Couple Builds Beautiful Open Concept School Bus Conversion

[Music] all right so we're Adam and we are soulful bust life this is Luna our 1999 Bluebird all-american school bus that we spent a year converting into our perfect tiny house so I had a checklist for everything that I wanted in the bus I wanted 8.3 Cummins with an Allison transmission I wanted a flat front with a rear engine I wanted the storage compartments we wanted double emergency exits one on either side so that we could have some more views and slash more airflow and we found this bus at Northwest bus sales in Federal Way Washington and it literally just checked every single one of the boxes so they had seven of these buses that were purchased back from the Renton School District when they placed an order for new buses and I saw all seven of them on their website and for whatever reason this one bus just drew my attention and when we went to look they only had three left and it was one of those three and we looked at all three of those buses and just knew this was the bus and Luna has served us really well for the little over 12,000 miles we put on her so far so welcome inside Luna this is kind of your front entry area or foyer or as I like to call it it's my mancave so in our last house I had a detached 300 square foot man cave slash workshop and so moving into the bus I didn't really want to lose that having my own space that I can escape to when I kind of just either need to be by myself or I just want to do some work so I adapted a tool box that I already had to be kind of my storage for some tools some hobby supplies equipment camera lenses and that sort of a thing and then this is just my standalone workstation so I can open it up I can bring out my keyboard and my laptop or in my mouse I've got a nice place to be able to work I can bust out my laptop and use it as a secondary screen I've got a charging Bank over here that has a USB C and a standard USB so I can charge my MacBook off of the USB C or I can just charge my iPhone charge the GoPro and then I still have two standard plugs we did repurpose some of the original blue bus lights as well as some of the original switches so that we could have some accent lighting we did put LED bulbs in here so they're extra efficient as well so a big question we get all the time is like what do we do from the road for work to kind of pay for this lifestyle and the last nine years I've ran a home theater installation business back in Washington that that was my main business for a very long time I'm working on shifting myself out of that business because it was not soulfully rewarding if I should say financially it was rewarding but as far as my soul goes it definitely was not so we do have a youtube channel soulful bus life as well as an Instagram channel that we have documented on the Instagram from day one when we got the bus all the way through the conversion and now that we've been traveling and then our YouTube channel we have just started within since we hit the road and are continually creating new content about bus life we've got a lot of really good tutorials on building your own windows screens for your buses how to build a composting toilet for your bus all about our solar system and how we put that together and how I install their new inverter under the couch storage area so we're really trying to just help people learn from our mistakes so it can make your conversion that much easier and doesn't have to be the painstaking learning curve like you know let let my mistakes and financial costs help you to save money in the long run that's really kind of our whole goal with with our YouTube channel is to really just kind of bring light on to this process can be as easy or as difficult as you want to make it I personally like the motto of let's work smarter not harder so if I can find a better way of doing things I'm all about doing that and and that's kind of like one of the things with creating a nice station to work while on the road is so that I do actually want to work if I don't have a nice area to be able to do that I'm not really going to want to do it and you know that just makes that fit that much more difficult we also kind of do I do a little bit of artwork as well as I'm getting back into my passion of photography so that's something that we're going to be offering as we go to more fairs is offering some of our artwork photography for purchase as well as people to be able to use for like stock footage and things like that so that's kind of really my side hustle that I'm working to get to is to really get into just when I was a little kid my dream was to be a professional photographer for National Geographic so now it's living my dream life so might as well pursue the original dream that I had as a little kid and do something that actually is soulful hence soulful bust life but filling my soul and if you enjoy doing what you do it doesn't feel like work if you don't enjoy doing what you do it feels like work and a lot of times it just feels like misery so then you just don't want to do it and you're unhappy and all of that bleeds to every aspect of your life so that was really our main goal with doing bus life was so that I could shift away from working a job that I didn't like working as much anymore so that we no longer have the same bills we used to have that required me to work that high paying job now I can make significantly less money and just enjoy life and be happy doing whatever we want to do whatever that day is whether it's going out and filming a new YouTube video or going out and riding our bikes or just going and sitting in a chair and reading a book for the afternoon that's bus life this couch area I designed to be the space where Rachael and our dog Oakley could sit while we were driving safely and because it is a seating area it had to be storage too right so in the back here we have storage for kind of our odds and ends like bottles of wd-40 and things like that I've also got our 