We Bought an RV LOT - and the Storage Issues That Came with It

We bought an RV lot a few months ago and tomorrow is move-out day. Everything's been perfect up until now. We have one major issue. What are we going to do with all this stuff we've bought the last four months? Come along with us as we give you a full tour of the RV lot, talk about why we bought it, and show you the storage solution for all this beautiful furniture that we've amassed. But first, if we haven't met before, we're the Shenpaws. We're a family of four who travels full Welcome to our home in sunny southwest Florida. We're about three miles from the beach here in Fort Myers, Florida. We bought this lot and we've just kind of settled in this year. We've really not made many improvements at all. We wanted to see what we liked, how it felt, and the next season I've got some plans. Up here in the front, it pretty much stays wide open most of the time. We pull our chairs over here sometimes and make a semi-circle because we do have a TV in the bay here. It pulls out on a swivel, so if we have more people over or if somebody wants to watch the TV here, that's when this space really gets used. But in the back is the real beauty of what we've got. There are no camping chairs back here and I love that. After nine years on the road, I was ready to have some comfortable patio furniture. We have these beautiful trees back here, a huge oak and all kinds of different palms, and we have this greenway behind us too. So lots of privacy. Feels like a real backyard. Totally, totally removes the campground feel when we're back here. We put up this gazebo. It's the only thing that we can leave, hint hint, when we pull out tomorrow. So once I show you everything, it has to go and we're going to talk about that in a minute. But we did buy a table with six chairs. We were gifted these two chairs and loveseat, which is perfect. Although we just got these last week, so that added to the things that we have to take care of. And then we have four more really big silver chairs that are super cushy. We have these great wind curtains, which we actually have used a lot this season. That's the funny thing about Florida, is some winters it's hot, others it's cold and windy. We had a much cooler and windier winter here, as you can see. You can see my hair blowing in the wind. I'm not making it up. As I show you this back space, it's not exactly perfect. It's a little hodgepodge, but again, we're just working out the kinks this year. Jason has this rabbit pellet ice machine, and then some friends brought over some of the round ice cubes last night. But, you know, next year we'll figure out a way to incorporate it. But listen, we've got a cooler as the table. We've got the ice maker. We have some extension cords. It gets the job done. Oh, and at night, we ran Edison lights in the ceiling. And next year, most likely, if you look straight up, Willis, there is a place where we can install a really cool dual paddle fan. And that'll help keep the bugs off of us and keep us cool if it's a little bit warmer. But the other thing that was really important was to have a TV out here. We literally want to come out here, have dinner, and then just sit and relax as a family or with friends. Last night, we had the college championship ball game on. It's a great space. Next season, I'm going to add a little more landscaping. Might even turn the gazebo another way, but I definitely want to add an island with a sink in it, so we can prep food out here and do the dishes. And then I don't have to disappear inside when everybody's having a good time after dinner to clean up. Actually, the kids help with dishes. I shouldn't say me, because every other night, they switch. That's one of their chores that they have. So that's pretty cool. But even still, it's more fun after dinner. You're talking. You're like in the heat of the evening, and then somebody has to disappear, and nobody wants to volunteer for that. We do travel with two different grills. If you've watched our other videos, you know that Jason loves his Blackstone, but he loves his Kaveri even more. So right now, we just have the usual setup. Just stick them where they go. But next year, we'd like to make it a little bit prettier. We're not taking the Kaveri with us this summer. It has to find a home. And like I said, just like all the other things, we're going to show you what we're going to do with this stuff here in just a few minutes. It was nice to get this deck box. We actually bought two, but only put one together. But you know, you can put, we actually have like grill covers and stuff, so they're not blowing around everywhere. Maybe you have a paddle board. Maybe you have folding chairs. There's all kinds of things you can stick in those. But it just keeps the whole space nice and tidy. I'm going to grab Jason because we want to share with you why we bought this lot and how it's been good for our family. He just ran to one of our neighbors to drop something off. So as soon as he gets back, we're going to pick right back up. We've been coming here for five seasons now. Why do we love it so much? I can't believe it's been that long. Personally, I love the people. That's the one of the things about this park that has just been amazing is the the relationships that we've built in the short time that we've been here. It's, we've never been anywhere like it. Yeah, and so, you know, you go to