Don’t talk to Heather Shutter about small spaces. Sure, she lives in a converted, 400-square-foot school bus — a skoolie — with her husband, Ben, three children (ages 14, 12, and 10), several dogs, and a Gecko lizard. She’s a full-time attorney who works in a tiny, cramped compartment in the back. Her kids are homeschooled.

She’s undaunted. The world is truly hers.

“There’s a great big whole outdoors,” Shutter says with a laugh. “The big outside.”

Today, that big outside is in Flagstaff, Ariz., about an hour from the Grand Canyon and 90 minutes from The Petrified Forest. Next up is Phoenix, then Tucson, and onto El Paso to visit relatives for Christmas.

Shutter and family launched this adventure last September, shortly after she took a job with Seattle’s DuBois Levias Law Group, a fully remote office. The plan is to do this for at least a year, until her oldest child starts high school. Even then, she’s open to continuing a lifestyle that is more associated with young singles seeking adventure than white-collar workers and growing families.

THE ADVENTURE

To understand why this works in the present, you must first understand Shutter’s nomadic past.

An Army brat, Shutter attended 22 different schools — mostly in Germany — before graduating high school. Her parents would move to an area they didn’t know anything about and then move to different neighborhoods in search of the best fit. A certain rootlessness is in her blood.

Her husband, a former member of the military himself and a helicopter mechanic, began homeschooling their children during the pandemic. Without him, she adds, this wouldn’t be possible. She is the family’s sole breadwinner.

“I think as a kid I really learned to be a chameleon and kind of fit in whatever environment we were in,” she says. “But for my husband and I it made it really hard to pick a home base.”

Shutter became familiar with the Seattle area when her father was stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. She became reacquainted when her husband was transferred there. They have a house in Olympia they are renting out.

THE DECISION

Their home now is the converted bus, which they bought in the fall of 2020 while she was 30 and still in law school. The purchase was inspired by a month-long car camping trip the family took while her husband was on leave from the Army. They drove from Alaska to San Diego down the Pacific Coast Highway, “our favorite family trip we ever took,” she recalls. “We talked about how we could make that our normal operating procedure.”

They considered an RV, but the bus was cheaper. Even then, it took four years to get it ready. Ben took the lead on improvements, including cutting it in half lengthwise to raise the roof 18” and rewiring it. It was complicated because they had to park the bus with family in Texas, so they traveled to work on it when their schedule permitted. It got a little easier when they moved it to a friend’s property in Southern California.

“If I’m being honest, we didn’t do it in the smartest or the cheapest way,” Shutter says, noting that the bus had about 120,000 miles on it when they bought it. It gets about 10 miles to the gallon. Shutter estimates they spend less than $500 per month on gas.

Her kids, she says, love the lifestyle. All three play musical instruments, and that “big outdoors” is the perfect stage. They recently went snowboarding. The family visits as many national parks as it can. On Thanksgiving, the family hiked into the Grand Canyon. It has visited about 35 states.

“I get a lot of satisfaction about giving my kids experiences,”  says Shutter, who has more than 42,000 followers on TikTok who follow her family’s life on the road. “I think they’re getting a lot of hope and experiential learning out of this. They are able to explore whatever is interesting to them in the moment.”

FAMILY MATTERS

Shutter says the future revolves around “whatever is best for my family.” Her oldest, she says, has been yearning for a more traditional school experience, especially as she enters high school next year.

Shutter, a family-law attorney, has responsibilities. She sometimes flies into Seattle for cases, but King County allows court via video, so she does much of her work over Zoom.

“Yes, I’m an attorney. I like nice things. I wear suits and get dressed up when I go to court,” she says. “I’m still type A. I can be kind of workaholic, but that’s part of the duality and joy of the bus. It lets me be both versions of myself.”

For now, the family is heading to El Paso for Christmas to visit her sister-in-law and nieces. The extended family will camp outside. Then comes New Mexico to visit White Sands, wave-like dunes stretching across 275 square miles of desert.

Shutter knows the lifestyle isn’t for everyone. She’s not a hipster, nor is she seeking attention. For her, it comes down to family.

“The thing is for us, we can get the things that we want out of life,” she says. “It’s not always easy. Sometimes, it’s hard. But right now, it’s the best thing for our family.”