Couple Builds Gorgeous DIY Skoolie Conversion ~ Saved Cash & Hit The Road

hey i'm mike i'm aaron and this is our tiny home on wheels it's a 2006 ic bus and it's a fe 300 and we call it the free roaming bus so we kept the original doors um but for the lock on the outside we just put it on a hinge oh it's locked right now but so we swing this over and lock and we always make sure we lock it so that we don't get locked in by somebody um then open this is kind of our as seen on tv screen magnetic just to keep the bugs out and get us a little air on the inside what really helps with ventilation is all the bus windows and especially in the in the front half of our bus front five windows if we open up all of those ten windows the wind will blow right through and it really helped good gospel we really get a lot of ventilation that and also the roof we wanted it to be visible with driving you know you can see through top to bottom and just convenience too as we were talking earlier it was a five-month project it's just time savings we had a we had a list of must-haves and we tackled those must-haves and then we hit the road so that's the main reason the main driver on the entrance was uh just the look of it we went with the white and then with the natural sealer so no color on the wood i think there's a poplar that we used just picked up poplar boards from the hardware store and put a water-based poly on it and it's been working out pretty well we had several mechanics in here and that kind of dirtied it up but we tried to get it back to what it looked like before and it still needs some touch-ups but we're happy with it it gives it a very light look and the white is just like a underneath is a rust block like a black uh metal primer coating yeah and then over it with this is what we used on the steps um they were actually in pretty good shape like i said this is only a 2006 um so it was from indiana but honestly we didn't have a whole lot of rust on it even uh it's really not that much for us so we're lucky there so one of the main features we were looking for when we bought the bus was that we wanted a front engine because we wanted garage space in the back so with a front engine the only thing that i'm regretting is that it's very very loud you know if mike and i sitting kitty corner to each other we kind of have to shout we were looking at insulating a little bit more but even um with all the mechanic work that we've had done they probably would have gave us very dirty looks if it was any more enclosed than it already is but and then the heat coming off the engine too we can really feel it on a hot day the downside to a front engine the upside was like aaron said the garage space in the back which was you'll see later the cooling i think a front engine cools more efficiently and then a rear engine so those are two important things for us the drawback being the noise but we get through it we try to only drive maybe a couple hours a day so it's not like it's long trips um we're just kind of doing this slowly and traveling slowly so it's not a big deal we can talk when we park this is a international dt 466 turbo charge it's a wet sleeve engine if worst case scenario we ever have to get it rebuilt they can actually in-frame it and just take the cylinder sleeves right out and rebuild the whole engine in frame i was searching for this 466 and low mileage it's this has uh when we bought it it had 84 000 miles on it 87 so we put about 3000 miles on it a little bit over a month we started january 23rd we took off this seat it was really important for michael that i had somewhere safe to be buckled in he doesn't like me up and moving around for going through tight spaces or construction so i needed a seat that i could be buckled into to be safe we thought as close as we could get it to the front of the stairs as possible so we hired a welder and he got it welded in the seat came out of a ford transit van that craigslist find i think uh 100 bucks it was never used it's a brand new brand new seat the only drawback is it doesn't recline i didn't realize that until i had it in the back of the pickup truck on the way home i think it's comfy enough like like we said we only drive a few hours max every day so yeah and it's tucked away too because if you see we don't have much room here we don't have much room to work with if you bump it out anymore you kind of take away from this front uh front hallway entryway area um so we really racked our brains on this for a long time this is what we came up with it's working well so far it does take the drawback as it takes away from the couch area like if we wouldn't have needed a front passenger seat we could have extended the couch way to the you know to the front stairs really but you know it's a lot of these bus projects are uh just a trade-off situation um you can you can have this but you can't have this you're limited on space the walls of the bus are two by four framing and then two by two is going down to another two by four going across on the bottom and then just luanne paneling that and then what's inside is the pink foam board and insulation the wiring for the outlets and the lights well actually the light wiring is up top but the outlet wiring is is through that also the lights are 110 with led bulbs in it so they draw four watts an hour and we have three of them and we barely ever use these normally at night we just have the one led light bulb it kind of lights up our whole nighttime sitting area that is something that's kind of interesting with this bus most of it is 110. we have three things that run off 12 volts that is the toilet fan the water pump and the rv furnace so