Okay, so we bought a campground, now what?
We have so many ideas and plans in our heads of what we want the campground to look like, but bringing those ideas to fruition is going to be the real challenge. Luckily, the main schoolhouse on the property has already been renovated, so we have a slight head start on the project as a whole. As great as it is that the schoolhouse is already remodeled and functional as a co-working space, there are still some changes and things we would like to add to the layout, such as more furniture, a podcast studio, a stage, a meeting room/content creator studio, and a camp store.
While adding these additions into the schoolhouse will take time and planning, the biggest mountain we will have to climb is planning and executing the campground layout for the rest of the park, which includes, rv sites, tent sites, a bathhouse, a dog park, a walking trail around the perimeter of the park, a dog wash station, a pavilion, oh and we can’t forget about the silo vacation homes! While our vision is big, we have to take a lot of small steps to get to the final product.
The first step we had to take? Getting our lives organized (well at least a little bit). Since we moved our entire lives from our storage unit in Phoenix up here to Montrose, we had A LOT of boxes to go through. Most of the boxes had been sitting in storage for 3 years while we were on the road in the RV, meaning we sort of forgot what we even had in half of them. It’s safe to say it took us a couple of late nights going through everything and deciding what to keep and what we no longer needed…which has certainly changed after living in a tiny home.
After we organized our personal lives a bit, it was time to dive into the campground plans. We already had the measurements and blueprints for what we wanted the layout to be for the park, but we wanted to layout one of the RV sites on the property in real life to see if the measurements were correct- or at least the size that we wanted them to be. We are SO happy we decided to do a mockup site! Once we saw everything laid out, off the paper and in real life, we realized that there needed to be some changes. The rv back-in sites were definitely too small, length and width wise. After traveling to many different campgrounds and parks in our Class C RV we know how much it means to have an easy site to back into, and sites that don’t sit so close together that you feel like sardines packed into the park. So, we made our adjustments and submitted the new changes the next day to get approved. It really goes to show you that you need to test things out before jumping in all the way.
For most of the week, Scott worked on all the behind the scenes projects – like working with the banks, connecting with contractors, and figuring out how we are going to get this project really started. While he was doing all of that work, I decided that it was time to make our ‘new to us’ travel trailer feel more like home. Luckily, there was a lot of paint leftover from the renovations made in the schoolhouse that I was able to use it to renovate our trailer. Maybe it wasn’t the colors I would have chosen given the choice, but my favorite option when doing these types of projects is the ‘free’ option! It truly is amazing what a little paint can do to the inside of an old trailer. I can’t wait to share the final product with everyone.