12-volt electrical hub here I have our main breaker disconnect for our Shore hookup and then in the bottom portion of this storage there is more storage but in the bottom area this tray lifts up to expose our battery disconnect some of our electrical wiring and then underneath this tray is where our Vic Tron energy 3,000 watt 24 volt inverter is so this breeze through this electrical vent here so it doesn't have any issues with Heat in that regards but this allows us to keep it by itself keep it safe keep it where there's no chance of water getting to it but it is still easily accessible because this whole couch section can all be taken apart so that if in the event we ever need to replace the inverter or make any alterations to the wiring it's very easy to do so we really like open floor plans period whether it's a tiny house or a regular house so when we came up with the design for the bus we wanted to make sure that we had this entry area that kind of is a separate area for me but then going into here this is the area where we just have our closets and our toilet and shower area so this is the only dividing section within the bus the rest of the living space is all a nice open area so all these walls their size was dictated by these walls were dictated by the size of our shower pan and these walls were dictated by the size of our composting toilet and being able to have enough space so that you could come in here sit down and not feel super cramped we decided to build our own composting toilet instead of going with like a separate or nature's head because to build this whole toilet only cost two hundred and thirty-three dollars with all of the supplies we do have a tutorial on our YouTube channel on exactly how we built this toilet with descriptions links to all of the parts and pieces but it's a urine diverter it works exactly the same way as a nature's head it has a fan that runs 24/7 that's always sucking air out of the unit but it was a fraction of the money to spend and at the end of the day you're pooping in a bucket regardless so whether it's a 5-gallon Homer bucket from home Depot or it's $1,000 bucket from nature's head it's still a bucket yes so when we were designing the toilet area we did design it around a window so then we had a way to be able to crack open a window when somebody's using the bathroom because no matter what sorry they're smells when you go to the bathroom it is what it is and we ended up going with a curtain instead of a door for a couple of different reasons one was wait two was how are we gonna make a door work here that isn't going to stick out into the hallway more or isn't going to take up more usable space so we decided to go with a curtain which we already owned from our own house because you know at the end of the day and 240 square feet there's not a lot of privacy period and everyone poops so whether it's a curtain or a door we all know what's happening behind here you just don't need to see it so the curtain works perfectly fine we do use a homemade one-to-one water vinegar spray to basically flush the toilet so then that way there's just not urine sitting in the urine diverter it helps things kind of flow through and if you add we use a lemon scented concentrate that's typically used for gray water tanks we actually put a little bit of that in the bottom of our urine jug and that really helps to cut down the smell and recently we kind of discussed and I think we're gonna start putting that lemon scent in our actual spray so it continues to add that scent to the urine jug and kind of keeps those smells at a minimum because really when it comes to the composting toilet the urine smells ten times worse than the solids do I I don't know what it is about it but that is by far the worst stench of a composting toilet when you have to change out that urine jet but as long as you keep the fan going all the time there's no smell that comes back into the rig so that's never a problem in the closet here this is my closet so we have a his-and-hers closet my closet acts as not only my closet but it's also where our electrical panel is hidden back behind all of these clothes our battery balancer our charge controller and then our batteries are actually in this and I can slide this little tray out to access the batteries and the fuses for everything that's hidden down there but it's out of sight it's out of mind I don't ever have to worry about it but it is easily accessible if I ever need to make any changes or alterations access fuses that have blown or anything like that because because we have ran into that where we've had a solar fuse blow all the sudden urge our controller wasn't producing anything quickly look at it and it's a fuse had an extra one in the Box pop it in and we're back on the road and running so we have a thousand and sixty watts worth of solar panels from great solar on the roof we have like I said previously a 3000 watt 24 full victor on energy inverter we have a let's see it's a hundred amp 50 volt charge controller again from Vic Tron energy we have a victor on energy battery balancer we have two 12-volt 200 amp our renergie AGM batteries that are wired together to make a single 24 volt battery and so far that has worked for us pretty much no matter where we are we're always able to power devices we're always able to maintain a hundred percent battery capacity throughout the day and then at night our lighting our home entertainment system charging devices and then our electric fridge is pretty much all that runs off of the solar batteries and in the morning we'll wake up somewhere between 70 and 80 percent and within a couple of hours of sunlight we're back up to a hundred percent and we're off and running again we do have a Ryobi portable generator that is kind of our backup power so if we are ever in the event where we get multiple days where there's serious cloud cover and we're not getting a lot of production we can charge our batteries back up from that we do use that