Couple Builds Beautiful School Bus Conversion As Their Fulltime Tiny Home On Wheels

[Music] [Music] I'm Elizabeth and I'm rich and this is our little house on the highway yeah we named our best little house on the highway we try to stay away from genders or actual names so it's pretty gender fluid but little house in the highways what we call it yeah we bought the bus in Bradenton Florida it's by st. Pete and we found that on Craigslist it was $2,500 so we went down and looked at it and it ran pretty well so we gave him the money and we drove it back to Atlanta yeah the bus came from an academy and so they had gotten new buses and they pretty much just wanted this one to be off the lot we found it on Craigslist over the weekend and by Monday morning we were in town taking a test drive and everything checked out but I mean we didn't really have a lot of research that we had put forth for buses so we thought okay it runs it had scheduled maintenance bought it it had 247 thousand miles on it but I heard that these engines get a lot of mileage so it's just breaking it in originally Richard wanted to live in a van and I thought well maybe just starting from I we were living in a Bart two-bedroom two-bathroom house and so going from that to a van wasn't really something I was ready to do so I started looking up RVs and those were either really expensive or had a lot of maintenance that they would need and they were all just really manufactured so I started finding people on YouTube that we're doing this like building out buses and I thought well if we just try really hard if we just go and do it and put them the extra elbow grease then we can make it happen for ourselves we knew that once we got the bus emptied out it's like a blank canvas you can build it however you want so all the buses are different so and since we built it all ourselves we know it better yeah you know we know every nook and cranny we know if some breaks we not to fix it you can't do that with a lot of houses or RVs people don't even know where they live and also we like that we put in a lot of the work ourselves so we can fix it if some goes wrong we're not shipping a product back to a company to get another one we're like fixing it you know which sometimes we can and sometimes we're also improvising a lot yeah when you live in a bus you learn how to adapt a lot so this is the inside it's a 96 it's got air brakes and lights and we just found out that our cruise control works driving across Texas it was important to check the cruise control so that's nice all the switches still work properly I keep the mirror up so I can see everything behind me yeah I'll have to check the mirror and I'll see all the drawers opening and stuff falling over I say hey go pick that up but it's kind of like a cockpit I feel like this is my area since I spend most of the time in so we've decorated it with stickers I got a fidget spinner up here this was an old trophy from motorcycle stuff yeah things that I you know the most important thing is when you downsize to a bus you get rid of a lot of things so we can only keep so much you kept the handle because that latch is pretty well you just put your hand there and open it up on the outside of the bus we have just a latch that will lock the master lock on when we first got the bus and we started driving it away I felt very comfortable because I used to be a school bus driver I drove a school bus for two years and I still have my CDL license so it felt like home it felt really natural and the the size doesn't intimidate me at all and I'm just glad it's not a stick shift and it's a four-speed automatic it's got the 7.3 liter turbo v8 the Navistar our starter did go out we're up in the cold weather and it does not enjoy the cold weather the bus came from Florida and it doesn't have a heater block either so it gets really cold and it's hard to start so a few times we've had to spray some ether into the air filter part and kind of get it that compression is so hard to get when it's cold inside here we have all of our first-aid and Road stuff we haven't done anything in this area yet so it's still empty we can put a bookshelf or something like that when we bought the bus they did tell us it had some fuel injector work done on it so so far so good the starter went out I think I said that but we had to get a new one and get it installed so when the starter went out the relay also got loose it was it's in the hood but it was starting and running was starting the starter as we were driving so eventually the starter just went goodbye so we have some plants in here and a little cigarette inverter just for the bose system while we're driving it's easy to just plug it in and use the buses own power we didn't have a preference on the buses that we were gonna buy we just knew they were when we looked they were between four and five thousand dollars and when we looked at this one it was twenty five hundred so we'd rather spend less money and able to get us out faster and it's like a house if something if you own a house and your AC goes out or your plumbing goes bad you still have to spend all that money to fix it so we knew it was gonna we'd have some expenses with it the our horn is a friendly horn so I'd see people or they're looking at the bus and I'm always honking and waving and hey I want to see the bus that's fun yeah we keep most of our shoes here at the front just because they're easy to take off and shove under this little cubby wipe our feet we do haven't done too much up here this cup doesn't tip over so I'll put cans in there or other cups of things and just sits up there have a plant my grandmother gave us that plant when she visit us for Thanksgiving yeah when we meet other Schooley people another van people - they make stickers we've got our friends the Schooley little groundhog banana