Couple Turns Prison Bus Into A PERFECTLY Designed DIY Skoolie ~ FULL TOUR

[Music] hey there my name's Ben this is Meghan this is our bus Kevin it's named after the person that we bought the bus from we were about a month away from becoming debt-free and we were starting to kind of browse around online of different options vintage trailers tiny homes a yurt and then we stumbled upon this really cool Craigslist ad very descriptive about this old prison bus mobile command center that had a generator and shore power and all of these different things already set up the body was in really good condition was down in Massachusetts and we within a week went down and saw it toured it met the really interesting and gentleman who is selling it and we were sold so entryway area is not done yet it's on the to-do lists yep we want to escape the cold of Maine so all right so this is a retired prison bus so as you can see we do have cages left over in here we decided to keep two of them in the front and the back for security reasons and it kind of looks cool so when we're out hiking we can lock the bus up tight this is everything we own this is where we live so we want to keep it secured and and it works great for that and we can lock that front door as well we just have to enter in through the back cage hop up on the bed unlock this cage and then open it so it's a little bit of a to-do but if we have the option either way of keeping everything secure so so when we're driving I'm up front here with then we found this really cool low profile jump seat that's mounted to our prison cage up front here and it's wonderful I get to see everything as we're driving and our dog moose actually we put his dog bed right up front here with us as well so all three of us get to be up front watching and hanging out we're driving I see so call our customer service is amazing they're actually like a female owned company to small business but we had it shipped within a day or two yeah and I believe it was about $300 well worth it I would do it all over again very safe seat belts and everything that's all quality I'm actually upgraded my seatbelt because I just have the legal lap belt which does nothing for you to protect your life but right now that's what we're doing but you can get seatbelts from them you can get all kinds of stuff and they're fantastic so as you come on in we got our kitchen set up right here it's all open concept to keep it feeling nice and big the countertop was something I picked up at a yard sale at a farmhouse in Maine it's not actually this thick it's only 3/4 it's just some white pine barn board then I got out of a guy's attic which is definitely something that you get really creative and where you're gonna find all of your stuff go to yard sales you know go to old estate sales Craigslist you can find some really cool stuff to make your bust look fantastic Habitat for Humanity ReStore was also a really good resource for us yep like with the cabinet's we built them all ourselves and I felt like different you know cabinet handles on on all of them and they were you know pennies on the dollar because we got everything in secondhand so yeah and it makes a little easier you don't have to buy sets of things which are they get pretty pricey so we wanted to you know do some little elements that were very unique and then used to manage a reclaimed lumber company so we have many elements in here that are decades old like the countertop as Ben said and also the floor which is gorgeous and has its own character that's a reclaimed factory maple floor from longleaf lumber and basically it's just it was an old maple floor and a factory got oil on it it got destroyed longleaf lumber took it re milled it repurposed it and made it into this awesome thing that you see here and it works great it's nice and rustic so if you do scuff it up or if you have a dog with you know toenails scratching it it looks fine looks natural so that really worked out for us and it's really hard which we kind of like you do have to consider moisture in the bus and how you lay things down this we do have the floor insulated so it's a floating floor and then we have plywood down it's a sub floor which is tied into the wall dolls with l-brackets to keep things from from moving too much and it's all glued and then we just laid the factory maple on top and nailed it down we didn't glue it because they didn't want any cracking issues going forward we probably could have and it'll been fine because it's a narrow board but if you go with any any wide boards gluing things down he sometimes can can get some checking that goes along the center on that so I use water luxe which is an oil base it's similar to tung oil it's some people have used tung oil on flooring but it's not very durable and and it's put a lot of coats to get any gloss and you're always trying to maintain water locks is a great tung oil product that is hard enough and durable enough for floor so you do have to recoat it but it's also really easy to maintain so after a while things start to fade you don't have to re-sand everything you can just lay another coat right on top of it and it's it's been around for you know I think the reason with that so it's it's got a nice historical feel to it so the dining area here is pretty simple this is also reclaimed it's a it's an old butcher block that we cut down and I believe been back playing it as well so the table if you can see it underneath but it has little stops underneath it that hold it up and we get to flip it down when we're traveling folds up and down which is really nice don't you want to do a little workout p90x insanity and the bus and you're not gonna jump too high then fold that down there's plenty of space right here and that was really like important to us to maintain the space it's not a big bus it's a thirty one footer so you've got a you know design it to the lifestyle that you want we're not very private with each other so we're able to keep things simple and and wide open all the way to the bed and we'll go to the bathroom later I'll show you guys that after but things that fold down things that can be tucked away