by Michele Coffill 
 
 photos by Bernadine Carey-Tucker 
 
 video by Tony Packer 
 
 Two people and two dogs are traveling the country, coexisting in 98 square feet of living space. 
 
 On some nights their backyard has been the vast openness of the Yukon Territory in northwest Canada, other nights it was Bridge Street in downtown Grand Rapids. 
 
 Kelly Tousley, ’11, and Curtiss O’Rorke Stedman joined the tiny house movement in June after purchasing a utility trailer and outfitting it for adventure. They took their dogs and some of their belongings and left their Juneau, Alaska, home in June to hit the road to build O’Rorke Stedman’s rising music career. 
 
 Also in June but in the southwest U.S., Kristin Connolly Schillaci, ’05, and Tony Schillaci, ’06, returned to Santa Fe, New Mexico, after spending a year on the road living in an 18-footlong, 1980 Coachman trailer. They traveled 25,000 miles to 30 juried art shows in 35 states to sell Kristin’s fine art photographs. They also were on the road with two big dogs. ||||| A 1,200-square-foot house is considered small by today’s standards. But one Juneau couple is leaving their home for something with less than 100 square feet of livable space. They’re hitting the road, but that doesn’t come without sacrifice. 
 
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 On the curb in front of a brown house sits a bookshelf, a suitcase and empty picture frames. Passersby might think the tenants are moving out or spring cleaning. 
 
 “We don’t really have enough time to do a true yard sale so this is our, like, piecemeal please-everybody-come-take-our-stuff-so-we-can-move-into-98-square-feet,” Kelly Tousley says with a laugh. 
 
 There’s also a sign: “Knock on the door for more items for sale in the house.” 
 
 Kelly and her boyfriend are getting rid of nearly everything they own to fit into a tiny house on wheels parked outside their rental. From the outside, it looks like a glossy white travel trailer. 
 
 “I mean, picture opening up the back of a U-Haul and that’s what we started with,” she says. 
 
 But the inside is more like a home with vinyl hardwood floors and lime green walls. They’ll pull the trailer with a truck for a yearlong trip through the Alaska road system and down to the Lower 48. 
 
 For such a small space, it’s remarkably plush. A bench folds out into a queen-sized bed. 
 
 “We had the conversation of, if we’re living in this and this is our house, we don’t want to be sitting on milk crates with cushions on top of them and feeling like we’re going to get slivers in our fingers when we touch the walls,” she says. 
 
 Electricity runs off solar panels. There’s a small bathroom separated by a curtain and a kitchenette but no running water. 
 
 It’s their version of the tiny house movement, downsizing and taking a do-it-yourself approach to home ownership. Many tiny houses are palaces compared to their trailer. But the couple needed something smaller and road worthy. It only cost $8,600. 
 
 “The coolest thing that I built to date was a birdhouse in sixth grade,” says Kelly’s boyfriend, Curtiss O’Rorke Stedman. “And to look at a box and say we can turn this into a house, that was daunting. And that fact that it actually worked so far is great.” 
 
 Curtiss is a high school English teacher and musician. Last summer, he toured the interior for his solo music project, Cousin Curtiss. 
 
 “So when I got back, I said, ‘You know, this is it. I’m hitting the road. I want to do this full time,’ and Kelly was 110 percent behind me all the way,” he says. 
 
 Kelly remembers it differently. She thought he was talking about taking a vacation. 
 
 “Whereas, I think when the conversation happened, Curtiss more so took it as I’m hitting the road with him full time,” she says. “And I think it took a couple of months of that conversation to happen. Is it realistic for both of us to hit the road, for both of us to quit our jobs?” 
 
 Together, they decided it was. Kelly would quit her job working with autistic kids. They would sell everything and go on tour indefinitely. Traveling from Tok to Chicken, then down south through Montana and Michigan. 
 
 Friends and family had mixed reactions. But no one said it was a terrible idea, don’t do it. 
 
 “I don’t think anybody said that,” he says. “I think a few people may have said, ‘Why would you do that?’ They didn’t understand it.” 
 
 One of those people was Kelly’s grandfather, a professional builder. Kelly recounts telling him about their first big project. 
 
 “‘Grandpa, we’re going to cut in windows. We’re going to install our own windows.’ And he said, ‘You can’t do that. You can’t install windows in a trailer. That doesn’t make any sense.’ And I sent a picture of us installing the first window and he said, ‘Huh, they did it!’” 
 
 They completed the tiny house in eight months. Then came the time to purge all their stuff. For Curtiss, the most difficult thing to give away was his plants, grown from his great-great-grandmother’s clippings. 
 
 Kelly says it was her clothes. 
 
 “You know, I’ll look at a shirt and be like, ‘I love that sweatshirt! I wore that every home track meet in high school.’ But the reality is I have those memories of track and I don’t need that sweatshirt to hold onto,” she says. 
 
 Kelly is giving the tiny lifestyle a year. After that, she says she’ll reassess. 
 
 Curtiss wrote the song “Here and Now” about missing Kelly on tour. But now he won’t have to. The couple is setting off for miles of open road, pulling behind them what they’ll call home. 
 
 “I think it’s a blessing to be able to ditch everything you own and be able to take off in true nomad style like human’s used to be and go hunter-gatherer across the country looking for adventure,” he says. 
 
 To see where Kelly and Curtiss are on their journey, visit paygasnotrent.com
– Alaska couple Kelly Tousley and Curtiss O'Rorke Stedman, both 27, vowed at the end of 2014 that they would quit their jobs as a social services worker and English teacher and spend a year traveling the US. "After four years of being 'professional adults,' we realized we wanted more out of life," they write on their blog, Pay Gas, Not Rent. To afford the dream, they sold almost every possession in their more than 1,000-square-foot rental home and spent about $10,000 turning a 98-square-foot trailer into a livable space, complete with toilet, mini fridge, sink, desk, pullout bed, and lots of hooks for storage. They left on May 31, 2015, traveling from Alaska to Michigan and from there to at least 13 more states so far. And Business Insider reports that seven months into their journey the couple is not only surviving but enjoying themselves—and is entirely debt-free. Not every month is equal. Their expenses were low when they spent a good chunk of the fall with family in Colorado, for instance, but they spent thousands getting to and exploring California. Stedman, a musician who goes by the name "Cousin Curtiss," plays two to four gigs a week to support their adventure, and the couple says it helps that they have no space to put new material possessions. Stedman admits that they had to learn as they built their new home, which had to hold their two dogs as well: Before this adventure, "the coolest thing that I built to date was a birdhouse in sixth grade," he told Alaska Public Radio at the start of their journey. Much of what they learned was through YouTube and trial and error, the Grand Valley magazine reports. But while they admit to Business Insider that they're committed to finding real jobs again when the year is up and saving for things like retirement, they'll never stop traveling. (The tiny house movement has a little secret.)