places and your first impression is what the RV resort or the campground looks like, right? Are the roads nice? The spots nice? A lot of times you look at all those exterior amenities. You can tell this is a nice resort. Just about anybody would be happy coming here. But once we got inside these walls and settled in and plugged into the activities, the people that are here are incredible. They are our people. And so we couldn't help but be drawn back to this place time and time and time again. We tried to get away from it, but we ended up back. Like, we're like, we're going to go do some other stuff in Florida, and we came back. Yeah, we even came back to, remember, we came back without the bus. We stayed in the hotel just to come back for a long weekend just to say hi to everybody. And that was after the hurricane. We wanted to check on everybody and hug their necks. So yeah, and we even went skiing a couple winters and said, well, we don't want to do that every winter. We were going to go back and forth. Hot, cold, hot, cold. So this year, though, when we were getting ready to come down, when you go to places in the prime season, it's more expensive. And so many more people are traveling now than when we started nine years ago that everything's more expensive. Well, I just didn't want to pay the monthly rent that they were charging. And so I asked Jason to find us a lot that we could buy because I thought that that would work out better for us from a numbers standpoint. So you did. I did. We did. And that's how we ended up here. The nice part about it is we have a place that we can come. It's ours. We're not fighting for reservations because that's the other part of it. You know, there's a lot of RV resorts in Florida. If you want to be in the middle of the state somewhere away from the beach, there's a fair amount of places to choose from. But we always choose to be close to the beach and the coast. And that's the other cool thing. I mean, we're less than three and a half miles from the beach. We can ride our bikes to the beach, which we love. We've done that multiple times this year. We're only about seven miles to Sanibel, which we only went there once this year for whatever reason. We were just busy. We traveled a lot and we're gone a lot. There are two major airports. One's 30 minutes. One's about 50 minutes from here. So for us, with still working, it made it easy to come and go. And our hometown is across the state. It's a four to five hour drive, but this place for a few months in the winter was just a great refuge to be a little more comfortable than camping chairs, have this wonderful community of people that we just don't have anywhere else when we're traveling and have all of the amenities that we were just talking about close. And the kids have plugged in to go into the gym. There's a planet fitness five minutes up the road. They've been playing pickleball every morning. They actually did pickleball lessons, which was super cool. They wanted to give back because this is where they learned to play pickleball five years ago, right? And so that's pretty cool. They've had a dog walking business. They help everybody with their IT needs here. It's like a real neighborhood. It really is. It's like a YMCA and the coolest neighborhood you've ever had put together between all the activities and the relationships and the way that people help each other. You know, when we hosted that graduation party for Jason, which we decided to do while we were here because so many people here love on our kids. And Jason stood up and said, you know, it's like we have a couple hundred adopted grandparents. And half are like, oh, that's so sweet. And the other half are like, we're not old enough to be grandparents. We're aunts and uncles. Kids of the best adopted grandparents, and that is you guys. Aunts and uncles. Aunts and uncles. Part of the family, I should say. And it was just the spirit of it was fun. And, you know, like this year we went to the tiki bar a bunch and played shuffleboard and ping pong. I mean, like, it's just, I don't know, this year we've taken more advantage of the resort than we have in the past. And, you know, we're still working, but I sit out here into the gazebo all day and make my calls. And it's funny because people ask all the time, is that a real backdrop or an AI backdrop? And it's like the palm trees and the breeze and everything like that. This has just been an incredible year, and I'm so grateful that we decided to buy a lot here. Yeah, and I want to encourage you all. If you decide you want to travel in your motorhome or camper, maybe you want to travel for a season or full time, look at getting a lot like this. If you want to be still a little bit more and then just come and go at your leisure, it's a great option. And for us it was way more economical than paying the rent at high season in Florida. But having said that, there's still a lot of people that do rent here and and it works for them. Yeah, absolutely. So everybody has a different budget and everybody has a different way that they look at it. But for us, this has been great just to have a little home base, settle down just a little bit, as much as you can settle. And but now it's time to take off again. Well, and if you have any questions about owning an RV lot, grab a time on our calendar. There's a link in the description below, and I'd be happy to share with you. I have some great