those three things run on 12 volt everything else is 110 off the inverter with the kitchen we wanted this bus to have a huge kitchen because i love to cook we want it to be like a main focal point of this bus so actually this whole kitchen is half the bus it's a 10 window bus this is five windows here the components of the kitchen i'll start on the countertop these are maple boards that i got at menards we put them on top of a three-quarter inch plywood and glued them then put the edging on it and that's all it is and and the water-based poly again it comes in a green can it's water-based poly and i don't know i just try to keep the chemicals down when i'm building things like this especially on a countertop yeah yeah when you're going to have food very close to it i think i read somewhere that all pollys are safe when they're fully dry but can't hurt to use a water-based poly so the cabinets are from lowe's yes lowe's stock white cabinets and we just kind of measured figured out you know we want a large cabinet for all of our silverware and utensils and then the bottom is all of our cookware and then on the other side we have a small area for just dishes and cups we can only brought you know like two cups for each person and then this is like our towel drawer and under the sink is all of our cleaning stuff all of the towels and cleaning products and garbage bags garbage can and then the most common questions we get are about our ovens our oven after researching on ebay and craigslist and looking around locally for vintage stoves or holiday oven magic chef all those things i finally started just looking for old campers and asking if i could rip the oven out so we found a guy locally um a couple hours away who was redoing his 69 shasta trailer and he was getting rid of the fridge and the oven so we took the oven it was originally green and it's in great condition and we love it yeah we didn't do anything other than just clean it and it's it's like i mean that's why we kept the dark browns away from the oven because originally this was gonna be a dark brown the floor is gonna be dark brown but it does it doesn't look as good with a bright green oven so we went very like light surfer vibes kind of thing as far as cookware and something i use just about every day since we're in solar there were a lot of things plug-in things that i couldn't have so i got a percolator which i use every day for coffee or tea or just to boil water for oatmeal um anything that's probably my most used besides just pots and pans kitchen appliance and when it comes time to doing dishes our sink does the job we kind of do dishes every night or at the end of every day we just put like a mat out here and let them dry and then put them away every day just to stay on top of them for the clutter and because this is our only sink so we're using this to wash our hands brush our teeth at night wash our face sometimes i wash my hair in it um so it's it's good to just keep clean and keep the bus tidy i love to cook and that's why we built this kitchen as a mini chef's kitchen and we tried to design it around a cook and so that's why we have so much counter space uh it's such an important piece of this bus and that's also why we have a apartment size refrigerator too and it's been working great that that oven stove that works just like it's brand new it's it's pretty crazy actually since it's from 1969. so yeah this is really meant to to be a kitchen that's cooked in and we do we we do cook a lot in it i save the majority of our meals we do like to go out to the different restaurants and you know in the different areas so we were in el paso not long ago and we had a lot of mexican food and when we were in louisiana we had the creoles and uh the gumbo so we like to try the local food but uh at the end of the day we're gonna be on this bus for 10 months now and we need to cook our own food just to save money too the flooring is a is a vinyl flooring and it's tongue and groove and it's a floating floor so it's not glued down at all and it's working very great the only thing that i have noticed about the floor is it does shrink and it does expand with the temperatures and i this is my first vinyl flooring that i installed i've installed like laminates and hardwood flooring before and i knew that they would um expand and contract just because there's more material in them but i wasn't really expecting this one to expand and contract as much as it actually does there's only a few spots on the bus that you can actually see it but uh i have noticed it's very minor but it's just one of those things to you know make sure you're not going right up the walls and if it is floating don't go right up to the walls you leave some room for expansion i don't regret doing a floating floor at all i think it's working out great um i would not do anything but a vinyl floor to be completely honest with you either vinyl or some other like totally waterproof material cabinets first cabinets were in first and none of this was in yet at that point so we went all the way to the wall yeah yeah i think we started on this side and then worked our way when when the couch was not there and the the bench was not there so so there is flooring under these under the couch in the bench the walls were built so it's really just uh the flooring is under these two pieces and not any anything else i think it's just like at least in houses too i've heard that debate and um i've always heard that it's just the price of material it's so you obviously use more material underneath the cabinets i have no problem the way we did it and just went right up to the kitchen cabinet it seems to be working