generator when we use our portable space heater to heat the bus but we are in the process of converting over to a wood stove so then we can basically use that space heater as a secondary heating source instead of our main heating source and that way we just less dependent upon fossil fuels so like I said we have his and hers closet hers closet obviously is bigger than his pretty typical but Rachael's closet is literally just closed so that's all her closet serves the purpose or is just the organization of all of her clothes this we deemed the size because it fit what was on the next window and allowed me to still build the wall right where there was a ceiling joist so I could make sure structurally it was as strong as it could be and then moving into our shower we specifically located the shower here so that it again was right around a windows so that we could open up a window but then we also removed the emergency exit hatch both of those hatches and our bus leaked and actually had water inside of them so when I lifted this one out it was like sixty pounds I was totally not expecting it to be that heavy but it was so full of water that it weighed a significant amount so we replaced with two foot by two foot skylights this one is opening so that when we're taking a shower all the steam can just roll right out of the skylight that way it's passive so we don't have another fan consuming more energy just to suck the air out which it's hot air it's gonna rise and go out anyways so this really helps to make sure that we aren't over humidifying the inside of the bus just from taking a shower this is a standard just fiberglass thirty-two inch by 32 inch shower pan it was a hundred bucks at Home Depot and then I just used fiberglass panels on top of half inch plywood and then just plumb to everything with PEX piping and it's a great little shower it does not feel like you're showering in a small shower I mean I can get in here and show you that it's like full size you have more than enough room to move around I'm five foot seven so I still have more than enough ceiling height and with this guy you can angle it so that you can get it anywhere or you can shower off however you want this is one of those that has a stop flow button on it so you can leave the hot water still going and it will cycle the water through the hot water heater to make sure that it still runs we I bought that thinking it was a good idea but we just turned the water off because it still dribbles a little bit of water and when you only have 80 gallons of fresh water and you're trying to make that last as long as possible every bit of conservation that you can do is really going to be of great then fit because our preference for camping is boondocking we like to be out in nature enjoy nature enjoy solitude and so we try and go for as long as possible but our water and our food are always the things that kind of make us retreat back into civilization and have to go get new grocery store or fill up our water tanks that like a pilot sir loves or Flying J or wherever we can so when you first come into our living area you can see we have no walls we're really open space as I was saying we really like the open floor plan this was our pantry that has served us well but we are actually going to be disassembling it and our new wood stove from an eBay with sort of stoves is going to be going in here so this is going to be kind of reconfigured very soon we have our wood stove now so we're gonna be doing a little bit of a remodel of this particular section but our cat litter box is still back here and it will still be back here in the new set up that way she can still go back and it'll be kind of secluded and out of the way and it'll have one of those little fans like the composting toilet has so it sucks all the air out so that will look a little different soon all of the stuff that's in here back in the rest of the kitchen we actually built some new upper cabinets which I'll show you momentarily as we scoot back and basically all of this stuff is going to be able to now fit we have cabinetry here that back cabinet I actually was able to empty out I got rid of some more stuff as you're kind of continuous minimizing your life and this stuff will all be able to fit now back here because we basically created more storage back here we used to have an open shelf like the one over here but we got rid of the open shelf so that we had more efficient space with the open cabinets so back here we've got a nice big countertop this is our sink we have a nice large sink that we absolutely had to have because it's just nice to be able to actually do your dishes normal this I think our insane hot water heater is under the sink as well and here we have a like a big drawer for dishes and then this pulls out and this is our garbage and recycle so everything is really just tucked away nicely behind this bright little curtain so the sink in this whole general shape of this space it just kind of worked out this way we got this really cool kind of this this shape sink is kind of neat and it just fit into this kind of corner crevice I think it just looks nicer than having it straight on you kind of have this nice little workspace here but then it allows us to have all this extra space because I don't need a extra sliver of counter over here on the right hand side you're just not really usable space so if we've tucked this sink over here and angle it a little it just kind of gave us more space over here and that just sended up being how it kind of worked out is we were laying out our plan it just felt this just kind of felt nice yeah the backsplash was just something we got online and it's just this really awesome sticker it's a waterproof kind of anti mold and type bacterial sticker that ends up just looking like a really beautiful backsplash and we have a very clearly a very kind of beachy theme going on in our bus it's kind of our mobile beach house and the backsplash that we chose really just ended