Couple Sells House & Builds A School Bus Conversion In 4 Months Costing Under $16k

[Music] hey guys i'm chase i'm maria jose and this is our bus tio aventura stands for uncle adventure in spanish i'm from venezuela i moved here four years ago almost five now and we met and started living together and decided to buy a school bus yeah i'm originally from the eastern part of tennessee knoxville she and i met when we were living in madison wisconsin both just working got the opportunity to come back down this way in nashville now and she came with me yeah and then one day i went to work and i hated it and i sent her a text and said let's buy a bus so there were a couple of non-negotiables between she and i and one for her was makeup i'm sure she'll discuss that for me it was a hammock i love my eno i've always had my eno with me where i go let me see if i can get it undone here so we found these really awesome clips and then actually screwed them into the ribs of the bus and this just to keep it out of the way going to be a struggle so we kept the mirror again i like the school bus aesthetic and it hides the hammock very very well this was a nice place of refuge while we were building the bus we'd open up all the windows actually gonna have to unwind it a bit there we go so yeah when we were building the bus this was a nice place of refuge it was hot you know june and july in middle tennessee we pop this up drop all the windows let the breeze come in here we go so we drop all the windows this holds the weight perfectly secured right into the strongest part of this bus is relax so when it's not 40 degrees outside we can lower the windows again and just you know chill in here this could be slept in you know if we have guests and we built this bus keeping guests in mind our sofas which she'll talk about slide together and then this would fit perfectly over top of it so we could essentially sleep another four people in here very comfortably so we would just set this up certain occasions it's not always out i'm sure when the weather gets nicer when we're going west there will be a lot of situations where this will be you know popped up so for the the compartment up here this was all original i know some of them don't have it i was really excited to see that we do have it i i kept it because it's it's a really nice space for me to put a fire extinguisher our paperwork we're legal i've got my drill drill battery and i have a little safe up here as well i keep our bus receipts from our build so there are a few other ones but you know it's a nice reminder of the money that we spent on this which wasn't as much as i thought it was going to be it was a little bit more than i would have preferred we bought the bus april 6th this year 2018 and it's still not finished but it's totally functional and that took us may june july august 4 months and then total cost on it total cost was under 16 000 that includes the bus and taxes registration everything so this is the living room area we decided we have an idea of we wanted kind of separate rooms we didn't want like one area and then we went into privacy like chase said we want guests to come over here so we want them to feel like welcome don't feel like we're sleeping all together in the same place so we have two sofas over here which actually you we can pull them together i will probably change that make it a little bit easier to pull together so i always need chase and be like hey i need help we do have some storage but because it's so hard to get in there we barely put anything in there so we actually went to ikea and so so this bed frames they they had like a weird it's a slab system we have in each side on the sofa and then we can just actually like fill them out and they will just submit in the middle we actually made the cushions ourselves the curtains ourselves we were gonna buy everything but then we were like you know what let's just buy a machine and try to make it ourselves like it's a school bus let's make it as unique and hours as possible so actually everybody told us like you're crazy that's so hard i hate sewing and we're like now we actually love it we bought the machine and now we're like trying to figure it out okay how could we make this pattern over here so we made the cushions ourselves putting it inside was kind of hard but they have zippers on the side so you can wash them my dog already threw up on it so it's cleanable which is good we tried to put as many rocks on the floor we probably are gonna get some more because the floor is kind of cold and my dog slides when we're driving so it helps to keep him in place then we have some storage over here which actually right now we only have like some tools and screws and things that we might need for the build we also put up some curtains i didn't want to see the whole cable or the kind of like the plastic that the bus originally came with so we just put some wood behind and cover the cables we actually kind of like drill a hole behind it and we can just put the cables to the whole cable system yeah that way you know it looks a little bit like more clean and then it's a little bit more firm as well for the curtains before when we first put the curtains up we had cables to keep them together they didn't look the best but they did the job until we went to walmart and found these curtain rods for like two dollars and we're like whoop we bought all of them and they work perfect they don't look bad at all and yeah you can like move it around if you need to and put them back together really easy yes we did make the curtains ourselves i'm looking for a way to keep them right now i'm using just a hair tie to bring some light inside but yeah it was really easy we actually bought the original a curtain from amazon and then we cut it and just measure about the size of our windows and it's a blackout curtains they're blackout curtains so it's nice to keep it nice cool inside when it's very hot outside and then when we're sleeping we don't have like the sun peeking through so in our kitchen instead of going for building and i'll be honest instead of building we wanted to buy cabinets this bus really really really pushed the limits of what i know about woodworking and you know honestly just building anything so we opted to get pre-built pre-manufactured cabinets don't do it honestly