out pretty well i don't think i would have done it differently otherwise one interesting part about our kitchen cabinets that i didn't talk about before was um we actually cut the toe cakes off of these cabinets they come with a three and a half inch toe kick i believe and it just covered up too much of the window we didn't we didn't like that the whole point of our design is to keep all these windows and keep it very light and um airy in here so we we cut like three inches off the toe kick they do float a little bit but um and we don't really miss it at all either like it's better for me yeah we're not the tallest people so it works out well actually no but it shows a lot on the windows yeah because then it would have been up you know what to hear about the most space possible and same with the window up front like if we can we always pull into a spot so that you know if we don't have neighbors we've got the full front window let as much light in as possible and if we do need to cover it we just have like a little drop cloth that i hang up with little plastic hooks so with our front window we have like the little plastic command hooks that you would use for like christmas lights and then i just cut little slits in my drop cloth and we just kind of loop them in right under the front window right up to the dash very very basic but it works really well yeah and it still keeps the bus really open so our original idea was okay well maybe we can do a track and cover the whole front but that really cuts down on space in here it makes it feel really small i also bought a rolling shave that i was going to install but that was too big of a hassle so we returned that and a drop cloth that i had in my closet works just fine yeah so we kept the original ac in the bus there's one up here and also one in the back it just seemed like too big of a an asset of this bus to get rid of it would have given us some more headroom but we have aaron's seat and the couch under it so we and we know it's there we don't bump our head on it or anything it doesn't really take up that much space um so we're happy that we kept it it's currently not running or it doesn't kick out cool air right now i think it's just needs a shot of refrigerant um the rear one does work but we haven't really looked at it too much we've been in very mild weather we've been running the heater a lot actually at night and we haven't needed the ac at all like i said before once you have the five windows on each side open actually only four on this side because the fridge covers one but um the four on here and then the five over here you open them all up and the breeze goes right through the furnace was a brand new suburban furnace 19000 btu and that is actually wired i put a switch in the bedroom so i don't have to get up out of bed if it gets cold at night you know how it is boondocking so i can set the thermostat the thermostat is actually over here on the side of the cabinet i ran the wires through the back of the uh the cabinet and then the the master switch to give power to the furnace that switch is actually right up uh beside the bed and the reason i did that was like i said it you can set the thermostat to say 50 degrees or 55 degrees and if it gets real cold at night or you know you wake up at 7 00 am ready to start your day you don't want to get out of bed because it's so cold all i have to do is flip that switch and it starts uh kicking out some heat to warm up the bus this has a uh unfortunately our bus only has a 35 gallon fuel tank it gets about 10 miles per gallon so we can still get pretty far but and we we carry about 15 gallons extra in the back just in case of emergency but we're stopping a lot yeah we stop a lot but we don't go that far in a day so it's just a basic boxed in frame with a hinge on the lid and we flip it up so it's just storage down we keep all of our backpacks in there crock pot coolers blankets hammocks it works yeah motorcycle helmets jackets it's a ton of space once you actually open it up i wish that it could extend a little bit but honestly i kind of ran out of cushion fabric we have cushions um from mike's mom's old couch so the cushions only got us so far it would be nice to extend because this drops down and then that cushion fills in and it can be one big seating area so it'd be nice to have the person sitting on this end to have some leg room but honestly we haven't even dropped this down yet so i don't know that we miss the pull out at all if we have one guest they could sleep here two guests i guess somebody's sleeping on the floor but it works um so like i said the table drops down to one big seating area and then actually inside of this bench is our little pop-up shower so inside the bench is a utility sink just old laundry room utility sink and then the hooks up there are for the shower curtain so a great thing about keeping the original bus um ceiling is that everything is magnetic so we bought those little hooks um off amazon and we use them for everything we hang our laundry from them we hang towels to dry we hang the shower curtain we hang decorations okay so to set up the shower we just kind of ditch these cushions and then this is just a piece of plywood that we tilt up so there is the utility sink and then we just bought a cheap little shower curtain and i just kind of go around and hook it in [Music] there's like a hose here so we've just got a little shower hose and we put like a little mesh bag hang so it just sits in there soap up turn the water on turn it off and it's actually deep enough i'm short mike is short so we still have plenty of headroom it's just not a lot of moving around room once you're in