up fitting in with the whole color scheme that we were going with I really wanted as much open floor plan as as possible so sometimes when we've seen other like bus styles and and the counters are here and then you've got these really big cabinets up top it ends up feeling really enclosed and so we were really trying to keep it as open as possible so the Shelf here works really well because it's a great easy access for towels so I keep my extra dish towels in these baskets on top of the refrigerator but I can always have a nice set right here so as we're doing dishes it's easy to grab these things and this just keeps things really open and accessible but because it's towels you can make it not look really cluttered which was one of the reasons why we got rid of the shelf over here it ended up looking cluttered and and it wasn't a usable space so yeah we just did this for accessibility and just the open floor plan the shelving just really worked out well for this particular space so we have kind of a standard residential refrigerator from Home Depot it's a 10.1 cubic feet and it's just kind of the standard freezer on top fridge on bottom and it works really well it doesn't actually pull very much it our solar runs this thing no problem day and night and yeah it fits into the space great we did make sure that if you take the doors off if it breaks it does fit out the emergency exit that's one of the other things with the bus build sometimes is you want to make sure that your appliances just because you get them in and then you build your walls make sure you can get them back out in the chance that they fail because it's a residential refrigerator it's bouncing down a forest service road there's a chance something could go overhung so but this has served us really well it's got plenty of space in it we have no issues powering it with the solar and it kind of just fits our needs that's why we went with a more standard sized refrigerator because we live a plant-based lifestyle so we have a lot of fresh veggies that we keep and we also have rabbits so they also have like an entire shelf of veggies that they eat so we just needed a big fridge it kind of just fit our needs for our our family so our entire bus realistically when we started making our floor plan it was all about our animals and what they needed and from there we kind of designed the floor plan behind kind of around their needs so we do share our home with a dog two rabbits and a cat and so the bunnies have this whole under area here they have a nice big hutch they come out every day and play and run around and then we have great storage cabinets above them that lock up tight when we're driving and then we've got these great overhead storage cabinets that again stay stay nice and tight shut when we're driving and then this huge countertop area so we're really not lacking in counter space at all and this drawer also serves is like a huge cutlery silverware drawer so we're not really lacking in our kitchen needs we've got our big refrigerator we have lots of counter space a big sink dinette eating area and lots of storage we have a camp chef's oven that's what we chose to go with instead of a built-in oven range this is great because it do is it has two burners on top and then we have our single burner over here so I can use three burners if I need to it opens up and to be honest we can do everything in this oven that you can do the regular oven you just do it on a smaller scale so we have a pizza stone and we make two small pizzas instead of one big one and anything you can do with a regular oven you can do with the Camp Chef the cool thing is that we can go outside on a hot day and cook outdoors and we're not trapped inside on a hot summer day cooking dinner which can be pretty miserable whether you're in a sticky brick house or you're in a tiny house of some sort cooking indoors on a hot day is kind of lame so it's pretty great and then we do have our max air fan right above the general kitchen area so when we are cooking we can crackling it windows we can turn our fan on and it kind of sucks any steam or just whatever we're cooking you know all the smells and all that goods just go out so in here in these storage cabinets is where we keep like the mixing bowls because I do bake a lot and we've got our set of pans we have this really awesome set of there are these nesting pans that are pretty fantastic by magma I think they're actually like a boat pan but they all nest and stack inside of each other and they have little handles that come with them and then you can basically just you know have your little set of pans and and it's nice sturdy it doesn't take up a lot of space so we keep our pans and our bowls and spices and some other kind of just like pet food supplies in there along with Tupperware and that kind of stuff so that cabinet is just kind of general kitchen kind of larger kitchen supplies since all of our dishes are kept in there and then we have a dinette seat area here where Adam did a really great job of utilizing all the space possible so we do have on both sides these kick open and we've got this huge really skinny but deep space here so like all of our pet food cans can fit back there along with our we have kind of like a meta medical-supply kind of first aid for pets and then we also have this back this opens up on both sides and they serve as great storage this side is kind of like a my bathroom area kind of a toiletries and stuff and the toaster and blender and stuff is over there and then these also lift up so we take the cushions off makes it a little easier this also lifts up and this provides a huge just seat storage basically for other kind of random things this is some of my educational work stuff and then yoga mats and and that kind of stuff can all fit in there and the other side serves as kind of where our printer pens pencils and you know office type of stuff yeah just kind of the office area yes so the dinette seat we place two here intentionally