don't do it thank me later now if you were to you know salvage some from craigslist that were solid wood absolutely the face of these was white oak they're from lowe's and that's you know their cabinets are meant to be in a home in something stationary not in something that you know takes bumps going down the road at 65 miles an hour so i can't say the quality is bad but the application at which i put them in was really really a bad decision so the drawers they're missing right now because they fell through but build yours you know take a few extra you know days to get it right do not buy build your cabinets but we went with an l shape we took a bunch of polls from family members people on youtube and everyone said they wanted our refrigerator right here and what did we do the exact opposite of what everyone said because we wanted a functional space we wanted to be open we wanted honestly the ease of plumbing we have the shower right behind here so we could just run both of our lines directly off of that so the sink here our cooktop here and then we wanted a good amount of accessible and reachable i guess prep space if you will so my biggest point out of all of this is go with what's functional that's what we did instead of what was popular we love it couldn't change it if i wanted to and then build your own cabinets for sure so with the refrigerator it's powered by our solar system we wanted a fully residential fridge because our intention is to boondock as much as possible in very remote areas so we want enough usable food and supplies as we possibly can this was a rated lower energy use than most of the apartment size fridges that we had looked at and it was significantly cheaper i got this on a discount while i was still working well thank you best buy yeah i paid like 250 bucks for this fridge um black stainless still it worked perfect with the design we were surprised it fit it was it was funny to see everybody from best buy just like pushing it through the little door but it's in here it's working we took the doors off of that just so they wouldn't scratch perfectly and we didn't have to load it up where we bought it at best buy we pulled the bus up and they loaded it up for us so that was a major benefit and they were excited to see inside the bus so we were like well if you help out you get to see the bus so it worked out perfect then we have cabinet we bought countertop from ikea we went with a gray color because we already had like different color wood in the floor and we wanted to kind of keep it like more simple and neutrals you can see inside the box we have like very neutral colors we don't have a lot of pop of colors just because we prefer something that it's more clean then then if we want to add color with other things we totally can and we will not get more of being inside of something that is just pure bright we want to put velcro in things but i'm i want to finish the whole kitchen and then kind of like decide what i want to velcro for the moment right now everything just goes in the sink while we're driving and it's pretty easy to put away for me actually the layout that we have in for the kitchen it worked out perfect i have a lot of prep space we have just a two two burner turbine two burner because it's just two of us we don't need a lot to be honest pretty much two is what we used in our house before when we have the large house we have like a four and we never use it we probably use one so that's perfect perfect size we have a bigger one in the back a smaller one in the front and it has worked perfect for us then we got the sink actually we got it at ikea and we saw it we fell in love we were like well perfect it's gonna fit amazing in there we pick it up and then we went to the damage part of ikea you know that is like discounted 50 off and everything and we found it there so we left the good one and we took the scratch one but it was perfectly fine it was just a scratch because it was display but it worked out everything actually we got it in there yeah the same this one was over there too you know we have the deep sink it's really nice to store while we drive but it really comes in handy to just you know it's the most useful thing to wash our dishes immediately after we use them and put them back up so there's you know as long as you're staying on top of cleaning and tidying you don't really need a big sink but it's nice for storage so you may say that so of course we use the sink for storage when we're driving but it's also very nice because it's deep and we get to just like clean the dishes right away and try to clean it and keep it as nice as possible because it's a smaller place that was one of my conditions i was like okay we're gonna live in a school bus but we're gonna try to keep everything in place i don't wanna live in a mess and feel frustrated of being in the bus i wanna actually enjoy being in the bus also a good thing about the sink is that we have a little chihuahua that we have to give him bath and that's gonna fit perfect so we went with the deeper sink and larger and we still have a lot of space for prep so for the storage on the top we put just the security to keep it close it hasn't opened at all while we're driving you can tell we haven't eat in the bus match yet we bought new things so we're still trying to figure it out where to keep everything we have some cups and mugs in there this area over here we have to cut it to fit the curve and the ceiling so we have to make sure that it was extra secure we already have the problem over here we didn't want everything to fall apart so it's it's pretty good in there i will say i just i just have some storage in there of like cooking and prepping but it takes some time to actually find out like you know at your house you just like put it there and then you're like oh it works better here so it kind of like you have to work around to see how it will work the best this has been a big area for me to be quite honest because we have a lot to storage and the kitchen that's pretty much the largest area for storage in the kitchen area but we actually bought some dividers i will say like organizers that on amazon and we can keep all our canned food and dry food so we're still trying to figure it out that as well but we're doing our best to kind of keep everything where we needed to be so