there it's it's a quick shower space it's nothing luxurious and then just in the extra room is where i threw all the soaps and the laundry detergent um if we really needed to we could do laundry in this tub too the shower curtain actually keeps in all the water we've really never had a water leak out from it we bought a a longer shower curtain so we could overlap the edges so it's extra wide so once you get like to this part it's doubled um so you're gonna slide in and wrap yourself in there and this again is just another trade-off uh do we want a dedicated shower room we see so many people in rvs that just throw all their stuff in the shower for storage and um you know we didn't want to just have a whole shower room um dedicated to showering yes silly as that sounds like a living space yeah we would have lost a closet is what it came down to our bus is only oh it's it's about 25 feet inside and then the rest is like so we needed to do well so we kept the original ceiling in here um just because that was the easiest thing to do um and we couldn't get ourselves to take the ceiling down um you know people have done it you'd have to take out all all those screws and or cut them out and then take out the insulation that's in there just to put new insulation in so that's the main reason we we do have very good insulation maybe not very good but just acceptable acceptable um insulation in this ceiling as is we wanted a roof access a lot of people put fans there which would be nice but i like to be able to get up on the roof we have our kayaks up there and just to be able to check on the solar panels it's nice to have somewhere inside to quickly jump up there instead of pulling out the ladder the thing about the fans is you turn them on and it takes the hot air out which is great idea but we have all these windows and like we said before once you open all the windows it takes all the hot air out anyway so i can see it it's a very important thing for someone that doesn't have many windows in their rig like a van or a or a schooly that um got rid of all their windows or something like that then i think you would definitely need one but we have such good ventilation in this uh in this bus as is yeah yeah we have a little ladder too they're like a little pantry ladder yeah we don't we don't go up there very often but um it is nice to check on the panels every once in a while clean them clean the panels check the kayak straps so the fridge is just a standard apartment size refrigerator that we got at lowe's it dr i put the power meter on it and it draws about 100 watts an hour when it's cycling and of course the fridge doesn't cycle 24 7. it only cycles i don't know maybe two-thirds of the time or maybe even less so it's pulling 100 watts when it's running and basically how we picked it was we went to lowe's and tried to find the most uh efficient refrigerator we could find in this size we knew we wanted this small like apartment size refrigerator and it's been working great and we we put a strap on it just so it doesn't you know go across our whole living room area here just little baby safety latches because the first couple of trips we had the door flying open and yep beers flying everywhere so these little uh baby uh class are really uh really nice to get and we found that if you buy things that aren't meant for an rv they're less expensive so if you buy like rv specific items like an rv specific latch like you're gonna pay more so we just try to buy like the generic the generic stuff that's meant for a house and um like this sink too this is a house sink obviously we got that at habitat for humanity for 10 bucks we tried to just get house stuff that's been the cheapest way to do it that we found and so the i said that it draws 100 watts an hour when it's running and that is our biggest energy draw of this whole bus so we designed the solar system around that our battery bank is 675 amp hours total it's six trojan i think t-105s they're called they're meant for a renewable energy and um then we have a 1500 watt inverter that that would power all the outlets and the lights and everything is mostly 110 other than those three items and i did that on purpose i mean i know it would have been more work to get that i wanted to keep everything separate just because if we ever have any issues we go to the mechanic and say you know these are our engine issues this is what's going on i didn't want them to say well it's because you did this and you it's because of the the house portion that i could say no the the engine the bus engine is totally separate from the house everything is separate there's nothing really other than grounds i suppose but everything else is separate and not connected at all yeah we don't turn off the inverter at all if we would get probably about three days of cloud cover then i bet you we would have to shut the inverter down just because you don't want to drain your batteries past a certain point one the other thing you were regretting not doing for those circumstances is we have our control panel in the bedroom it would have been really nice to have the inverter on a switch inside the bus so you don't have to get out climb in the garage it was like 30 bucks more for the switch and i didn't do it no i kind of wish i would have because we we did hit a lot of cloud cover um early on in our trip and i wasn't comfortable with like the battery cycle yet so i was shutting off the inverter at night we were getting such cold temps the fridge held its temperature just fine for like the eight hours but then i once we got south and we're getting all this sun it's it's not even a problem it didn't take our batteries