because then we actually have this door that can open up on a nice day and we can actually open this door the bunnies can get kind of that fresh air and that breeze and then we also this seat comes down and this tabletop will rest on on the edges here and it creates kind of a lunge space so we can kind of lay down and read a book just eat whatever you want to do sometimes I put it down I'll actually just work on my computer right here and that's kind of cool so we do open that door we are working on trying to find some sort of I don't know magnetic screen or something so that we can actually have open all the time and not worry about the kitten getting out that's kind of the thing right now is we want to make sure we don't lose her she decides to bomb out the door although she's not really a door - sure but so anyway it's moving back I mean it's basically just this is all the kitchen living space it's really open really we tried to keep you a really bright we wanted the bright colors we wanted the light wood just making this as kind of big homey comfortable as possible yes so our flooring we have hardwood floor up front and then it transitions into carpet and that is very unusual for a tiny house of any kind we do know that we have carpet for the main reason was for our animals we are bunnies bunnies like to come out and play they like to jump they like to run and just be kind of crazy in general and carpet is better for them you know they slip and slide on hardwood floors and it doesn't matter how what kind of rug runner you have those rugs move so the carpet not only is it kind of homey or it's more comfortable on your feet but it really does provide just its better traction for the rabbits and then we also have a senior dog and the carpet is easier for her are going on and off the bed and it's just overall it was just traction for our animals the carpet was also a free piece that we got from a family member who was doing a construction job this was an extra piece of carpet they had so it worked out perfectly that we wanted carpet and that we ended up finding some really nice carpet for free so we just paid carpet guy to come out on a Saturday as kind of a side job and a couple hundred bucks with some carpet pad and he installed it super cheap quick and it is different we know that yeah carpet is is definitely kind of a unique thing in a tiny house but it fit our family's needs and again the animals is kind of what comes first if it was just us we probably would have just gone with hard floors and a rug runner but when you've got dogs running around and bunnies running around carpet works better we've definitely accommodate for our children civil our cat this is her this is Sybil's treehouse so Sybil's got her little tree here she can climb and be crazy on she's got a perch with the open window we've got screens on all of our windows which Adam does have a tutorial on YouTube but he shows you how to make screens for the bus and so we've got screens on all of our windows so this is sibylla's kind of this we call this Sybil's playhouse treehouse area she's about nine months old right now so she kind of gets those crazy kitten antics and this provides like a really great playtime for her and then across from it is where we have our TV we're big on movie nights I like to watch movies I like to re-watch TV shows that happen to be like my favorite the TV can really easily it comes out and if I'm cooking I can angle it this way and so watch and then when we have our movie nights it can go this way obviously in an angle perfectly to the bed and then when we're driving and not using it it just goes right back up against the wall and it's really nice and secure and under here is where we keep all of our kind of media storage board games that kind of stuff so everything that runs the TV is just right under here and it's all protected and covered by our covered cabinets and then this is just going to be extra kitchen storage I kind of cleaned this out so this isn't being this isn't fully organized since we're gonna redo that pantry area we're gonna be moving some stuff out of there so I can probably fill live a milk crate under here that I can pipe it like all the you know baking supplies in and then when I have a baking project I can just take everything out at the same time and that works really well so everything plenty of storage space kind of all around you know and the movie thing that was another when you're kind of sitting down making your bus plan it's sort of think about if you have kids whether they have two legs or four it's what do they need to be happy and comfortable in this new life and then make a list of the things that you really want we wanted a TV for movie nights we wanted a big sink and a normal refrigerator in our king-sized bed that we've always had so we kind of just made our floor plan around those those lists it's like what are the animals need and what do we kind of want and need to be happy because this is our full-time home so it's not just a weekend getaway and you can kind of deal with more if you're just doing it for a weekend this is your full-time house all year round you want it to have all those comforts and that's what we have and so like I said we do have a king-sized bed it's underneath one of our fixed skylights it doesn't open unfortunately we potentially will replace this wasn't with an opening one but for now it doesn't open but again we can open all these windows with the screens on them and get a nice breeze and then the bed lifts up really easily just lifts up on these hydraulic lifts and then we have kind of extra storage under here and then our two water tanks are on either side so under the bed as you can see we do have that's where we store our freshwater tanks and it's 240 gallon tanks that gives us about 80 gallons because the tanks are actually about 46 gallons each but just because of where the water inlets are we realistically just film about 40 about 40 gallons each and that