initially to fit the curvature of the bus which is insanely difficult we did something very similar to this with self-tapping screws and toggle bolts where we would re-drill push our toggle bolts through secure the wood essentially base plate if you will with the toggle bolts and then self-tap them in multiple spots then we reinforced the inside of the cabinet with wood and then just mounted that directly to the face board that we made and then after about 600 miles on the road this started to still loosen up and wiggle a bit so we added the secondary support down below which we should have done from the very beginning in hindsight we would have preferred to you know just build the cabinets in to the curvature of the the wood and support them or into the curvature of the roof and support them this way to begin with so in the refrigerator we have way too much space it could actually store most of our dishes and and tupperware and still have enough room for now but we've been staying centrally localized to where some family live so they cook for us yeah so we don't have to have a ton of that but come january and just before we're gonna need all of the space that we actually have so that's nice i didn't mention how it is powered so it's powered off the solar system we have 800 watts up top that they're renegy 100 watt monocrystalline panels we wanted mono over poly i know there are a couple of other types of things but we went with the mono panels we have 500 amp hours of batteries those are agm i believe they're not necessarily what we need so we're actually battery shopping right now i think as painful as it's going to be forking out the money lithium is going to be the way that we're going to want to go and we're we're honestly looking at a much larger battery bank just because of our battery needs will be growing we're going to be you know adding some additional things we want the option to eventually run air even if it's for an hour or two a day but we don't you know we don't have any of that installed because of the climate and the temperatures that that we're in right now and then that's all powered um from dc from dc to ac through the walls with a 4 000 watt ames power inverter with the wood stove this was something that i absolutely i had to have she i don't know was as interested in it as i was at the beginning and now i love it but i wanted it for two reasons wood heat i grew up with a wood stove in my house and it was one of my fondest memories growing up sitting by the fire the dog sitting by the fire but two i wanted it because i mean it's a natural heat source you can go out and chop some wood you can buy ricks and bundles of wood and you know aesthetically this thing is beautiful it fits the space perfectly so those were really the reasons that i wanted it implementing it in a school bus is a lot more difficult than you know just the concept in your head so um the first was finding stovepipe that's three inches that isn't stainless or single wall because you are going through the roof you do have some insulation up here um some combustible materials but once we figured that out it was how do we how do we actually get it how do we you know get it into place and and get it working so um i did it all in about four hours when i actually set out to install it so i went to lowe's and i got this 15 and a half by 15 and a half inch paver used a masonry bit to drill down through it and then put bolts from actual carriage bolts through the bottom and tighten the wood stove down to the block first moved it in i had already cut my hole and i used a six inch hole saw that thing was insane good luck finding them and you know when you do i'm sorry for your wallet we were in wisconsin when we found finally found all the stuff we couldn't find anything in tennessee for it i mean you know for a small wood stove at least but uh then we secured the block down um with just actual screws through the floor so it won't move and then built a little trim piece to go around and hide the the screws but i'm absolutely in love with the wood stove a lot of people complain that the burning time is not extremely long on them but what i found is if you use really really nice hard woods you can maximize your burn times large large chunks we cut all of our wood in probably six and a half inch chunks and we can fit a few of them probably three chunks in there and that'll burn for four and a half five hours on a really really really nice hard wood the dogs loving the dogs love it i love it you can feel right here the heat coming off of it and we have the front door wide open on the bus and it's in the 40s today so the only thing is when you go with a small wood stove like this you do need to get the radiant heat fan to push the air you know in the direction that you want otherwise you are going to have a hot spot here and for our layout it's difficult to get the air back but it does over time fill up the entire bus um with heat she was recording a video she'd make up videos and it was 24 degrees outside and this was earlier last week yeah we had snow which is odd for us it was about 20 24 26 degrees outside and in here we were having to remove our coats it was hot it was really hot um our ups guy has come in when he's delivering packages and we've had this running and he even made comment on on how warm it was so i i would say we're able to get and we do have the walls insulated uh we're able to get a good 35 to 40 degree difference from outside to inside it depends on how hot we let it burn you know if we have all of our curtains down we do try and use as much passive solar as we possibly can to help heat you know and then on the cool side we'll leave the curtains drawn so we're blocking the cool from coming in which also we left the heaters the original heaters from the bus yeah we let them there's one over here one in the back and then you have one over there right so um we inspected all of the lines very very well before then because i know there are some issues where they'll spring a leak and then you know you've got a lot of trouble there but we liked the fact that if we were on a serious pool and the bus is you know creeping up in temperature we could flip the heaters on and circulate the coolant even further back so when we're driving we just flip on the heaters we have a right front i have