connections with RV resorts around the country and be happy to share with you just some things to look for if you're considering that. Because not only are we experts at this from doing it so much, you're a real estate broker, I'm a loan officer, and we've been doing that for almost three decades. So if you have any real estate or mortgage questions, we'd love to help you in that way too. We can help you in almost all of the 50 states. And like Jason said, if there's a state or something that we don't know about really well, we'll get you in touch with somebody who does. That's right. Don't be shy. Seriously, click the link on our calendar if you have any questions about any of this. We would love to help you. But enough about that. Now that we're done sharing why we bought the lot, let's go take all of the furniture that we bought that we didn't intend to buy to the storage that we never intended to have. When we bought all this furniture, we got such a good deal on it. We bought it at a closeout sale. And so my goal was that we would use it the whole season and then put it on Craigslist or Facebook or whatever for half off, be done with it. I didn't want to mess with storage. I didn't want to pay for storage. And I just thought that would be like one and done. Well, as you can tell, that's not how this story is going to play out. We like the furniture and actually it was really hard to find it in November in Florida because most of the stores don't carry this spring and summer patio furniture until February or March at best. So having gone through that and looking back and assessing how hard it was to find the furniture, we've decided to keep it. Fortunately, one of our friends needed a storage unit too. And we decided between our two families that we could share one large storage unit. He worked a great deal just across the street. So that's the plan. Put all of our stuff in half the storage unit, split the cost, and when we come back in the winter, we'll have our setup and pick up where we left off. So to add on to the greatness of this campground, they actually have a little trailer that you can haul stuff on for the entire campground to use. You just have to have the hitch to hook up to it. We don't actually have the hitch. We just asked one of our neighbors. I don't know if you can tell or not, but I'm sitting in the driver's seat and so this is going to be my first time driving the truck with a trailer behind it. So I'm kind of excited, kind of nervous, but we have to go get that so that way we can load all the furniture and take it across the street to the storage unit. So we got the height. As you can see, we have only put the bikes and four out of our 10 chairs in the storage unit. Our fear of not having enough room is starting to become more and more realistic. You know Willis, I realized in the beginning that we probably weren't going to have enough room and it's true. We don't. What we thought we were going to be able to share with our friends is not going to happen. The solution is we're going to need another unit. Luckily for us, I already checked and they have plenty. So let's go up to the office and let's get signed up for another unit. I knew we were going to run out of storage. I could just tell when we got here. When we decided to share with a friend, we just had them pick out the spot. We thought there'd be plenty of room and there probably would have been, but we got to the point where it was getting to be really tight and we acquired some new patio furniture because somebody was giving it away for free in the park. So now we got to go get another unit. I went ahead and hopped online and I was able to secure us a 10 by 5 unit which should be more than enough space for us. So we're going to pull in here and go get it buttoned up so we can finish up our move. We're running out of time. I got to thinking before I filled out all the paperwork. I should probably make sure that the 5 by 10 is enough. What do you think buddy? Let's go peek at the 10 by 10. Let's peek at the 10 by 10. I think we could probably do that if we absolutely had to, but I think we should go look at the other one and check out the size difference. We literally just drove around the building to walk out that. We couldn't just walk right out that. What do you think? That's definitely enough space. The other one is together. All right. Let's go home and look at our stuff again and I'll just finish it online if that's okay. Okay. Alrighty. So Willis and I went over there and looked at the storage units. Yeah. I think we should just do the 10 by 10. It's just going to make more sense. It's only $10 difference and it's going to give us so much more space. It's dramatically different between what we have here and what we already have over there. Our bikes, the, you know, the bike rack and all that. We're not moving everything from the other unit. No, that's going to stay there and then we're just going to take what we have and put it in the other place. But you don't think we fit in the smaller one? It's, I mean, it's five feet. So like from here to here to right there at that wall. I mean, that's how big it is. And what all still has to go in that one? The table, all of our chairs, the dock box, the Caveri. Yeah. I mean, it just, and then we're not spending all this time trying to, you know, move it all around. We can just put it in there and be done with it because time is money and we got