gets us I would say about 10 days anywhere to two weeks it just depends on how much we're using the animals go through a lot of water we go through a lot of water just kind of on the usage during that time but it works really well they they're up here we don't have to worry about them freezing which is why we put them inside and it's really easy to open the bed and check our levels so we can just open the bed look on either side and see how much water we have left and it kind of helps us gauge our usage or when we need to plan to move and that kind of a thing and then we've got our king-size bed with atoms it's kind of a again with the his-and-hers we've kind of a his-and-hers sides of the bed so Adam has his wood area with his shelving and his crystals and stuff like that and then I kept my mint wall with the extra kind of mermaid tiles and my work basket back there and then the carpet is actually carried on that back ledge so that if you wanted to sit back there it's very comfortable and it also just it was just a great way to enclose that space because it's kind of this big metal just area that there's not really much to do with if you don't have your bed up really high which we have our bed down low because of our senior dog we couldn't put it up very high because of her this already is a little high for her we still help her up but this was actually really nice it's a little headboard it gives you a kind of a place to put stuff behind you the cat beds back there she loves sleeping in that bed or even just behind that curtain she has this big huge panoramic view of her ever changing world so it works really great and then we are big readers so we incorporated bookshelves there's a bookshelf up front for the Adams books and then I have a bookshelf back here just because we needed to have books on on board with us we do read a lot so we did the paint all ourselves Rachel and I both painstakingly spent over a hundred hours sanding the bus prepping it to do this paint job I've always wanted a Volkswagen bus a classic Volkswagen bus so when we were trying to figure out how we were gonna paint the bus I decided let's go ahead and paint it just like an old school Volkswagen bus so that's what we did taped off the the little front V and then continued on down the bus with the rest of the two-tone top half white bottom half with the ocean Mist and why panelling so you know we think we did we did a pretty good job trying to nail that that Volkswagen kind of bus look and then we have the under storage the last to store under storage actually goes all the way through to the other side so there are two more doors on the other side and then this front storage area is kind of like my mechanic storage so I have a toolbox filled with all of my mechanics tools to work on the bus I've got another bin that has our 20 tonne bottle jack and our 12 ton jack stands and basically anything that we need to if in the event something happened on the road we have the capabilities to pretty much fix just about anything ourselves and then the rest of us it's just rear engine in the back we have a bike rack and back that we tore two bikes on to be able to get around when we want to go crews on bike trails or see a town but we don't want to deal with driving the bus around that's kind of how we tend to typically get around and run some errands so with this bus it was it's a 38 foot bus so it is one of the larger it's a 75 passenger bus when we first bought it one of my initial hesitancies was driving it was being overwhelmed by just the sheer size and granted I spent the last five years driving a Ford Excursion the largest SUV that has still ever been made so I'm already used to driving a fairly large vehicle and I've towed big and closed trailers before so I do have some previous experience driving longer rigs but never one single vehicle that's this long and when I first jumped into it it was kind of a really eye-opening experience of like wow there's a lot behind me and there's a lot like it takes so much more time to slow down it takes so much more time to get up to speed but it's so much fun to drive like now that I'm used to it this thing is just a blast to drive it's a tank on Forest Service roads as long as you go slow and easy it can pretty much take you anywhere that you want to go the biggest thing for me that I wanted to make sure when we got the bus was that it did have the five or six speed was my preference I settled on the five speed Allison transmission and I'm very very happy that I did because how this transmission is made into the 8.3 is like the perfect absolute combo I never feel like we don't have enough power to get up and go I never feel like it's ever struggling at any point in time you know any vehicle that weighs a ton is gonna slow down going up a hill so that's just kind of something that every one of these buses is going to deal with but I'm very very happy we cruise seventy seventy-five miles an hour on the freeway all day long no issues she'll do faster than that if I let her but I try to keep her reined in at a fairly decent speed but you know there's really not much to driving this that's any different than driving a regular vehicle you just need to know the vehicles parameters and be aware of your surroundings and especially when driving a vehicle like this have patience have patience with yourself have patience with the road and have patience the vehicle because everything takes longer in a bus so as long as you're not in a hurry and you're good to just cruise bus life's amazing so the gauge cluster is factory all of these gauges came with the bus which it has your standard tach has your speedometer then we have gas gauge we have gauge for a battery capacity we have the amperage pull from the alternator as well as we have gauges for temperature oil pressure and then the air pressure for the front and rear air brake system so when you're running a bus that is running off of all air like ours is it's air brake the accelerator