audreyh1
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Well, our RV decided to buy a house!
Yep - you read that right. Our RV saw a house it wanted built, and we decided it might just be perfect for us humans too!
This is a totally unique type of house that truly integrates the RV into the living space. Both the house (a small two bedroom - less than 1000 square feet) and the RV open out into a shared courtyard area which is private from the street. The street “front door” actually opens into the courtyard. When “at home” the RV becomes our guest quarters. Otherwise, the RV is ready to roll at any time for when we are ready to take off for extended travel. We see this as perfect kind of “transitional” living for serious RV part-timers, really designed for 6 months home/6 months traveling, or whatever the schedule might be for any given year.
This slideshow (from which the above image was taken) does a pretty good job of illustrating the development concept Retama Village Photos - Bentsen Palm Development - Rio Grande Valley, Texas. These “Casita” homes are integrated into a neighborhood development that has small retirement homes plus large RV pad sites with “coach houses”. It's a 55+ retirement community.
The development does all the landscaping (for common “look” with native plants no less) and all yard maintenance. In our opinion they have the most spectacular “native wildscape” type landscaping we have ever seen. We’ve admired it for years.
We have spent a lot of time down in the south Texas border area for the last 6 years because the wildlife and parks are incredible down here. It’s our absolute favorite winter wildlife spot. So we know the area very well. When they started building something that accommodated our RVing lifestyle, we thought we better take a good look. The winters down here in the valley are wonderful. And the rest of the year - well, we’ll probably be traveling much of that as spring-summer-fall is prime travel season for RVing!
We had been talking resuming our overseas travel (it's been 7 years!) and thus occasionally leaving our motorhome behind parked somewhere. We had also been discussing some of the limitations of always being on the road - mainly lack of a full kitchen, small art studio/print shop, and how difficult it is sometimes to get adequate regular exercise. This small home solves these problems for us - the community has exercise and pool facilities, we are right next to a world class state park, and there are extensive bicycle trails in the development, and we don’t have to do any exterior maintenance of the home.
So our great RVing adventure continues........ just in a slightly different (and oops! a wee bit more expensive) form.
Audrey
P.S. I figure some of you folks are probably shocked - right?
Yep - you read that right. Our RV saw a house it wanted built, and we decided it might just be perfect for us humans too!
This is a totally unique type of house that truly integrates the RV into the living space. Both the house (a small two bedroom - less than 1000 square feet) and the RV open out into a shared courtyard area which is private from the street. The street “front door” actually opens into the courtyard. When “at home” the RV becomes our guest quarters. Otherwise, the RV is ready to roll at any time for when we are ready to take off for extended travel. We see this as perfect kind of “transitional” living for serious RV part-timers, really designed for 6 months home/6 months traveling, or whatever the schedule might be for any given year.
This slideshow (from which the above image was taken) does a pretty good job of illustrating the development concept Retama Village Photos - Bentsen Palm Development - Rio Grande Valley, Texas. These “Casita” homes are integrated into a neighborhood development that has small retirement homes plus large RV pad sites with “coach houses”. It's a 55+ retirement community.
The development does all the landscaping (for common “look” with native plants no less) and all yard maintenance. In our opinion they have the most spectacular “native wildscape” type landscaping we have ever seen. We’ve admired it for years.
We have spent a lot of time down in the south Texas border area for the last 6 years because the wildlife and parks are incredible down here. It’s our absolute favorite winter wildlife spot. So we know the area very well. When they started building something that accommodated our RVing lifestyle, we thought we better take a good look. The winters down here in the valley are wonderful. And the rest of the year - well, we’ll probably be traveling much of that as spring-summer-fall is prime travel season for RVing!
We had been talking resuming our overseas travel (it's been 7 years!) and thus occasionally leaving our motorhome behind parked somewhere. We had also been discussing some of the limitations of always being on the road - mainly lack of a full kitchen, small art studio/print shop, and how difficult it is sometimes to get adequate regular exercise. This small home solves these problems for us - the community has exercise and pool facilities, we are right next to a world class state park, and there are extensive bicycle trails in the development, and we don’t have to do any exterior maintenance of the home.
So our great RVing adventure continues........ just in a slightly different (and oops! a wee bit more expensive) form.
Audrey
P.S. I figure some of you folks are probably shocked - right?