van adventures sloth high five it's nice meeting people and trading things and I'll just sticky tack all the backs and put them up that way they're not permanently stuck the bus is governed at 65 miles an hour so on the highway it's just pedal to the metal and but I don't like to go that fast we stay off the highways we'll try to do the back roads 50 miles an hour is my favorite because it keeps the RPMs low and helps with the fuel mileage which isn't that good we only get about eight miles to the gallon it's a forty gallon gas tank so it's pretty small to begin with so you drive in four or five hours and you got to fill up again so about 300 miles per tank the speakers work but the radio doesn't work that'll get replaced one day we also keep our manuals for the bus up here the instruction manuals and yeah they came with the bus the Academy that we bought the bus from originally in 1986 so it was one company that had the bus the whole time they said they had him but when we left with the bus we didn't get him with us yeah that's nice on those bumps so I'm in the driver's seat now and right behind us is where we do most of the solar equipment all most of the Soler's in here built this box just with some plywood and two by twos and one by six is just whatever I could find in the top is a cubby with some electronics and we've got 400 watts on the ceiling that come down into the charge controller the charge controller comes down into the batteries it's to 200 amp hour batteries so there's 400 amp hours here most of our power goes to our refrigerator and we also have some LED lights that go around the bus we charge our cell phones we charge our computers not too much else the power is enough for what we need in the bus if we don't have any Sun the refrigerator drains it the fastest so if there's no Sun and we don't have any power we'll just unplug the fridge at night maybe and plug it back in in the morning we've never had an issue with power we've been able to do it pretty well the construction of this is not very professional I haven't had a lot of woodworking skills but with enough wood and screws if it stays together it's good enough for me so I knew the batteries we're gonna go here so I built the box around the batteries and I put the inverter as close as I could I built a box around that put the charge controller in there and then built a little cubby for other electronics and it didn't have any hinges or door faces on it and it still doesn't have any knobs but I figured eventually I can make it look pretty that is how I how we learned we had the solar equipment in the bus for two months and I was just I had a lot of doubts and I was nervous so I never hooked it up I was afraid but we had some friends help us at a tiny house show and they came in here and in 30 minutes we had it all hooked up and working and so once I had some help it made me realize that it wasn't as scary as I thought it was going to be it scared me at the beginning but it wasn't as complicated as I imagined it to be I made it scarier than it really was this is an air-conditioner it came with the bus up top we also have one in the back and that was just repaired before we bought the bus so both AC and it still works oh it's hooked up to the engine so while the bus is running we can have AC in here we've used it on some hot days we've started in Atlanta when we built the bus and we were out there during the summer so while we traveled we had the AC on some days and but with a lot of the windows open it cools the bus down enough you just it's not a house so it won't keep all the temperature in and it won't prevent it all from coming out the solar comes down through the ceiling and down over to the charge controller behind here this is a storage unit that came from Ikea we had it in our old house in our bedroom that had the TV on it and some other things the Cubbies worked good enough and we put some bungee on here so nothing falls out and the space on top was kind of wasted so I built a little bookshelf and it works good enough and none of the books fall out it has a little preventer so everything kind of stays in nice and tight the front piece of wood here is cocobolo it came from Liz's Aunt Mary and Irene they helped us put it on there it's real a nice wood got some Buddha's over here I read Buddhism and meditation and helps me stay mellow and stay centered and Elizabeth's writing books and comedy and all sorts of other things I don't have all the information padded numchucks in case anyone comes in the bus I can take them out in here we've got some batteries toys headphones binoculars just stuff that we want to keep close and we can grab and use while we drive I haven't noticed these coming out at all they they're pretty heavy they stay in place they'll move around a lot so well we just put the bungees there to prevent anything from coming out but nothing's ever felt falling out of here these captains chairs we got really really fortunate with them our first trip out we went to it towards Savannah and we stayed at Boone Dockers welcome a site through the website Boone Dockers welcome so our host her name is Susan she has RV and she wanted to put down dog beds in her RV so she wanted them out these two chairs and so Richard did the work and put down the laminate flooring in her RV and we thought well maybe we'll take one she's like well if you don't take both of them I'm gonna throw the other one by the side of the road and we're like okay so we'll take both of them and we put them in before this we had an Ikea couch that folded out into a bed which was pretty cool because we thought oh if we have a friend over they can stay the night and it was in our office before we moved in here so I was still a little bit attached to it but then with these chairs you couldn't really say no to what she was offering so she