I Slept in the Trunk Last Night

If you've been reading this blog, you know that I've been sleeping in my car for several months now. I decided to try something different last night, though.

For nearly every night in my car, I've slept with my head resting in the back seat and my legs extended into the trunk area. Last night, I reversed position, with my head in the trunk and my feet extending into the back seat. Although the idea of sleeping in the trunk seemed a little weird at first, it actually worked great.

Now, I thought I might be a bit claustrophobic with most of my body in the trunk, but I was actually more comfortable.

I installed a little push-light on the roof of the trunk door to give some light in the evenings, which are now growing ever longer. I can actually affix my Ipod Touch to the roof of the trunk and use it as a miniature ceiling-TV for watching videos before I go to bed.

I'm not sure exactly why, but this setup seems to be a somewhat better use of my space. It also makes it easier to keep my car interior neater, and it's faster to make my car look 'normal' in the morning before going to work. Now I just leave my pillow and foam sleeping pad in place during the day. I can roll up the sleeping bag and stuff it into the trunk area (where my abdomen would normally be while I sleep).

In all, sleeping with my head in the trunk wasn't a bad experience at all. I'm still new at this whole 'living in a car' idea, and I still get new ideas. I want to experiment and find what's the most comfortable over the long run.

A Chilly Night in the Car

Last Tuesday night was my first chilly night in the car. I've been living in my car since this past April, and springtime was very mild. Very rarely did the temperature drop below 50 degrees Fahrenheit during the entire first month I slept in my car. And after mid-May, the temperatures were much higher.

This past Wednesday morning, I woke up to a temperature of 40 degrees.

Honestly, I've been fearing sleeping in my car in winter. I don't especially like the cold, but I want to stick with my experiment in homelessness at least for this winter. I recently acquired a mummy-style sleeping bag from Wal-Mart. Supposedly this sleeping bag is made for temperatures all the way down to 0 degrees F. Now, here in the middle of the country, the temperature doesn't often get that cold, but I want to be prepared.

Wednesday morning's 40 degrees wasn't especially cold, but I was pleasantly surprised that I actually felt comfortable in the sleeping bag. It seems to help that the human body actually gives off a decent amount of heat, and it's not too difficult to heat a tiny space (like the back of my car) with one's own body.

With privacy curtains installed, I have a cozy little compartment in the back of my car, and the well-insulated sleeping bag helps to keep me quite warm.

My clothing wasn't especially warm; I wore nothing more than sweatpants and a sweatshirt, with a t-shirt underneath. A wool hat kept my head warm, and I slept just fine in the car like that.

Now, I'm hoping that I'll be just as comfortable when the truly cold weather hits, from December through February. I might need to buy another well-insulated sleeping bag for more layering. And I might need to start wearing long insulating underwear to bed. But this is part of the experiment.

Since I don't have a fixed home anymore, the easiest answer to beat the cold weather would be just to drive to a warmer climate for three or four months out of the year. But I do have a full-time job, and I earn good money. And I'm under contract for several more months, so I don't exactly have the option of quitting right now. To be quite honest, it's actually quite fun to be a well-paid professional by day, and a homeless person living in a car by night. I've been able to hide my living situation from my co-workers for many months. And I don't really want to leave my job. So I'll be parking my car in the immediate area every night for the next several months, rain or shine, cold or warm.

I feel great after my first night in a cold car. I just hope wintertime is manageable. At least there won't be any mosquitoes!

Every Bit of Space Counts

Living in a car means that every last bit of my 23-square-foot home has to count. No room can be wasted. However, I have to reserve a fairly large percentage of that for a bed area. That includes about half of the backseat area and nearly half of the trunk. So I'm left with the rest (maybe 12 square feet) for storage. I actually have a storage container under my pillow, so even some of my bed area has a dual use.

I bought a set of plastic stacking drawers at Wal-Mart for about $15. I can hold a fair amount of clothes and supplies in those drawers, and the main benefit is that by 'going vertical' with drawers, I use every bit of my available floor space.

Drawers, or any time of stackable storage for that matter, force us to be neater and more organized.

I'm learning to acquire smaller products, too. For example, I used to have a full-size flashlight, but it just took up too much space. I bought a miniature LED flashlight instead, which gives off just as much light and takes up possibly one-fifth the space of the big one.

I used to own a 17-inch laptop computer, with all the bells and whistles. But living in a car, there's simply not space for such a large machine. Instead, I replaced it with an IPad. The IPad, along with a Bluetooth keyboard, takes care of 90% of my computing needs. For anything more serious, I'm able to use a computer at my job after hours.

Big things, such as winter clothing, what little furniture I have left, many of my books, and my CD/DVD collection are left at an off-site storage facility. It doesn't cost me very much to maintain those belongings there. And if I really try, I can forsee a day when I won't even need that storage unit.