down at all really anymore we have so much battery power and the 600 watts of solar powers everything yeah and the best part about trojan is there's a five-year warranty on them so they tell you to keep the receipt the original receipt and you can go to any trojan dealer and as long as they find fault in the battery they'll replace them five years so that says a lot about their battery for them to offer a warranty like that a five year warranty on a battery that's pretty darn good you pay a premium for them but pay premium for the warranty house you know running really yeah if without batteries we lose a lot so our other big thing was that we wanted like separate living area and sleeping area so back here um on this side is our toilet closet um we have the nature's head composting toilet and we love it um it gets a little gross when you have to clean it out but it's not that big of a deal that's mike's job and then this side is our pantry and we just have shelves all the way up we use a lot of um tension rods to keep things in place quarter inch pine quarter inch pine and i just i took a day to put up a whole bunch of gray stain on it and then i did a white wash and it didn't turn out the way we had imagined it but i like it i like the blue so every door is on these little latches which keeps things from flying open if we forget on the road this is our closet we just have another closet tension rod shoe racks most of the closet is for me um but it works again not pretty but functional we didn't cover any windows yeah like the pantry in the closet otherwise we kept every window just to let light in and we sprayed um like the like bathroom fogging so on the bathroom the toilet closet window these windows and then we have another closet here and just shelves we keep all of our stuff in those canvas baskets and just keep all our folded stuff in there towels things we need to take away and then during the build i asked michael to build me drawers and he said no way so i took it upon myself to make some drawers so down here um there's little drawers just to use up all the storage space possible one on this side too and this side on the slider yeah so that looks good good uses because the bathroom and the closet is raised up due to the wheel well so then you have all this space like around the wheel well and that's what that's maximizing that space i don't know where i would put that stuff if we didn't have those so i'm glad that we have drawers this is like our bed cubby they just kind of hop up in there underneath um is our water gallons so we have two 50 gallon um drums for water 55 gallon drums for water um they came from the habitat restore they were like the alcohol fluid that you put through soda machines and they were selling them for like 10 bucks each i think so we grabbed two of those mike did some crafty plumbing and now we've got our water pump down there two water tanks on each side and just extra storage um laundry ugly stuff that we don't want out in the open extra water tank for drinking water and that's just on a hinge and a little latch and then our bedroom is pretty small um but we're small people so we have a full-size bed it's just a foam um we ordered off amazon i think we order everything off amazon and then we kept the windows in there the only difference with the windows in the bedroom is that michael built screens so there's screens screwed on the outside just so we get some airflow it gets really hot in there because it's so enclosed and then we have a fan up there too and then two little lights that we have on dimmers that we really never turn on it works it's functioning so now we've seen the inside and we're gonna go check out the garage now so this is the side of our bus it's the storage area in the back of our bus and uh right now we're looking through the side door of it these are the things that we use every night or every place that we go camping so our chairs our water hose our 30 amp electrical cord our rugs these are things that we use frequently and in the back we have a motorcycle rack blocking the rear door so that part of the storage is things that we use less frequently because the motorcycle is of course blocking that door so to access that back door we'd have to move the motorcycle down the motorcycle is really important to us because that saves us from having to tow a car behind the bus and it saves us so much in maneuverability um especially our bus being a short wheelbase bus we're very maneuverable we don't really have to plan ahead anywhere we go really it's just like the elevation the big bumps and that kind of thing that we have to look out for it's not the tight parking lots because this can handle it no problem with the 12-foot wheelbase bike is just nice to have because we don't have to pack up the bus to get somewhere it's just a good little kind of excursion vehicle for us we like to take it out just for fun sometimes or if we need to go get a couple of groceries then we can just quick hop on the bike and go we don't have to worry about taking the bus into cities bike is nice and small just yesterday we used it to go get a piece of beer yeah sometimes we put like a milk crate on the back i just use the straps just to put a milk crate on the back or a backpack works just fine too and just we just need usually just a few things like just a very short grocery run it's very convenient for that it's also very convenient for hiking too so like if we wanted to hike a mountain range up in the distance without tearing camp the bike itself yeah it only goes about 55 miles so we don't go on major highways with it not that i want to be on major highways with a bike anyways