pedal is air our bus door is all air you have to make sure that there's enough pressure in the system to allow you to operate everything under conditions and most of the system needs to operate between 100 and 125 psi if there isn't that pressure in our bus the emergency braking system actually won't let go until it reaches that pressure to make sure that there's enough pressure in the system for everything to function properly so it's a great safety system that Bluebird designed within these buses to make sure that you're not trying to get up and go too quickly that you're going to go safe you're gonna make sure that everything's proper the way to go we do have an air accelerator built-in so what this does when I flick the switch when I first turn the bus on it increases the RPM of the engine which increases at the speed that the compressor is working to fill the system so that's a big benefit we've also got our light switch on the front here I did change all of our lighting to LED lighting so not only is it more efficient electrically but it is also much brighter going down the road and is much easier to see than the standard halogens that came with this thing because they just there was no throw to the original headlights what sir I'm sure your bus is probably exactly the same way and then we've got our transmission control over here it is all just a keypad touch control we can individually select what gears we want to go so if we're going down a hill I can kick it down into third gear and not have to feel like I'm having to constantly ride the brakes to slow us down in this panel here I did actually rebuild this the original panel was completely full of switches from all of the old school bus things so I utilized as much of the old switches as I could but I kept what I needed entry lighting my fan to keep me cool mirror defrost front defrost I have driver heat and then I have front heat here as well for Rachel from when there and back we've got our bus door open and closed windshield wipers front and rear fog lights so when we're boondocking and going trying to find a campsite in the middle of the night having those fog lights has saved our butts so many times of just breezing right past a campsite that we could have parked at that I would not have been able to see with just the regular headlights and then we do use a backup camera I unfortunately I don't remember exactly the brand we did find it on Amazon this is actually the second backup camera that we tried the first one I tried was a wireless system and at 38 feet and having walls in between it just was not an adequate enough signal to be reliable and when I wired this guy in I wired it so that when we turn our bus on it access my rearview mirror so it's running a hundred percent of the time whether I'm driving straight down the road or I'm backing up and that really lets me monitor our bikes that are on the bike rack and it also lets me see what's behind us and if I'm being too slow and I've got a huge line of cars I know I can pull over let every go everybody go by and then hop back on the road so I definitely would recommend if you have a longer bus just do a hard lined backup camera it's going to be more reliable and all of the backup cameras for the most part are going to use the exact same wire so down the road if the rear camera ever goes bad or the screen ever goes bad you'll still be able to use that same line running through to upgrade to a newer system but this system was pretty inexpensive I think it was like a hundred bucks on Amazon and super easy to install it is a two-channel camera system so I can actually add a second camera somewhere else and be able to either do split screen and see both at the same time or I can cycle back and other than that the only thing that I would say that I've seen a lot of schoolies do where when they're going through the gut process they decide that they're just going to remove all of the heating equipment whatsoever and my advice is you're gonna drive through the rain you're maybe gonna drive through the snow this windshield is going to fog up and you're going to need defrost so at least make sure that you're leaving the defrost and some way to be able to heat yourself up when you're driving down the road and can't run your space heater or your wood stove at the same time and you know it's it's here for a reason you might as well use it while it's already here instead of having to figure out a way of fixing it later on just leave it use it and we've removed all of the heaters further back in the bus that we're hooked up to the coolant system and literally just left what's up here well thanks for watching our bus tour we hope you enjoy checking out Luna if you want to see more of our adventures and more pictures and just kind of get in touch with us you can run Instagram and Facebook under Sol fool bus life we're also on YouTube also under the same handle soulful bus life we have a couple of we have one tour video we've got a couple more coming through and then we also have a lot of tutorial videos that we're trying to put together to again like I said previously just help you guys that are either in the dream stage of doing a bus conversion the planning stage or if you're in the midst of doing a bus conversion helping you to learn from our mistakes so your conversion can go that much faster than what ours did and feel free to get in touch if you have any questions yes yeah and if you have any questions feel free to reach us on probably Instagram would be the the easiest way if you have any questions about our bus or for us when it comes to bus light feel free to shoot us a message we're happy to answer any questions [Music] [Music]

Channel: Tiny Home Tours

Views: 535,082

Keywords: tiny home, tiny house, tiny home on wheels, van life, camper van, shipping container, design, tiny houses, tiny homes, tiny house tour

Id: P93LLYfPRsI

Length: 42min 47sec (2567 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 26 2019