paid Richard for the job that he did and then she gave us these chairs and he bolted them down pretty well into the floor and they do alt I mean like they swivel they both lock facing front so I'll show you with this one so if we're driving a lot of times I'll want it to stay front facing and then it won't move around but then there's a side little handle and you can pull it out and then it'll swivel back so these can face each other there's also adjustable arm rests and they can like the chair itself there's a little handle on the front kind of like in a car where it can move forward and backward they're pretty pricey chairs so we got very lucky especially having them probably about a week and a half into us being full-time so that was like the moment or I'm like we can travel across the country we can do this and also the main reason was because they have seatbelts and so they each have seatbelts that that fastened here so it's one of those things where when my family comes to visit and they come and sit in the bus there it's like everyone has a seatbelt well not if you're sitting over here but they do and you know it's just it kind of legitimizes it a little bit which is helpful to get family on board and these are very lightly used and even we've done a little bit of damage to them just kind of in the back where we would like swivel but we took a trip to Shenandoah National Park and it was awesome because we could turn the chair so that it would go facing out completely to like you know the valley I don't know it was just beautiful so you know we've really gotten the most out of them we enjoy them a lot and also I think because we're in a mobile space this is like the mobile equivalent of like lazy boys so you kind of kick your feet up after a long day we hang out and we're comfortable yeah so the table is new this we put in before our last show which was in November so Richard made this all told it was probably about $20 for all the pieces so even created it's a fold-down table so both chairs have to face out but it'll fold down the the leg folds under itself and there's just a hinge under here and it you can see underneath here how it goes and he created this little component which I mean it's semi-permanent we might find a better way to do it but we're very really about like you know hey it works it's also a good height table wise it's pretty I'm pretty tall but it's still like nice and tall for me so I can edit videos or write on the road and then what I like about it - Richard did a good job making it so it's sort of wedges itself right there so it doesn't flap around it's pretty like stable when it's down and then you know it just creates a whole nother like area well it's nice to have this open space the trim that we have throughout the bus is actually PVC trim it was it's we were all about durability - I mean for his fast as we did this we built the bust in four months to get on the road and move into it so most of that time was just making sure it was insulated and and sound but this is PVC we have some other trim that's PVC around on the floor it's just really durable and we that's kind of what our goal was so Richard had the idea of having copper piping his dad was a plumber and so he was just like oh well this is really handy and it also for me aesthetics were a thing so I thought wow that looks really nice it looks really durable and then we had these curtains so we've first I'm gonna untie this so that you can see but these curtains are actually lengthwise really long curtains but and this is where you would kind of put the curtain rod but for our purposes they fit really well going this way so I just kind of took some fabric glue and I fabric glued it all the way around we had about two days to do this before we had to move out of our house so I didn't have access to a sewing machine but I did safety pin the edges so that they could be a little bit more sturdy and then so we had all the curtains and these are also blackout curtains which was important to us because if you're out in a parking lot or wherever you're staying and the lights are on I'm sure if you know like anybody can see in after dark so blackout curtains were important but then they all started flying out the windows in the summer because we were going you know and so then we got these and drilled them into the actual framing of the bus so that we got a ribbon my friend happened to work at Chanel so she gave us a bunch of ribbon for more she worked and then we just tie them up like that so even when we're going no matter how windy it is whatever we have open these like these are not going to budge and so we just that was a good fix for us and then I can change out the ribbon to this desk used to be in our office so that was another thing that we didn't need to buy to move into the bus IKEA it tends to work well for tiny spaces maybe it's not as durable for some people I've heard different things but because we already had it we were going to use what we had these are also storage spaces that we owned before we moved in this as well and these were the hardest to figure out how to secure these drawers because normally if you're not living Moberly nothing like this will be here so we have storage inside but these we bought at Home Depot but they are just decorative so they didn't really do anything so they'll wiggle out and then you'll be driving down the road and it pulls one of those so we put sticky tack so we talked a little bit about sticky tack in the beginning about stickers we put that there it didn't work we had velcro and I and it looked ugly and it didn't really work but then well because we have our our natural ceiling natural as in we didn't do anything but putting magnets was the win so yeah we'll pull these out and we were talking about this even yesterday that we might take this