64-year-old lives life on the road – her tiny house van has quite the impressive interior
When you do a search of the #vanlife hashtag on Instagram, you’ll see around 6.5 million posts.
More and more people are turning to a van life so they can be on the move, avoid high mortgages, and live a peaceful life within nature.
When you go through the #vanlife posts on Instagram, you’ll find it filled with people in their 20s and 30s going around different cities and countries in their van homes. Seeing all these photos makes a person think that van life is really just for the millennials.
Well, this woman is proving them wrong.
Clare Colins is a photographer from Australia who has been living a van life since August 2018. She is also 64 years old.
She made the switch to a van life to make life easier and more manageable.
She used to own a house but was getting tired of paying a mortgage just to have it.
“I had a house and I had a mortgage. And, as you know, being an artist, your income is not much,” Claire told Home on the Road. “I thought if I had something small and beautiful that I own without a mortgage, that’s going to make me feel a lot better than four empty bedrooms and a mortgage and then [there’s still house] maintenance. So I sold the house.”
So she paid off her mortgage and bought a van to move into. Thankfully, she also found the right people to help transform the van into something she could live in for the rest of her life.
“I needed it to be beautiful. I needed it to be artful. I needed that every time I walked into it, I liked it,” Claire added. “And I did.”
Welcome to the Mouse House!
When the doors closed, it simply looks like an ordinary white van. But when you open the sliding door, that’s when you’ll get a glimpse of something more.
Her van home still has a main door with windows that opens up to let the wind come inside. And once you enter the home, you’ll immediately step into the office on the left and the kitchen in front of you.
Next to the kitchen, there is a small door that leads to the driver’s seat of the van. It’s separated by a heat-proof curtain from the rest of the home.
The entire van, from the ceilings to the walls and to the floor, is double insulated to keep additional heat from coming in.
Claire loves to cook so one of the biggest parts in the van is the kitchen. She has a three-burner stove with an oven grill. She’s got a pantry and lots of cupboards for her kitchenware. And she’s even got a hot water system when she needs that hot water going.
“So I spent about a year, researching, reading, [and] looking at tiny houses… and van builds,” Claire shared. “Picking little bits out of them until I came up with this design… I designed it down to the millimeter.”
One question that Claire gets asked a lot is if van life is safe for a solo woman.
“A good idea is to have a way from the back to the [driver’s seat] and drive away,” Claire answered. “If you’re parked somewhere that you’re not sure of, don’t put your awning out. Just be ready to drive away.”
And what can Clare share with other people who want to live a van life?
“Buy a van, get a van, plan it though,” Clare said. “Draw it. Work out what you want in it because… it’s going to be difficult to keep buying and selling vans because you made a mistake. Do it. Life’s too short. Have a go at it.”
Would you like to see the rest of the Mouse House? Watch the video below.
Please SHARE this with your friends and family.