to keep this thing moving. So. Okay. All right. Perfect. So it wasn't just the furniture that we needed to put away. We also needed to clean out all of the extra things from the basement because of where we're going for the summer. We need every ounce of space. So we're going to clean and reorganize everything. What are we doing, bro? We're driving over to the storage unit with a lot of stuff in the truck and on the trailer. You can't see it. I'm kind of nervous. I've never driven with Jason driving with the trailer in the back full of stuff. So I'm a little nervous. Are you nervous? What are you nervous about? What are you nervous about? I'm a professional driver. I've driven Lamborghini, Corvette, Prevo, truck, Jeep, trailer. Got the trailer behind. I'll be fine. At least we're just going around the corner. Yes. Luckily the storage unit is just right across the street. Let's see. Action. Action. Action. Action. Shook. Get out of the car like a lady. Mom, why didn't we just get one storage unit to ourself the first time? We thought our furniture fit on top of each other and stacked a lot easier than it does. But come to find out, it doesn't stack at all. Not even a little. So instead of being able to make really tall towers, we just kind of have to put it in a single layer or a very awkward double stack. Fortunately, I am shocked at how affordable the storage unit is here. I was thinking it was going to be hundreds of dollars a month. It's not. I'll figure out the exact dollar amount and tell you here in just a little bit. Don't put that. As you can see, we're going to have plenty of space. We've got our table, two chairs, and the Caveri grill still to come. A big rug and one more Tupperware bin. So this is going to be so much easier than trying to stack it. Thank you, babe. Let's go grab the rest of the stuff. We have some really cool adventures we're going on this summer, right Sarah? Yeah. We can't tell you about them quite yet. They're a little top secret, but soon we'll share it with you. But putting our stuff in storage, obviously we can't take all of the big patio chairs and tables, but some of the other things we're leaving behind makes a lot of space for carrying some extra supplies that we're gonna need for our upcoming adventures. That's right. So I'm really thankful that we're able to do this. It's literally like a half a mile from where we stay, so it's super convenient. Like I said earlier, price is right and it really frees up space for the next six months of our travels. I have a little advice for you. When you need to pack your stuff up and put it in storage, don't do it the day before you leave. It's a little bit much, isn't it? I'm exhausted and we've stayed up three nights in a row with friends and woke up at like seven. So it has been short nights and long days. Yeah, we're trying to squeeze in everything we can with everyone we can this week because most people we won't see for six or eight months easily. So prepare, plan ahead, do a little bit at a time. Fortunately we have four people and that makes it way easier. I mean we unpacked all that stuff in seven minutes flat. But yeah, give yourself plenty of time. And that is the last of our stuff of our last trip to the storage unit. Let's go over there and get all this stuff in and then we can be done for the evening. So mom, what are we doing? We are putting the lamp in storage because we're going to be traveling a lot and moving more often this summer. And instead of taking this up and down and throwing it in the back and it getting dented and ruined, we're just going to leave it behind. And then when we come back at the end of the year, we'll sit it up and enjoy it again. Why are you so sad? I have fought tooth and nail for this ice maker because I love it so. But I guess it's not making the cut for our trip for the summer. Which I don't know why because Sarah and I are not happy about it. But I guess for some reason in all of this space we don't have room. Goodbye pellet ice maker. You've been a good friend. Everybody needs a friend. Something we're leaving behind because of all the moving around we're going to do this summer are our e-bikes. In the back of storage bay number two are all of our bikes. There's a couple reasons we've chosen to leave it behind this time. First of all, we may get on some dirt bumpy roads and we may get on a lot of them. And the bikes already take such a beating on the back of our truck that we decided we would leave them behind. The kids have electric skateboards. Jason has a scooter and I'm going to get one too, reluctantly. But we're going to have something that we can get around quickly with. But we're just not going to go through loading and unloading those bikes and all of the wear and tear they would take if they were on the back of the truck all summer long. We'll just have to remember all those bike rides we took this season to Fort Myers Beach over the bridge and that'll hold us over till next time. Let's go. Last time. Okay gang, we have so many memories that we've made in Fort Myers Beach this season and it's a little bittersweet to pack everything away but it's totally going to be worth it. We have an amazing summer ahead and before you know it we'll be right back here opening the door and moving back in. The lamp goes last. I hope you go grab someone you love and make a memory now. Be sure to like and subscribe and we'll see you on the next adventure.