um but yeah we just kind of take it slow i don't have anything to drive ever which kind of bothers me but i don't drive the bus i haven't yet i'm sure if i really wanted to i would have an easy time or not an easy time but an okay time but i'm too short to ride the bike so i don't ever get to drive i mean in the garage is just where we wanted everything that we didn't want to create space for inside so all the ugly stuff like the propane tanks and the batteries and all the electrical and hot water heater this is one of two water tanks we don't have like gauges on any of these tanks it's just visual it's all by sight so you can see we're almost full and that's a that's probably about 100 gallons right there both of them are like that and they're linked together so they would both have the same level and this is just uh the fill hose from the other side it's just harvey it's a lot of it this is an rv material the rv fill holes and it's also it's done two ways uh you can gravity fill it or you can connect direct to the city water just like an rv so we have a little on-demand hot water heater back there yeah the only downfall with that is i didn't permanently vent it yeah so every time i take the vent out i just shut the gas off to it so it's kind of a two-step process but basically all i do is drop that window and uh put in a metal a piece of metal flashing here and then i put the the vent tube through it and that fits perfectly in the bus window i guess i could probably drive with it like that but i haven't i just take it down every time and uh we like to stay in one spot for you know at least a few days so it's not really a big deal for me to do that yeah we didn't want to drill a hole in the side of the bus i know a lot of people just put a hole but that makes me nervous well what i would have to do is i'd have to take out that school bus window and put in just a sheet of metal and repaint it it's just another job yeah this has been working fine all right so this is the electrical part of the bus underneath all this storage is our six uh trojan batteries and from there it feeds into the uh the inverter and then from the inverter it goes into this automatic transfer switch and this transfer switch is fed uh two ways once from the inverter and the batteries and also from shore power so that shore power goes into the transfer switch the battery power goes into the transfer switch and it defaults on shore power so as long as we're plugged into shore power that's where our power comes from if we disconnect from shore power there's a 20 second delay and it'll switch over to battery power and then it takes whatever power um it has and it goes into the ac distribution box and then from the ac distribution box it goes the outlets and the lights and everything else and then on the 12 volt side we have the three things that run off 12 volt it's uh the furnace toilet fan and the water pump those are all coming out of here so that's the 12 volt time very easy very basic that just goes to the batteries then and then charging we charge our batteries two different ways one way through solar so the solar panels on the roof come down and hook into this charge controller solar charge controller it's an mppt charge controller and then that sends a charge to the batteries the other way is the one we're connected into shore power the short power battery charger is connected into this transfer switch now the main thing that you want to look out for with something like this is you don't want that smart battery charger being powered um unless you're connected to shore power otherwise you can create a dangerous loop not really dangerous but just like a battery sucking loop if this battery charger is being powered off the batteries and then charging the batteries you're going to create a really nasty cycle there that you want to avoid and this transfer switch avoids that because there's actually a specific spot in that transfer switch meant for you to install a battery charger and wire a battery charger and you can get those transfer switches pre-wired but it's like i want to say it's like three times the price of an unwired one um i wish they would just do them all pre-wired but i actually uh for the transfer switch itself i had an electrician friend help me with it but that's the basic system that's how it works i think they're all pretty uh they work well together um i haven't had any issues at all it's it's all battery voltage you know it's they don't know that they're different manufacturers so this is our water fill and our water hookup this is our 30 amp uh shore power connection and this is a vent for our flooded trojan batteries so down here is our gray water tank it's about a 40 gallon gray water tank and we just plumbed it in right here with just a regular ball valve i think that is and then we connect the uh just a regular garden hose a three-quarter inch garden hose and just put that down in the sewer and open the valve up and drain the gray water that way we're very careful about putting the strainer in the sink so no hair and no food get down into that gray water tank so thanks for watching and checking out free roaming bus and you can get to our instagram at freeroamingbus or i'm working on a blog freeroamingbust.wordpress.com on that blog we have a products that we use page with a link to all of our amazon affiliates links any little purchase through those links helps us out all the information will be in the description

Channel: Tiny Home Tours

Views: 559,285

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

Id: 0OQU-g97jiA

Length: 35min 49sec (2149 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 25 2018