whole thing out and put in a couch because we find what we usually use it for is people will come in we want them to sit in our chairs and hang out and then we end up pulling this out and we sit there can you know three people can sit here and we don't really use it that often for working I'm usually working at the table so we don't know how much longer this might be here but original idea was to have a workspace and and to sit out and look at stuff but that don't really happen yeah we didn't use it as much as we thought for that and every you can see how its secured is through l-brackets a lot of the things were just L bracketed in which we've replaced some of them we've driven we've gone through like 23 states already so we've had to replace some of the L brackets and some things shake loose but for the most part it's pretty solid and these are secured with another piece of wood that he drilled in so that they're together as one piece and then also secured onto the floor and this is the other side of the bookshelf that Richard explained a little bit ago but we because it's our home in our house you have to be very particular about what you put in so we want to make it like a home my mom actually is very supportive of us traveling and she made a little birdhouse that has the same colors as our my home house in Southern California so she just painted it and I don't know it's just we didn't know where to put it actually but we just kind of screwed it in here because my mom made it you know and then this is our Kitcat clock it doesn't really work because it has to be balanced in a way that needs for the eyes cuz it'll one of these numbers but I just said it to my inventory's anniversary date so that's kind of a way that we could still keep it and have it be relevant even though it's not gonna work so these are just things that we're in our old house and then well in our new house and so yeah I wanted to keep that home vibe going and this one is some school II friends of ours that have a school bus called little groundhog they're based in Atlanta which is where we built out the bus their parents Romans parents are artists and so our friends banana van adventures that we mentioned earlier came to surprise me at my graduation because I graduated after a month of travel or a semester of writing my thesis online and traveling in the bus they met us at my graduation and they got they brought me this so it's kind of a tiny house little reunion type art situation again we're really eclectic in this bus so we kind of take what works we live day to day and if it works it stays if it brings joy it stays but if it doesn't then it has to go in this area I do this is just an air freshener but we don't one thing I wish we had more of is cup holders and so we don't really have much of that but because this was a desk and this is where the wires would go in this is a it makes a really nice cup holder so if we're driving down the road and we have too much going on I'll put an extra cup in there and right now I have an air freshener and it is sweet apple flavor scent I'm not eating it so we already talked about the desk area but we're gonna move now over to the kitchen and really the kitchen is this area and this area but we have our sink here the tile came from Habitat for Humanity ReStore and that was a great resource for us as we were building the bus because this tile was I believe it was $1 a square foot just that the pricing that they had also the sink was about $40 it's an LK sink stainless steel and we bought this faucet from a bus build that we saw online rolling vistas they had a product that they recommended and it was really inexpensive and it works really well I also like that it come open or come out and we had to take like outdoor showers so the space is good because we actually don't have a cooktop over in this area so what we do to prep food are actually to cook our food is under here and this is a coleman vintage stove which can come out and it will sit on here and it opens up with two burners and it runs off of white gas and but what we tend to use because it's a lot easier these really work great for us you can find them this ones we got at Walmart it's a Coleman blend fuel thing and so we just we take this off and screw it in and so basically it ends up being like that so that's how we'll boil coffee a lot of times in the morning if we want a hot breakfast we'll just have meal because we can use the boiling water from our coffee also to make oatmeal we do mix it up we do to have bacon and eggs we do sometimes use the two burner but we do also like to do a lot of one pot meals so that way if we just can make everything into something that tastes good put it in a wrap it saves a lot of space and time because we can just use a single burner one of our neighbors where we used to live was a Vietnam veteran and he was into a lot of survival stuff so he when we were leaving for like our going-away party he brought own we used these plates too because they're they won't break on the road but something that our neighbor like to do is refurbish old stoves and so he had this one and it's from the 60s and it says Sears because it's an Edition that was through Sears Roebuck but very vintage and so he this will come out and then that will turn on and we can you kind of just like pump it and then we can have two burners the last time we used this for a big breakfast was in Lancaster Pennsylvania which was around October and but it was a good breakfast we got a bunch of meats from the local market and eggs and we made bacon and eggs and coffee and but then once we started using this it was just so you can just put it anywhere like even if I wanted to use this countertop I could just start cooking here so this was kind of like a process it would take a while to get it going it would take a while