While we were working on keeping the blog running and growing, and really creating a home we loved, some friends passing through New Orleans gave us the idea to take an old run down camper and completely renovate it. Because why not add something massive to our to-do list. It sounded like an American fantasy, and after a bit of careful planning and a few thoughtful emails, we'd successfully figured out how to go about it. Just one month later, Rosie arrived at our door. A sweet, 1969 camper trailer that just needed the perfect dads to treat her right. We were so excited! And then we realized we'd just signed ourselves up for a wild summer project.
July, August, and September of 2017 saw us in a perpetual state of dirt and sweat as we tackled big questions like "what do I do with 50-year-old garbage?" and "how do we cut all this tile?" and "honey who do we think we are???"—our new power tool collection was giving us an identity crisis. But we got it done, and by October we were ready for our first camper trip up to North Carolina for a week, where we taught ourselves and Fox the ins and outs of hiking and building fires. Apparently the secret for complete beginners is you gotta have one of them fancy starter logs or else you're screwed.
We didn't expect this, but photos of Rosie would end up all over Pinterest, and get picked up by Design Sponge, Country Living, and Dwell Magazine. Rosie was kind of a hit, and we couldn't have been happier about it. So with all that excitement, we returned to New Orleans and had to decide where the hell we wanted to live, because our lease was ending. We didn't want to stay put, and we needed to make a plan. We left behind the pink home that we loved and sold basically everything that we owned.