one underneath the seat and then we have one at this wall actually below the cabinet but it's not inside the cabinet and it vents up up the wall out and into the bathroom the bathroom will get very very toasty while we're driving if we have that heater on and then we have one that actually vents out in the back in two different ways so it keeps that back area warm as well but that's only when we're driving this thing produces enough heat i wouldn't say it produces too much heat and i can see where for some people this might not be enough if we had moved it any further forward we would have an issue keeping the bus warm if we had moved it any further back we would probably get way too hot in the bedroom this is a nice open area for it so it heats up this area very very well and then with a fan it pushes heat back super super nice it doesn't fold up right here we actually have the table mounted on the wall it comes off the wall and then it has hairpin legs that you can open up and that sits perfectly in between our two sofas here okay so now we're here in the bathroom area our area where we spend most of the time pretty much it's really comfortable back here that was a big point for us we wanted to enjoy being in the bus so we went with our queen size bed from home from home yes it's very comfortable we got everything on top from pretty much everywhere something's from amazon something from uh the world market world market yep we love that store then we have the wall which divides the living area to the garage which chase is gonna take you there in a moment and show you but then we have some storage on the top as well where pretty much want to build two more because it's a long area and for me it's kind of hard to just open the one in the middle kind of like curl around and try to grab everything there we don't have a lot of things in there right now just our sewing machine and like sewing things but that's pretty much everything we have right there then for me how chase said that there was some things for him that he actually needed to keep in the box for me was my makeup area because i do makeup tutorial so i didn't want to get rid of anything also i freelance i do make a freelancing so it's gonna be more like freelancing and doing makeup on the road so this was the area that i wanted to actually keep because i was not gonna give it away it's part of my job as well so i love how it looks it actually fits perfectly with the room i get a pretty good space to actually record and it looks good i don't know we got everything from here from ikea as well some some storage not the best they're already broken like this is a mess so it's already broken in the middle and how chase said it's actually made to be in a home no in a school bus which is moving and full of makeup and just like sometimes my drawers just like explode and go everywhere so we're trying to find a way to actually keep them closed while we're driving but we have it kind of figured out right now then we actually have this little area over here which is more for like the tv area chase loved to play video games so finding a place to a storage all his game and his playstation was important we actually found that in tj maxx and it looks really cool so we just mounted there and it's stable for the tv we actually want to mount it kind of like a corner because right now it's kind of like in the middle but yeah right now it's just there but we actually eventually when i just mounted in the corner of there i hit my shoulder on it pretty regularly yeah and other people who come into the bus do as well yeah and every single time it happens i get mad underneath the bed yeah so it was it was really vital for us to still have um space and we went from a very large house for us for two people to an area that's functional every way that we need but we you know it's important that we still keep the things that feel like home and that can you know keep our passions and our hobbies alive like i have my didgeridoo i have my guitar on the wall she has her makeup space she let me keep a playstation not that i use it here but you know and then to still have a lot of storage was super important to us as well so we actually in a small space have more storage than what we really need as of right now which is kind of cool but that's only because when we decided to go small we truly committed 100 to that for reference we had large walk-in closets and we had essentially walk-in closets in every room every room was fully furnished with dressers and drawers and every single closet was full of clothes was completely filled with clothes and shoes every drawer was filled with clothes my clothes and guest rooms her clothes and the walk-ins and we downsized to where we could add things to our wardrobes now in this small space but still we're trying to keep it a little bit more responsible for every single item we buy we have to give to away so it makes you think like do i truly want it is there something that i don't like as much so we're trying to keep it more balanced and actually keeping what we truly need and we did the one and two out because eventually we would go zero and you know we're blessed to have everything that we've ever needed in life yeah and um you know i have at this point still more clothes than what i need and instead of taking shopping as a hobby if i really need a nice winter coat because we're somewhere that you know something isn't keeping us warm i can go and get one now but i don't have one because i don't need it yet the other thing with the storage i'll show you here we have the bed on struts no i get it with our 100 gallon water tank in the back it fit perfectly in the space it's nice because you know it's it's got all the things around it as well as you know the bus being heated you know to keep it from potentially freezing and then we have a ton of extra you know decorative pillows a table top oven as well since we only went with the cooktop and then just some other storage things that we don't use as often so that's why they're underneath the bed but it's nice to have that space it's on struts that help us lift it but don't keep it up and now for the storage we went with closes on this side for the hallway eventually was going to be a washer and dryer it was going to be a washer and dry area but we decided that we