to cook it cooks really well it works really well but we don't use it that often anymore so this is what the coleman camp stove runs off of can't feel you can find that basically anywhere we found it at Walmart a little trivet these are what we kept from our larger collection of towels and and things and this was my family trying to be supportive again with the mini waffle maker which I haven't gotten the chance to use yet but the tile as I said earlier we got from Habitat for Humanity ReStore and we put the tile in ourselves after we already moved into the best so we were in Home Depot parking lots mixing mortar put laying tile making sure it all looks good and then it's convenient cuz you're right next door to what you might need if you have to pick something outside these are just shelves that we picked up on our travels this is where I went to school Kennesaw State so this is for my graduation I graduated from Kennesaw State with my master's in American Studies so they were pretty supportive in my program anyway they're like wow she's doing it she's in the School Bus she's driving around interviewing people talking to people so I would say I'm using my major and then this porthole we had to screw in because it wasn't really staying it was falling off no it's actually a frame but it's meaningful and so that's why we chose this this is from the Shenandoah Valley or the Shenandoah overlook from Skyline Drive a sunset that we saw there I wanted to have something that was not really what you would see out of a regular porthole so we chose a sunset in a mountain scape but we both worked on Norwegian Cruise Line that's how we met and so that is kind of just a we met on a cruise ship so I mean I wanted to make it a little bit you know as we were decorating something that would like show that part of our personalities and part of our story so originally when we had built this piece it was going to be this extra part was going to be a breakfast nook and we had two stools that were underneath here and it wasn't very long before we realized it wasn't gonna work out they were falling all over we didn't have a great way to secure them but more importantly we needed more storage space so at our first stop we Richard one day he just we got rid of the stools and we we had some extra plywood from the build and so he built this out and again you know it's it's just another way we've improvised because it's great for what we need it's not the highest craftsman you know way that you might find but we have our like canned food and some tortillas and some food in here we can have a full fruit bowl of whatever our spice is and then some more food on the bottom so it's really maximized what we can put in here as far as like having food storage but lately I've noticed that because we don't have any pets that we don't think about that type of stuff so we store a lot of our food on the bottom and so some of the dogs from the camp Blake they're like well I'm like why do they all love our bus it's because they can come in here and like try to eat some of our food on the bottom because we haven't stored it high enough we'll probably put the food higher up with we're gonna have pets in here but it's worked really well another thing just really quickly before we get underneath here is that we have used these types of latches in order to close the drawers and then we use child latches to close the bottom and we've done that on several cabinets that we have in here around the same time that he built this Richard also built an extra shelf into all of our cabinets so it pretty much doubled our space so that's why we have storage for pans and we have storage for other things because it was just a box it's basic but it works really well so now under here we have a lot of our cleaners we have cleaning supplies on both sides yeah so underneath here we have cleaning supplies and we have our gray water tank is a six gallon gray water tank then we also have a little bit of storage it was a cubby that we had in our previous house and so we just put kind of odds and ends and plastic cups and things and then we have a cooler it's just an Igloo cooler and that's where we have our mugs and our pour over coffee and behind that we have a shurflo water pump our freshwater tank is 40 gallons our freshwater tank has given us enough water to last at least a week possibly two weeks with what we use it for we're mostly using it for doing the dishes and we shower we have Planet Fitness membership so we don't have to worry about showering and we don't have a black water tank but the 40 gallons have worked really well so far but we haven't done off-grid as much because we built this in Atlanta so traveling in the East Coasters not as much BLM land so we hadn't we would always be close to either a place to fill up or a place to get just gallons of water so we're kind of new to just only having the 40 gallons we were in the bus for four months before he had the water hooked up so we would during that time we only lived off of just gallons of water that we would fill up at the gym at the grocery store wherever we could find water but 240 gallons to us is like a luxury at this point this is also another painting from a family member Bridget Duffy she's a an artist and so I wanted to bring one of her paintings into our bus talk to because we have sort of a beachy theme going on I guess you could say so I wanted to bring in her work and just in it's velcroed so it doesn't come off this is our refrigerator we have we didn't really do too much research as far and I wish we would have because it's not really made for a RV it's made it just as a tiny fridge it would have been more helpful if we got one that was more friendly as far as not like draining our solar because like Richard said we do unplug it if it gets really hot or if we don't have