Since I've tried to reduce my wardrobe now that I live in my car, I have to wash clothes more often. I make time to do a wash at least once a week at a local laundry facility. And I do store a small amount of laundry soap (the smallest package they sell at the Dollar Tree, actually) in my car, along with a small package of dryer sheets.

Over the last few months, I've tried to obtain the smallest version of everything that I need. Instead of large headphones, I use tiny earbuds. Instead of buying and carrying bulky books, I purchase e-books to read on my Kindle.

Mainly, though, the key to living in a tiny space is being content with fewer material things. Sure, it would be nice to have a TV, but I don't really need one. Besides, I can get my TV fix through the Hulu app on my Ipad. It might be nice to have a kitchen table to eat my dinner, but I can make do by eating at a picnic table in the park. It might be nice to have a stove or microwave to make my own food in my car, but I don't really need one. I can eat dinner quite well with cold food, like salads and sandwiches. And if I need an occasional warm dinner, I can warm something up in the microwave at work or eat at a restaurant.

And in case you're wondering, I don't spend all of my non-working waking hours in my car. I use my car for sleeping and for changing clothes. Sometimes I eat dinner in my car, and I watch videos on my Ipad or listen to satellite radio in the evenings for an hour or so. But other than that, I spend time in other public places -- living around my car, not always in it.

Privacy in a Car

During my first two weeks living in a car, I spent most of my evenings trying to organize my belongings. Not matter how organized I became, it was still hard to function without any real amount of privacy. My car's windows were untinted, which made it hard to change clothes or relax in the car.

I spent those first few nights parked on a residential street, and the lights got to be annoying any time a car passed. Even the fairly distant street lights made it harder for me to sleep, since I was used to sleeping in a very dark room. I tried using eyeshades, but even the virtual darkness of the eyeshades didn't change the fact that my whole 'home' was exposed to anybody who walked by and peeked in.

Something would have to change.

After living in my car for two weeks, I decided to put curtains up and tint my windows. That combination of tint and curtains worked amazingly well, making me practically invisible to any passersby.

And even better, it didn't cost that much to install.

I stopped by my local AutoZone parts store and picked up a $10 do-it-yourself window tinting kit. After watching a few instructional videos on YouTube, it took me about an hour to tint my back passenger windows. I decided against tinting the rear window, since the contour is different. Also, the defrost grid has a greater likelihood of causing ripples or bubbles in the tinting.

After applying the tint, I went to a fabric store and bought a couple of yards of denim fabric. The thick, relatively opaque denim would make perfect curtains. I cut them to cover the approximate shape of each window.

In all, I had cut four curtains: one for each of the back passenger windows, one to cover the rear window, and one to separate the front seats from the backseat area. Some adhesive velcro kept the curtains attached to the windows.

Total cost of the window tinting, denim fabric, and velcro: $25.

One of the best things about my curtains is that they are convertible and removable. By day, my car is completely transparent and looks like a regular vehicle. After I'm parked for the night and the sun has gone down, I just put up the curtains, and my car is instantly converted into a tiny private capsule. Passersby can't tell that I'm inside. In fact, they can't even tell that there are curtains up, unless they practically press their face to the window and look very closely.

By making my car private, it makes my life in a car so much easier. I can change clothes without a problem. If necessary, I can even go to the bathroom or take a sponge bath in my car. But more about those topics some other day!

By making my presence in the car nearly undetectable, I feel more comfortable parking overnight in a much wider range of locations. Some otherwise wonderful parking places have bright lights, which made me think twice about parking there. Now I have no qualms about parking under the bright lights, because the private capsule in my car is shielded from the light. No eyeshades needed!

And my little sleeping area is just about what I need. The private capsule in my car is shaped like a small igloo. I sleep with my head behind the front passenger seat, and my legs stick into the trunk area. I have a fairly large 'nightstand' area next to me, which I use for storage. It's actually a lot more comfortable than I thought it would be. My little private living area -- not counting the front seat area of the car -- gives me just over 23 square feet of space.

Twenty-three square feet. That's not much by most modern standards, but just enough for me to get by.

Learning to Use My Space

Over the past five months that I've tried this experiment of living in my car, I've become much more aware of the space around me, not to mention the space that my possessions occupy.

In my earlier post, I mentioned that I moved the remainder of my possessions into a storage unit. Of course, that was after a thorough cleaning-out process of all the things I had accumulated. I had to go through books, magazines, electronics, and other miscellaneous gadgets. Going through all those things made me realize that I don't use most of them, and if I hadn't used them in over a year, then I didn't need them. And if I didn't need them, then I'd be better off selling them or giving them away. So that's what I did.

