As mentioned in my previous post “5 state park campgrounds in the Denver area” We lived in state parks, bouncing around from state park to state park in the Denver area for about 6 months. We learned a lot and got quite good at hitching up and moving. When Jon accepted the job opportunity that would land us in Denver even longer, and we knew we would be in Colorado all winter, we realized it wasn’t ideal to keep having to move that frequently so we started looking at alternative options. Campgrounds will often offer monthly rates but we really didn’t like the look of most of them because they are crammed in so close together! That is when I started looking into volunteer jobs at state parks. I thought it was a long shot, after all we had 4 kids, 2 adults, a cat and at this point we also had a puppy! But hey, why not try? So I did some research, got on the Colorado state parks website and applied for a “resident camp host position”. They let you choose 3-5 parks you would be willing to go to. Since we had to be as close to Denver as we could get, we chose the 4 closest. That is how we ended up at Chatfield State Park for 9 months.
We accepted a volunteer gig at Chatfield State Park near Littleton, CO beginning in September, 2018. Every state and park has different hour requirements for how many hours you have to work in order to live there. You can split these hours up as a couple or one person can do them all. In return, you can stay for several months at a time in an RV site with full hookups at no charge. For us, it worked out very well. Jon would commute to downtown Denver, the kids would do their schoolwork and keep an eye on Joshua, who was 2 at the time and I would be on site working at an entrance gate or in the Main Office for a few hours 4-5 days per week. I had to work all the hours myself which made it difficult to juggle the kids, but overall it allowed us to stay in the area for next to nothing (just the cost of propane). We were able to pay off a lot of debt during this time and I spent almost my entire pregnancy with our 5th child at Chatfield. During the winter, we had most of the place to ourselves! The kids were young enough to enjoy the playground and bicycle paths and the ice covered lake but old enough to keep an eye on their baby brother while I did my volunteer hours. (I was always only a couple minutes away on foot). It was a great experience and I recommend it to anyone who would like to find a very low cost way to see new places. Or to stay in one place depending on your circumstances. I have since met many RV life people who travel around to whatever volunteer jobs they can find, spending a couple months or a season at a time in new places. State parks are really an amazing place to live!
Things we learned from our 9 months of stationary RV living for a Colorado winter
Skirting
In order to protect your pipes in your RV and to preserve your propane/electricity it is recommended that you skirt your trailer if you are going to be somewhere that is frequently below freezing for a longer period of time. There are MANY ways to go about skirting your trailer or motorhome. Although expensive, you can purchase a custom skirt for your particular rig. From what we have seen, most people seem to do it themselves using a variety of different materials and ideas. People use everything from foam sheets to straw bales to accomplish this. We managed to make a nice looking custom skirt for our camper at a very low cost. Here is the link to a useful blog we found on the issue of skirting. We ended up taking their advice and making a vinyl one like theirs with only a couple changes. The only change we made was instead of using tent stakes to hold it down, we created a PVC pipe frame and used 4 inch snap clamps to hold the skirt to it. The reason we chose this type of skirting was because we found it to be more aesthetically pleasing than many other options, more affordable than having one custom made and also easy to roll up and store to use over and over as needed.
Here is a list of materials we used to complete this project:
Vinyl from Billboard Tarps We chose vinyl that was black on one side, so our skirt is black on the outside
Clear Plastic Adhesive Hooks *We use these hooks like CRAZY for all sorts of things, hanging towels, hanging shoe organizers, we even have one on the ceiling holding our bananas up! But beware-these things are super strong and will take off whatever surface you place them on if you don’t heat them up and remove them with care.
Grommet Tool & Grommets *We purchased this for making our skirt, but since then we have used it for all kinds of things too! We grommet all of our towels and rags so they hang easier and don’t fall when we travel, more ideas that include the use of a grommet tool coming in a later post.
1 Inch PVC
Water
If you are going to be parked somewhere that gets below freezing, you will need to purchase a heated water hose to ensure your water doesn’t freeze on the way from the hook up to your rig. Here is the one we purchased.