a lot of solar or if we get low on our batteries will unplug the refrigerator I mean it is Energy Star I can't really tell you much specifics on it but I do know that it is the biggest power suck that we have is from our solar is this refrigerator and now that we're the desert it's been great because we have no problems and it's great also because we've filled our refrigerator to be here but it stores quite a bit of food I mean you know we have stuff for the morning sodas eggs and leftovers can be in there too so having this refrigerator is even like a new addition to the bus because we didn't have power for two months so in that time we would eat out a lot we would go out to restaurants a lot we would find to not spend a lot of money and still have enough food so having this now going from not having a refrigerator and no power to having the ability to store anything and even make ice is is a good a good thing so we're fine with the size just wish that it didn't suck as much energy this is poco he's a new addition he came from San Antonio from a restaurant we don't have any pets this is probably as close as we're gonna get so and we like animals we just not all the time you know this is our sort of like our pantry area it's a little full now we have some to-go containers and like medicine vitamins like aspirin that type of thing and some dry goods and canned goods under here this top drawer is kind of a miscellaneous drawer we have a flashlight we have a screwdriver we have received like we have a little bit of everything in here so I think every home has one so this is ours so these LED lights came out of our friends garage he was selling his house so I'm not exactly sure what type they are but we sticky tack them on to the roof because we can move them around and sticky tack is awesome these lights were for cabinets so to go underneath cabinets but we found that we can move them anywhere we want to and depending on where we want light and they are also on a dimmer switch so we don't have to be full force we can just dim it and we kept a lot of our you know original writing and everything wanted to keep it pretty original so to across from the fridge we have our sort of bathroom area this will be where the shower will be if we decide to put one in next to what we have is a travel toilet or a portaloo it's a camco toilet and what we do it's not composting but we can disconnect it and actually just pour it into another toilet so we add a little bit of chemicals to it to make it not smell and to just kind of dissolve the toilet paper and so we have these our V toilet paper that dissolves extra quickly you can find it in Walmart and this is a new addition we are we now have a toilet paper roll so we're just building a lot of things out as we were on the road this is just a little push button light that works well if it's nighttime and you have to go so when we first got on the road we didn't have these two walls these if you want to call them walls they're kind of just there secured to the cabinets but we didn't have this at all so I would basically have the toilet at home and I'd be like trying to hide and usually staring at the refrigerator which is unique and then we after a while I say you know can we can we make some walls please and so we put in two walls and so now this is more of like a closet and so I feel more private because I can take the this was actually in our old house it was our shower curtain and you know like you just as you do he now you just kind of go behind it and then and that's why the lights in there too but then on this side I also really wanted to have a place to hang some clothes like just to just to put up and so just jackets things that you want to grab in a hurry this is for lack of a better term like our dressers we live still out of suitcases but that's fine as long as they're organized enough it's kind of like a its mobile because if we want to go on a trip or if we want to go into family's houses then we can just take a suitcase and go but then we have jackets and storage up here so it's a little more private than it used to be and also we have more storage so it just looks kind of unassuming a lot of people think it's a shower some people don't really know but more of a bathroom than it is but it's just a good way to hide that part of our lives you know if you don't need it out there so on the other side of the walls where the toilet is there is a medicine cabinet that we installed just a couple weeks ago so it's nice there was only one mirror and the bus before and it was the rear view mirror so it's nice to have this and that also includes a little bit of storage this is more of the tile we've tiled this side and the other side with Habitat for Humanity tile that I mentioned earlier this is where we keep our toothbrush toothpaste hairbrush kind of toiletries stuff we also have a really good hand sanitizer dryer sheets just random kind of bathroom stuff and then under here we have more toiletries wipes Kleenex we have some first-aid back there and so pretty much anything that you would want to go into a bathroom cabinet for is in this one just smaller than a regular house then over here and I say over here but they're matching dressers that are pretty small they were from Ikea so there's no real room to put in clothing but we have just it would be like if you have a nightstand what do you put in your nightstand if you have a lot of different things and there's some socks in here this one's Richards so I won't go too much on the house side but then this one's mine I don't have enough room to put a lot of stuff either jewelry I'll put in make up and so we have those that are pretty helpful and they work really well because right here we're on the wheel well so both of these cabinets and both of these dressers are on the wheel well and so is the