prefer to keep it for storage for right now we truly prefer to just like park somewhere and go and wash clothes we're not gonna be able to use it if we were not connected or like the whole process so why to just have it you know with the classes we actually build it ourselves of course like pretty much everything else it was a little bit issue because they will open when we were driving and if we put the locks the other type of locks they will open anyway so we went with this one instead which you just turn it and then you can just open really easy that's the other issue with this one that you have to open all of the closets to be able to open that one we fit pretty much that's all chase's clothes over here we just have like some extra jackets and we put our tripod and camera equipment the other side it's mine and i keep some shoes on the bottom and also my clothes and that's pretty much everything that i own right now so it was really helpful because they don't look bumpy i would i would say that they don't take a lot of space and we are able to fit a lot of things in them and they have work perfect we we're gonna paint it eventually we were gonna do white but then we were like that's pretty much a lot of white so we went with a stain weather oak and we loved it it actually looks rustic kind of i said i didn't want a rustic look but eventually i kind of like it because it bring out some of the colors from them actually wood some greens and blue and gray i really like it because it kind of goes with the floor as well over here we we're gonna have some other closet area but it was too tiny for it so we're probably just gonna build some shelves and just have like a shoe rack or to be able to put small things for storage and that's pretty much everything for our closet area this is our bathroom we have a lot of space for it to be in a school bus and we designed it that way in particular on the opposite side of this wall is a hall and the hall for some people may be a little narrow i don't rub on either side and that's perfect i don't hit my head and i don't necessarily have to duck much but that was a sacrifice for us to have our own personal sanctuary you know wake up shower you know shower before bed we wanted something that we can move around in and we wanted to be beautiful so we tiled the shower with marble and subway tiles and we found the shower pan at kind of a salvage yard it sounds odd there's this very eccentric man in middle tennessee named tink he has hundreds of acres filled with salvaged products that he buys bulk trucks full of from lowe's and home depot and contractors and things like that so we picked our shower pan up for about was it 35 which the next closest one that we could find was about 140 of this size the shower rod we made our or the shower curtain rod we made ourselves with a pipe bender and some pipe and uh it's only fixed on you know two points of the roof and it wiggles if you move it but that's just the metal of the roof you know the metal sheeting of the roof that bends but it hasn't fallen off very secure for what it is and yeah so we just dedicated a lot of space to the bathroom because this is this is a really good place for us to relax and unwind we wanted to be functional we wanted to be beautiful and comfortable the downside to this would be our flooring and we haven't spoken about the flooring yet it's beautiful it was relatively inexpensive and i think i was in a mindset reflooring a home rather than reflooring 250 square foot of school bus when i went to purchase it and you know i had sticker shock a lot of things so i ended up going with a cheaper wood laminate i shouldn't have done that we had a little air conditioner that we used and just a little bit of moisture got on the floor and actually started to bubble it so we didn't know that it was there so we didn't have the opportunity to wipe it up knowing that this area is exposed to moisture we do you know we can and do wipe it so that's not a problem yet i do think at some point i will be redoing the floor probably with like a lifeproof vinyl so my tip would be learn from my mistake and do something that may cost a little bit more but keep in mind at most you know you're you're doing 250 260 square feet of flooring but it'll pay off in the long run so everything in here runs off of our 100 gallon water tank we wanted to keep the speakers and the bus so all of the original speakers so we can listen to music while we shower or while we're in bed and then we got a really small small space bathroom vanity from lowe's and it works perfect actually we haven't had any complaints out of it like we had you know the kitchen cabinets and some stuff like that so there we have i believe this is an aqua flush rv toilet and it's super comfortable it works very well i've i've seen a lot of videos where people go the route of composting toilets because they don't want to deal with gray or black water tanks or black water tanks in particular i grew up camping and if there was anyone who had the uh the bad end of the deal who you know was helping flush the black tank it was me and it's really not that difficult and it's not that cumbersome of a task so for us we could have gone the route of composting but we chose to do a black water tank just because i was one unfamiliar with composting two we had heard some horror stories of people cleaning the composting toilet i'm sure if i researched i could find both positive and negative things about it but uh we will be splitting some of our time up between state parks and campgrounds and things like that we'll that'll have dump stations and there are a lot of uh travel centers that have dump stations for rvs as well so our black water tank is almost 60 gallons our grey water tank is 55. so with that and everything vented we have no smell in here and we have a lot of you know potential time to poo that's the reason why and and she doesn't have to worry about flushing the tanks i don't mind to do it but i i think it gave us a little bit more flexibility less maintenance it's easy to clean you dump it set it forget it never really have to deal with it much so that's the reason why we went with that we've got a little bit of towel storage over here at some point in the future i will probably build a small little cabinet above the toilet but it will have to be small