After the 'purge', as I call it, I still had some things. But I had a lot fewer things. Since I wasn't going to be owning a house anymore, I didn't need all those lawn tools or a lawnmower. I got rid of all the clothes that I couldn't fit into anymore. Disposables were either used up, donated, or disposed of. Furniture was sold, with only a bare minimum put into storage.

I decided to simplify my ownership of 'things' down to a bare minimum. I kept a small wardrobe of clothes, necessary toiletries, the most important books and documents, and some useful electronic devices that would help me keep in touch with the rest of society.

That purge of possessions was important for me. At that point earlier this year, I had realized that accumulating material goods was really of no value; I had already lost one of the things that was truly important to me when I lost my wife.

My decision to start living in my car was a lesson to me that even reducing my possessions to a bare minimum would sometimes fill my car with seemingly unnecessary things.

So I learned to organize! I could only store an extremely limited amount of food, and even that would only last a very few days in the trunk of a car. So food always went in the same small cooler, always placed in the same corner of the trunk.

I bought two large - but shallow - plastic containers for trunk storage. One would hold clothing for 4-5 days at a time. The other would hold books, documents for my work, and other papers that I needed to keep dry. In a separate plastic container, I kept all my nighttime necessities: pajamas, a sheet or two, a blanket, with a pillow nearby. With a duffle bag as a makeshift hamper, a backpack for my electronics, and a small rolling briefcase for sundries and toiletries, I was ready for just about anything.

Still, it felt like a lot of stuff.

Living in a six-year-old Buick will test your use of space like little else will. After a week of sleeping curled up in the back seat of the car, I learned that the back seat itself was just a waste of space. I was living alone, and I would obviously never actually sit in the back seat while I was driving, so I found a wrench and took out the backrest of the seat, leaving the bench and leaving an easy connection between the back seat area and the trunk.

With the back seat out, I could now lie stretched out on my 'bed', extending my feet into the trunk area. Add a sheet and blanket and, voila! I had a comfortable place to sleep.

Everything had to be in its place. Just like moving into any new home, if things aren't in their proper place, it wastes time and energy to look for them. So I quickly learned to get organized. I never tossed things onto the floor or passenger seat of the car, just assuming I'd find a place for it later. Everything had to be put away the right way. Every night, I had a place for my shoes, wallet, and keys. And I made a personal rule that when I ate in my car, I'd never leave the empty packaging lying in the car. Drink cups and food packages would go into my tiny trash can or directly into a dumpster.

My very small living area was starting to turn into my new home, and it was getting to be, dare I say, comfortable. It only took me two weeks to figure it out. I had become a minimalist and had hope of succeeding at this experiment of living in my car.

The only main problem I had left was an obvious one, though. My Buick had untinted windows, and my 'home' was essentially exposed to anyone who as much as peeked in my car window during the night. I was going to need privacy to be happy living in my car, and I had an idea.

My Secret Life in a Car

I have a secret. A big secret. I live in a car. And I've lived in a car for the last five months. So, I suppose you could say I'm homeless.

I didn't plan this. A little over a year ago, my wife and I lived in a regular 3-bedroom, 2-bath home. We were a two-income family getting by. However, in little more than a few seconds, that all changed. While she was driving home from work one evening, my wife was hit by a drunk driver. She survived the accident initially, but lost her battle after four days in the hospital.

As if the grief of losing my wife weren't enough, the hospital bills amounted to over $70,000. Insurance only paid a little over half. My income by itself wasn't enough to pay the mortgage, so I decided to sell the house.

My initial reaction was to rent an apartment, but my income - by itself - wasn't enough to make it worthwhile.

On the day the sale of our house closed, I had moved what was left of my possessions into a storage unit, and I had nowhere to sleep. I thought about staying in a hotel or asking friends or family if I could stay with them. But I hadn't lost my wife more than three months before, and part of me just wanted to be alone.

And so I did what made the most sense to me at the time: I slept in my car that night. Now, it was the middle of April. The weather here (in the middle of the country) was still a bit chilly at night. But the weather had been warmer than usual, so it was really quite comfortable. So I slept in my car the next night, and the night after that. And I've been living in my car for almost five months now, with just a relatively few nights sleeping in a 'regular bed'.

Now, it wasn't the easiest thing I ever did. But I started to realize that I kind of liked it. I had a level of freedom that I had never had before. And my fixed monthly expenses dropped to near zero.

Of course, I had new challenges to face. Where would I shower? How would I get mail? Where would I go to the bathroom? Where would I park my car at night when it was time to sleep? And, not the least of my worries, how would I deal with the social stigma of being one of 'those people' that lives in his car - a.k.a. - a homeless guy, or a bum.

And I still haven't mastered all of these challenges. But I've found some level of satisfaction in this new lifestyle. I guess you could say I'm homeless by choice.