These are a must have if you will be somewhere cold. Also, we found we needed to shove a towel or something around the water hook up to keep it from freezing on especially cold nights so we just kept one there all winter.
Showers & Laundry
Some rigs have a washer and dryer, however, ours does not. Thankfully most campgrounds and RV parks have a laundry facility available- so keep plenty of quarters around for laundry day! If you are a family, I recommend re-wearing things until they are actually dirty (except for socks & underwear of course). And for heaven’s sake, don’t wash towels that have only been used to dry off a clean body after one use! I find people do way more laundry than necessary. As a family of 7, I find around 2 loads a week is usually sufficient to keep things clean enough. Including bedding. If you are not living with a family, or if you have a very large hot water heater, you may be able to get away with showering in your rig. However, our hot water tank is only about 6 gallons and our shower is painfully small. Therefore we usually showered at a rec center or at the campground. So keep quarters around for that too because you will find most campground showers to be coin operated.
Propane Vs. Electric
This particular issue depends on your situation and your rig. Most RVs are heated by propane. They also use propane for the stove/oven and like ours, the refrigerator can be switched to run off of electric when you are plugged in or propane when you are not. Most of the resident camp hosts at the campground we were at had larger rigs than us and almost all of them had a huge propane tank dropped off for the winter and periodically refilled since they relied on it for heat. This is a good way to go if you have to have that much propane since you would otherwise be filling your little tanks every couple days during the coldest months. If you are boondocking or not plugged in at all, you will probably be relying on propane to heat your rig. However, we found that since we were getting free electricity all winter, it made much more sense financially to heat with space heaters. Some RV parks will meter your electric when you are there long term and will charge you according to how much you use, if that is your situation, you will have to do the math to see if it costs more to heat with electric or propane. For us though, it was a no brainer since we were not paying the electric bill. We did some research and purchased a space heater for the inside along with another one for under the trailer (inside the skirt). On really cold nights, we would turn on the space heater underneath the trailer. We set our propane heat to low (around 55) just to ensure that it would turn on if it ever got below that point due to a power outage or something. With the refrigerator and the heater running off of electricity, we only used propane for cooking and therefore we could go several weeks in between refills on our two 5 gallon tanks. Many people are unnecessarily spending A LOT of money on propane when they could be heating with space heaters instead. So we highly recommend- go space heater as opposed to propane whenever you have free electric or non metered electric hook ups! This is the space heater we use for the inside of the trailer, We use it every winter and it is still going strong 3 years later.
Stuff breaks all the time
One of the other big things we learned during our first year is that things break all the time. After doing lots of research on different brands of campers over the years, I have come to believe that this is just the way it is. Some may be better than others-sure. But in the end, most of them were not made to be lived in, they were made for short vacations and camping trips. Certainly not for a large family to live in EVERY day for YEARS. You will quickly find that every time you turn around there is something that needs fixed, usually something small. For example, one day, as I was pressing down on the countertop that covers my sink when it is not in use making a smoothie with a handheld mixer, the entire sink fell in the hole! This happened within the first year of owning a brand new camper. These things are very frustrating but I have come to accept them as part of the deal when you live in something that had to be created light enough to tow all over creation. I am very thankful my husband is handy and keeps up with these things as they come.
Well, that sums up our year of being “resident camp hosts,” living stationary in a cold place and living in a state park campground. Overall, it was a very good experience for our family. By the following summer (July, 2019), just as we were completing Jon’s year at work that was required before going remote, I was 8 months pregnant with our 5th (and last) child. We did tons of research on boondocking during our stationary year. We wanted to be able to travel around and live off grid without the expense and rules of campgrounds. So we wrapped up our volunteer gig, Jon got free to go remote and we moved our RV back to Steamboat Springs in July where we would stay until the baby was born and gear up to start our boondocking travel adventures.
More on boondocking to come!
