here below us. so this is a really great place to hang out. we spend a lot of our time just using thisas our sofa as well. this is a curtain that we made. when it's too sunny out we'll have it hanginglike this. otherwise if we want to look outside we willpin it up just like this. pretty easy to do. over here is our seating area and it's wherethe dogs sleep as well. we had a table in here before but we foundthat it took up too much space and

it felt kind of crowded with us trying tonavigate around each other with cooking and everything else that we weredoing. so we took the table out and now it opensup our layout a lot more. we use these two areas for more clothes andmore clothes down below which is nice. one thing that's pretty important that wedo with our camper is we hang a lot of things that we use on a daily basis so we hang our cameras, the dogs' bandanas, our sunglasses, my jewelry, some of our fruitsand vegetables, we hang our hats

and that just makes it easy for on-the-gograbbing stuff whenever we need it. >> greg: one of my favourite parts of livingin the camper is also the freeing lifestyle that your lifestyle doesn't cost as much as a conventionallifestyle. it's very liberating to know that you're usingless resources which means you have more time to backpack or fish or simply just enjoy life really. >> kathleen: we continue to be inspired byother people breaking the barriers on what

an alternative living style is. it's been really cool because that's alsoshifted our ideas and we feel like we can continue to brainstorm new new forms of tiny living and explore them.

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