just for some extra storage because i'm sure the longer into this journey and lifestyle that we get we will need a few more places to store things i frosted out the window but then we also added the curtains this was just a cheap film and it looks a little bubbly on the inside but you can't tell at all and i wanted that because it's the bathroom we need privacy in here but i didn't want to put something that was going to block light out because you know natural light is super important and it's really nice to have so we frosted the windows so you can't see in but you know you can still see out and then we can always drop the windows if we're in an area by ourselves and we want to catch some views while we're you know doing our stuff we got a really small little trash can here for the bathroom as well we don't even at our house that was as large as it was we didn't really have much trash i can't say we didn't have a huge footprint but some people can fill up a trash can in a few days and it would take us several weeks to completely fill our one garbage can up so we don't need a ton of stuff there so so one of the first things that you see when you come into the bus aside from the staircase is this little corner shelf that we store things like my game boy color i think i have pokemon or tony hawk in there you know we've got little bows some candles polaroid and books this was really going to be wasted space if i didn't find a solution for it and and i wanted to you know keep some of the books that i enjoy reading and rereading and then a place to also you know introduce some new ones there so it took me about an hour and a half to build this a few adjustments and then secured it to the side of the the sofa and i think it just works out perfectly a little shelf space up here a place that we can secure our lamp to and then kind of like a not really a collect all but a spot for you know some electronics and headphones and things and some books so we like it it's uh maybe not the best use of the space but we can take those off here on the uh on the weather mat so that i i probably wouldn't change we've got i don't even really know what you'd call it a single piston lock i'm not sure but uh we have it secured through both doors and really you can just close it it's locked you're not getting in once we close the uh the actual regulator there the air regulator for the doors and then from the exterior we've got our keyhole just a standard key lock unique to the school bus or this tiny home if you will but uh we wanted something that we could secure it you know it may not be the absolute most secure thing and we're always thinking of ways that we can improve the security functionality and the reliability of everything on this bus but we've not had anyone really try and break in yet and i wanted to do that actually that was one of the first things that i secured on the bus after we bought it in april because we uh we had it stored at a storage facility that we were driving to driving the bus over because i couldn't keep it in our in our neighborhood because of the hoa but i noticed that some kids near the the storage facility had gotten into the school bus and were messing with the adjustments that the lights and the interior exterior speakers and so that was something that we we added fairly quickly but it was like a 20 or 25 dollar lock that that we bought you can get them at home depot menards lowe's and you just have to drill through the metal the only thing is with the bifold doors going down at highway speeds they will flap a little bit so it's a little noisy there but keeping it locked and the the air regulator closed for the doors it won't fly open that's a tough one really so the paint scheme for the bus we wanted to do henry's tropical up top so we did that first thing it was a noticeable difference in the the tennessee summers as far as immediate heat or radiant heat that you can feel coming through the roof so we knew white on top all the way around that was amazing to just anyone building a bus or even a van if you're renovating a camper most of those are white tops anyway go and get you you know depending on the size of your vehicle a five gallon tub of henry's tropical and take a day to slather that marshmallow all over it but i wanted green i wasn't quite sure what color green i wanted to do and she was really into the teal colors of the buses but we wanted something that we hadn't necessarily seen on a lot of builds and bus builds are extremely popular right now and we wanted something that was durable so we consulted some experts at sherwin-williams and they got us over to an industrial oil-based enamel that they said would hold up to anything that we needed going down the road in different terrains and we spent we actually spent a few weeks looking at colors for the bus and we ran into one particular shade called cascade green and fell in love with it so we bought five gallons of it and instead of rolling the paint on we were pouring it into a wagner sprayer bucket and we prepped for about a week and a half on the bus and sprayed the entire bus in a matter of about 90 minutes to the finish that is now and it's i mean it's dirty uh we've been traveling in the bus this is you know the way the bus looks but we had all the windows taped off my mother helped actually tape off windows because she loves the paint prep part it was quite possibly the rainiest or not necessarily the rainiest but the windiest day that we had seen working on the bus and we we got it done but we love it it blends in with the environment it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb but it is unique going down the road you know it's not a school bus well anymore a school bus you know it's not a prison bus and we like it we like that it pops with the little white accents that we've got going down the side on the inside of the bus we kept like i mentioned we kept all of the original bus speakers and we kept the stuff up at the front as well that i guess the original head unit for the bus had a little microphone wired to a megaphone outside so i guess bus drivers could yell out routes or tell kids to watch out or whatever on the bus so i wanted a spot where if we were if we were parked somewhere like here and we were sitting outside or around a campfire and we want to listen to some