refrigerator and so is the toilet so we try to really use that space as much as we could also coming back here we recently installed our water tank so it's a 40 gallon water tank underneath and it just goes in the way where you would bring a hose over the window open this up and just fill it like that it's pretty straightforward and this bench that is now our bed frame was Richards tool bench and he just cut it in half it used to be in our garage in our old house and he cut it up and it's it's a full bed so it's been really nice because it's pretty tall still and we can put a lot of storage underneath these are new we put our hampers in here so we have our dirty clothes that just lies now there's also a toolbox and some other things I didn't mention the floor yet but the floor is just a rollout vinyl we knew that when we wanted to come into the bus that well originally I wanted to have the floating floor and the laminate but Richard had the idea of like let's do the vinyl and it'll be really easy it'll flex with the road it'll be waterproof and I was concerned it wouldn't look very good but we get a lot of people that just think it's hardwood so we lucked out and we have really nice even though it's vinyl floors again our full bed this is a blanket that we got from some friends on the road splendor Oaks farm I think about a lot of the more the things that are around us all the time it's called a kantha and it's really warm so in our previous home we had a queen-size bed and that was the largest bed size that we'd ever had and so we thought because we're going into a smaller place that we could have a full and we've lived in a full and we used to have a full and so we we decided to go with the full size because it's like it's big enough for both of us and it's also is small enough that we can have extra space around it and we didn't need the extra as in queen or a king size you've probably seen a notice that we use these hooks for just about anything but this helps us keep some light out and kind of keep some privacy back here when we're driving down the road so we have our curtain up here we Richard made this dream catcher when he used to work at his old job in Big Sur we have our map which we probably need to scoot over because we started it we started out in Georgia and now we're all the way over here so we need to start looking at more West Coast stuff but we also have an atlas and we also have GPS so it's kind of fun to dream at night but we also you know when we're really planning routes we're gonna use a different map this is another AC unit and we also have one in the front next to the bookshelf or right above it and so this one really works well it was already in the best when we bought it and it looks like it's not doesn't have all the components but it just it's really powerful and it works so that's that's all we care about this area and the storage right here is really new and we installed it I would say probably two or three weeks ago and originally when we first went on the road the bed was not facing this way and that goes back to the vinyl floors we put the vinyl floors everywhere so that if we wanted to move things around we would still have like a wood look underneath and the finished look underneath so the bed used to be facing this way and then we moved it so that opened up this whole area and but we had a lot of totes and a lot of storage because we used to have a garage in the back where we had bikes that we left with some friends and then we just had this extra space so instead of having the storage in the garage we decided to make this our friends that we stayed with at Splendor oaks they had these just left over their building at Airbnb in Georgia so they had just a lot of different materials and they put it together in about a day and so we have the same type of Bungie system that we have in the front but we're still kind of working out how we're gonna do our storage for this because we're not completely sure it's kind of awkward because it's just a great so I'm not sure I might move some of the things in here over here we're still working that out because we're all and it's not finish it we might make a door we might leave it like this we might paint it it's just kind of whatever we have time for and then this bottom part all stars' doors it'll store two luggages the ones that you saw in the closet it'll store two of those under here so that's good but then I realized that I like the system of having them over there better so now there's some other stuff here and it has just a little latch that keeps it closed but besides that we have some extra room under here some more storage so we didn't completely get rid of the totes but we got enough storage we just have to use it effectively yeah that's hard you know cuz you start making systems and you start getting into a routine even if you don't have power if you don't have water but you find that's what we've noticed we're just so adaptable you find ways to make it work and then when you get all this extra storage it's like okay well what do I want to do with that how do I want to make it work better so this is our heater our friend Denise the Schooley gave it to us she lives in Massachusetts and we visited her bus build and it was pretty cold so she just had an extra heater and gave it to us and not what we've been using before we would use it just with the 1 pound propane tanks and so it was nice because you could move it all over like you could move it wherever you were sitting and it would just we crack a window and just turn it on for a little bit mostly we use it in the mornings when it's really cold or before we go to bed and then when I do that we'll take the curtain if it just in the bedroom space we have the bathroom curtain we'll just move across toward where the refrigerator is and create a