We didn’t want to choose between having a home and being free. So we built a life where we don’t have to.
We’re Nicole and Levi. We live on an acre of Sonoran Desert outside Tucson, where we write about Southwest travel, desert nature, camping, and life in southern Arizona.
Before we bought this place, we spent 9 years living full-time in a 39-foot motorhome that was parked at a Tucson RV park.
In 2026, we traded the RV park for a house and an acre of desert, but kept the part we loved most: having a home base and plenty of reasons to go explore.
2005 to 2017
We did everything we were supposed to do
In 2005, we were in our twenties, fresh out of school, working full-time, and renting in the Midwest. Buying a house seemed like the obvious next step. We were told renting was throwing money away and that homeownership was how responsible adults built financial security, so we bought one.
Three years later, the housing market crashed, and we owed more on the mortgage than the house was worth. We couldn’t sell without taking a loss we couldn’t afford, so we stayed. What was supposed to help us get ahead became something we spent years trying to get out from under.
We kept working, paid the mortgage, and lived paycheck to paycheck while we waited for the numbers to finally work in our favor. By the time we were able to sell in 2017, I had spent years feeling trapped by a decision we’d made because it was supposed to be the responsible one.
When we finally sold the house, I was convinced I never wanted to own another one.
2017 to 2026
The pit stop that lasted nine years
In 2017, we sold the house, bought a 39-foot motorhome, and drove it to Tucson. We weren’t planning to travel full-time in it. The plan was to rent an inexpensive RV site for a year or two, save money, and decide where we wanted to live next.
Compared with the house, we had less space, fewer possessions, and far less to maintain. For the first time in years, our housing costs gave us room to breathe instead of consuming most of what we earned.
We still wanted to travel, but we quickly realized we didn’t need to take our house with us. We bought a Jeep and a squaredrop trailer and started using them for weekend trips in the backcountry while the motorhome stayed parked in Tucson.
The longer we stayed, the less temporary Tucson felt. We made friends, learned our way around the desert, and found ourselves choosing to stay another year, then another. When the pandemic arrived and home prices climbed, buying another house stopped feeling urgent.
By the time we finally left the RV park, we had lived in the same motorhome at the same Tucson site for nine years.
Now
About that depreciating asset
People warned us that a motorhome was a depreciating asset and that paying rent for an RV site meant throwing money away. They weren’t wrong about the motorhome losing value. What those warnings didn’t account for was what nine years of inexpensive housing enabled us to do.
Keeping our housing costs low allowed us to save, and in 2026 we bought a house on an acre in the Sonoran Desert outside Tucson.
This time, we weren’t buying because we thought homeownership was the next step we were supposed to take. We wanted more room, a dedicated studio, land around us, and a permanent home in a place we had already spent nine years getting to know.
The motorhome got us to Tucson and was a comfortable home for nearly a decade, but we no longer needed it to live the kind of life we wanted.
The Diesel Apartment documented those nine years of living in a stationary RV. Rooted in the Dust picks up from there, with Southwest travel, camping, desert nature, and life on our acre in southern Arizona.