music we could just flip that toggle switch to the exterior and have some music out here so i got marine grade speakers open the holes for them and they're inexpensive i think like ten dollars a speaker and i mounted some exterior speakers underneath as well and then just wired everything to the external route so they sound phenomenal we could have a rave out here outside not that i would want to but we could but then we can also dial it down to where it's not it's not rude to people who may be camping around us you know we like to keep that in mind everywhere we're going but it's nice it's really nice to have and and they're cool this bus came with two really large underbay storage areas it i would have loved to have four of them some of the buses have them in the rear and the other side i absolutely couldn't have gotten a bus that didn't have the storage if i had gotten a bus that didn't have the storage i would have learned a lot about welding because i would have had to put storage underneath it these work out super well we actually have some leftover space right now that's probably gonna end up being firewood seasoned firewood for the wood stove but we store our propane tanks down there we store some tools some bus fluids because anything diesel you know you never know what you might run into and something that's 14 years old as well you never know what you might run into so the back is solar batteries right now charge controllers and then the front here is propane tanks and tools i think this is an atwood i think it's an atwood six gallon hot water heater i i won't lie this has been kind of a pain point for us right now i don't know many people who like cold showers but we're having a really difficult time keeping this thing operating i don't know if it's from a wiring standpoint or what but it's been difficult this works both off of lp we have it lp converted and it'll run on electric as well so for like plugged in somewhere but uh it's not it's not worthy of its price tag quite yet i think if i had to do it over i would i would go with the tankless which i see a lot of buses do and at this point i can kind of understand why but maybe over the journey it'll change my mind but right now i'm not keen on it and here's our dirty garage area again we drive the bus it's going to get dirty we still have some leftover oil residue from when we sprung a leak but i have the lock taken off already just for this but we have a big master lock here you see them on a lot of buses they're fairly common i i love them i think i would be hard-pressed to see someone break into it which i'm sure it can be done but we just keep it locked while we're going and then we store just a little bit of everything back here i've got our breaker box our transfer switch which we really didn't even need one but we just went that route because a lot of people that we had done some research on did that with their bus but this is our 4000 watt ames power inverter i didn't know much about anything and i still don't know much about anything solar related but i know ames is a very reputable brand that i think magna sign were the only two that that i felt comfortable going with and so far it it's been running flawlessly for us we did it all with the help of my father he uh he helped my brother helped some with some stuff and then i just ordered all the parts together figured out how to how to wire it and and did it and it worked we hadn't caught the bus on fire yet but we do have the fire extinguisher you know on hand if we do the garage area in the back was something that we had planned initially i actually had planned it to be a little bit larger but then when we were taping everything out we didn't think we would need much space i would say if you're gonna build a garage area and you want the space commit to the space i ended up taking about eight or nine inches away from this which would have been i think extremely useful for you know the times that we need to get up and reach certain things but we definitely planned for it i'd plan for it to be a little bit larger but then we second-guessed that decision and minimized it a little bit but it still works out very well for us like so far i've kept some wood back here got sub-zero a sleeping bag a ready bag for anyone who's still a prepper i i have that but now i just drive around with my home so that's cool some rock climbing gear little coleman uh grill so you know if we want to grill out back there and it's unfinished right now but then again i don't know i don't know if there's really much reason for me to uh to finish it in it's just an extra expense at this point the only other thing that we really really want to do back here is put same transparent film or the semi-opaque or opaque film on the back just so it'll kind of help keep prying eyes out of the back of it while we're on the road yeah help keep them honest so this was this was not a cheap piece of equipment and you know some other things back here aren't necessarily cheap pieces of equipment either but i think once we have that you know that blocked off it doesn't matter if we finish it in you know i can just keep hanging things that happened after my company sent around redundancy plans and instead of letting it take a negative effect on our life we saw it as kind of a freedom an opportunity and we fixed the little things that needed fixed up on the house listed it yeah and took off we uh our first trip got cut short because uh we got an offer on the house and we went ahead and accepted it so we had to come back to the area to close we've been here now for i guess the last three or four weeks we're going to hang out around nashville for the next few weeks we have christmas in wisconsin and then january 1st actually it may be before then yeah it may be before the new year we're going to be taking off through the southwest we're going to go through texas and arizona you know all the fun spots there try and chase good weather until spring yeah head up the coast and then pacific northwest once it gets a little bit nicer out probably i will say that we're gonna drive and just enjoy the ride for the moment and probably find a place where we actually absolutely love it and find land and probably park and build our own house so we were talking about it the other day and i think living in the bus at least