box in the back of the bus so it'll heat up faster but now we have a 20-pound propane tank which we didn't we're still kind of figuring out where that's gonna live but right now it's worked out pretty well to have it right here and it's it's been fine we have a guitar but we don't really play a guitar and everybody when we get to tiny house shows and everyone's like who plays guitar and we're like nobody you play guitar and so like we get people to tell us about it our friend again our friend teal that was moving out of his house yeah that gave us the lights gave us this guitar and it's actually a nice guitar from what I've learned about it and I would like to learn on the road but so far we've gotten some people to play it which is cool like now is the time I should have more time and then these sheets we got from a thrift store where we bought the mattress we bought the mattress new at a thrift store and the lady that we told was that we were building up the bus got so excited she was the manager and she ran to the back and she found these sheets that she loved and so we thought wow you know we're gonna put him in our bus and so it was really nice of her just to be so on board with it yeah especially out here in the desert they really fit what we're going for this is a little thing up here that Richard will hang his hats on this is these flowers were from my family when I graduated so we dried them these are really cool if you come across them at a Dollar Tree not all the prints are great but this one was kind of a little Tiki one dollar and they light up in there LED lights so when we drive though they like spin around and then they like fly on to the ground or leg on to other things so this one's in kind of rough shape I need to go hit up the Dollar Tree again but they're just two triple A batteries this was Richard's license plate that's up here we just tried to incorporate parts of our lives that were relevant and that we want to remember these are also really helpful they're magnetic and they turn on pretty brave yeah now you seen the interior thanks for checking it out Richard's going to be outside to show you around the bus here we are at the back of the bus and we've got some windows here and they are from the original Main Street at Disney World they're from 1972 or 1 1971 one of those and our friend works at Disney he's a contractor and when they were remodeling and replacing the windows they took these ones out and he took these home he took him home with him yeah we just decided to put them back there we might even add some more things like a little rooftop arch or some lattice or we thought about some flower pots right here to put some flowers on there just little house in the highway it kind of goes with the theme yeah there are different sizes and this window here had both of these arch things so we just cut one off and put it on this side so it matches it's dirty now but we're in the desert so what can you do on a dust our neighbor when we built the bus in Atlanta he lived next door to us and he had his own vinyl printing machine so I said hey what can I do to help and so we printed out little house on the highway on his vinyl machine our other friends Robin and Tim de Klerk helps us with these Instagram Facebook and YouTube logos they bought those for us and surprised them so we put them on and having these on the highway really helps too because people drive by and they look at the bus and they go they look it up and then they start waving and making videos and tagging us so it's a lot of fun we've got some solar on top and there's four panels up there you can't really see them too well but it's for 100 watt panels so hopefully the panels are getting more Sun than my eyes right now so the paint is this darker blue it's called Norwegian blue and the lighter paint is still the primer that we did the whole bus first but eventually we want to paint it to make it look like an old-school classic woody so we'll do some woodgrain on the side and just make it look like a classic car the paint is a Valspar storm coat so with the Valspar you could still die at different colors you change the color so it's the storm coat Valspar it's the same paint that they use for or like outside dumpsters like big green garbage cans and stuff pretty heavy-duty and we rolled it and brushed it the whole bus by hand and we sanded the whole thing to first yeah it took like ten days there's two of these there's one here one on the other side and this is the radiator system for the AC that's inside the bus it'd be nice to have more storage in the back and on the sides but we just haven't done that yet I don't do too much welding or heavy duty building but I could handle the inside of the bus having the clearance is nice too because it's really high off the ground and it's easy to work on it you just climb underneath and there's a lot of space so thanks for watching the tour of Little House on the highway I'm rich I'm live you can find us on Instagram Facebook and YouTube and this little house on the highway the only difference is for highway it's Hwy Little House on the highway on Instagram little house on the highway on Facebook and little house on the highway on YouTube and our gmail is little Hazama yeah if you have any questions send us an email at Little House on the highway at gmail dot all that will be in the links below or in the description below [Music] you

Channel: Tiny Home Tours

Views: 424,650

Keywords: tiny home, tiny house, tiny home on wheels, van life, camper van, shipping container, design, tiny houses, tiny homes, tiny house tour, school bus conversion, skoolie, skoolie conversion, skooly conversion, school bus camper, school bus tiny home, skoolie home, skoolie tour

Id: dzg_8ZUD_Gc

Length: 48min 20sec (2900 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 19 2019