since we have been one year perfectly fine yeah three years even better i think five years is probably our max and we may go through a few changes over over that amount of time but five years i think that's what we decided would give us enough time to find land buy and build but we have no plans of getting rid of teo anytime soon so unless you want to buy for like 60 it all happened very quickly we had been watching several other bus builds on youtube my family my dad actually got us turned on to the idea which was kind of funny but we had been looking and we wanted something larger because we had certain space requirements that we wanted now having a large bus i think we could actually go a little bit smaller be a little easier to uh to park and travel with but um we were looking in a certain price range below four thousand dollars you know some buses that we had seen were gas like engines and we didn't want that we wanted diesel and then this one popped up fresh off of its route at nashville metro so and and i can tell you we wanted that because they don't run the buses during the winter so there's no salt no anything like that any chance of snow schools called off so they don't run and this was a zero rust bus which was fabulous front engine just so happened to be i think now i would much rather have a pusher because they're a lot quieter but this we can still hold a conversation it's it's not so bad that we can't hear each other but it's a caterpillar 3126 with the huey some people love it some people hate it so far so far it's working really well for us we both really loved the school bus aesthetic so we opted not to not to change this it was functional it's not the prettiest it's a school bus and we're living in a school bus there's no real reason to mask that in its entirety but i wanted a flat front because we wanted the extra space the mvp thomas has an awesome you know range of view that you can see so i think that all kind of went into us finding this bus it was local it had been serviced up until six weeks before we bought it and they only they only got rid of it because the safety requirements change every 14 years in the state of tennessee on school buses but um i wouldn't change the flat front for anything i love it i rode you know this type of bus to school when i was a kid and i always enjoyed it and now i'm living in one which is kind of cool but everything works they didn't pull anything except for the the cameras off when uh when we bought it which is kind of cool and you can still use the toggle switch over here to open and close the doors it had under 200 000 miles when we bought it has 204 000 on it now just about and we put all of those on it in our first trip 17 states and close to 4 000 miles but we're getting about nine miles per gallon diesel right now we did get the six gear allison transmission approved for an unlock so we're expecting another probably one or two mile uh increase which is huge we have a hundred gallon fuel tank we are averaging that from here to madison wisconsin madison wisconsin to camden maine and camden maine back it's been awesome we ran into one issue with the huey pump it blew a seal and we just purged oil all over northern indiana and freightliner fixed it they didn't fix it just right they didn't replace the o-ring they just tightened it and so we lost oil for the remaining 3 300 miles until we figured out we were still you know purging oil from the same spot but it has air brakes we wanted that it's automatic i know some old old old buses or manuals it's great you know we're rolling right now locked into fifth at 65 miles an hour as a top speed i know some buses are maxing or governed at 55 thankfully we're not and we don't really care about additional speed 65 is is great out west 70 will be nice once i get six gear unlocked we actually haven't installed the backup part of it it's a four camera system and i've got them both on the sides and i wanted that just as a security measure while i was driving down the road getting used to driving this you don't have to have a cdl in tennessee when it's converted to an rv so they're functional i wouldn't say they're the best we did get those online it was like a kit for 200 some odd dollars with all four cameras and the receiver or the monitor the monitor is awful the color is way out of whack so typically i just keep it in black and white instead of seeing you know green roads and purple trees but it is nice to be able to see both sides of the bus you know we do still have the six mirrors up front and they they're great but uh the backup camera it's wired and it's ready we just have to actually mount it to the back that will be very useful with 40 feet of bus here i think the biggest part of driving this bus was the initial fear that it's you know a 21 000 pound vehicle and you're driving it you know in nashville traffic for us but after about the first 50 miles on the bus it felt like driving a normal car to the point where when we get in a normal car in her honda or my jeep it feels very strange but the i don't know if it's the flat you know the flat nose busses it's very easy to drive because it's very easy to see where you're at once you get used to you know hovering over the front wheels guys we really appreciate you taking the time to watch the video we hope you enjoyed our bus as much as we enjoy our bus there are several avenues that you can keep up with our travels because we are going full time we are full time we've sold our house our instagram is to aventura bus that's teo aventura bus it's easier if you just yeah everything will be down below we're on youtube and instagram so as well everything will be like link down below both of our accounts and tio ventura youtube channel and instagram account goes without saying if you want to see makeup on the road she does full-time freelancing and tutorials both on youtube and instagram primarily instagram at this point um but you can keep up uh keep up with her how i make it happening here and that link will be down below as well [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Tiny Home Tours

Views: 1,841,801

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 build, bus conversion, school bus conversion

Id: KoyY1HnvNaE

Length: 54min 43sec (3283 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 21 2018