that's that was really important to us so that we can maintain the larger feel in a really small space back to the cabinets for a second we have like a small lip here which I was a little bit concerned about because we obviously left Maine with some projects still to be done we wanted to put a little you know stopper here a little guard to keep the stuff in there but we haven't had anything fall out of the cabinet's yet and I store all of my dry goods and like ball jars and things like that and nothing's falling out or broken yet knock on wood so that's really worked out and everything fits - as you can see we don't have too too much cabinet space but we've traveled 3,400 miles and we've been in the bus for a couple of weeks now and things are working out we're actually finding that we brought a little bit too much stuff you know so you find that out once you actually get out there and start living full-time I love cooking I love baking so I was a little bit concerned at first going very simple with our kitchen setup Maine the state of Maine is very strict about ensuring a bus conversion like this so we ran into a bit of trouble with that thankfully we were on the beginning end of our conversions so we were able to set it up accordingly and so the one thing that they get really hung up on is having a full stove and propane and all that stuff in your cooking area so we decided to go for a very small butane you know cooktop like this just one even though we love cooking because it's a way around it and they're fine with that it's totally okay so I cook all of our own meals we don't really go out to eat much and I've been able to maintain the same diet that we would at home pretty much probably even healthier - the cookies in the pizza because we don't have another yeah I do miss cookies and pizza I got both of those before at home but yeah so that's been fine and this sink actually I want to mention a little bit about that so we while we were building the bus this summer we tried out a very small sink it was I don't know 10 by 10 or something square like a hand wash sink we were like that's gonna be plenty we're living in a bus this'll be fine it was the worst like within a couple of weeks of attempting to wash dishes and something that small we wanted to go for a bigger sink so we found this secondhand I think it cost us five or eight dollars restore it was the restor yeah appetizers so and this double bay is great we can use the right side of kind of drying and everything so one of the systems that we weren't able to get set up is our hot water before we left so we just have like two tanks underneath the sink we have two tanks underneath the sink one five gallon freshwater and then one gray tank underneath so those are all you know piped into the sink and then we just have a very simple marine hand pump for right now and it's been great it's been fine right now it works for now we heat up water for right now but you know to wash dishes yes yes fine would it be better if we had a nice large you know faucet that had hot running water at a moment's notice yes but we'll get there fine I will say that having something like this has trained us to conserve our water and we're out here in Arizona it's really important you don't have streams or anything like that where you can fill up so if you're boondocking your water is very important and we found that we can make five gallons work for a couple of days at least sometimes sometimes two days a little less if we decide to do a solar shower but you know doing dishes with just a little bit it's totally doable we actually get the faucet I'm a little worried that we'll get so spoiled with it we'll start using up all of our water but I think with the training we'll be all right absolutely it makes you think about all your water usage when you're in a home in our apartment and how much we're spoiled with that and can not even think about it I mean even when you flush a toilet and you have ten gallon or whatever then that goes down you know we have a composting toilet what you'll see so we can avoid that but dishwashers and sinks and stuff like that that's a lot so the other thing that it's taught me so far living in the bus full-time what it's taught me is about trash you know like right so living in a regular apartment you don't really think about it you put your trash on the side of the the road or in a dumpster and it's not a big deal but you have to think about where you're going to put it you know and and so we've cut the amount of trash like we're conscious about food that we buy in the packaging that it comes in a little bit more than we used to because you know that'll equal trash on the the back end so zero food waste - if at all possible yeah we'll pair pretty much every meal with a little bit of bread to clean our place so it makes dishes a lot easier and it's tasty so so really when we bought the bus we had two very large AC units on top of the bus great safety hatch because yes we did not have any emergency hatch because it was a prison bus so last thing you want is prisoners crawling out of the bus so we ended up getting rid of our AC units thinking that we would rather be off-grid we'd rather not have to worry too much about powering something like that and bulk up the insulation we can't be in a hundred plus degrees but we're in probably toasty right now and it's very comfortable we replaced them which is very simple RV Rufus there's no fan in there but they do work fantastic I think I got him for like you know 20 bucks on something simple as that and the holes were standard so they fit right in there just like the AC unit fits right in there yeah modify your person who installed them did a little croquet which drove me crazy but we're gonna live with it and the insulation is probably one of the most important things that you're gonna do in a bus so I think I spent a month's worth of work doing that a lot of people go with the spray foam insulation which is absolutely fantastic I tried to go a little bit cheaper so what I ended up doing was doing a hard foam insulation for insulation I did two-inch car foam insulation glued up on a curve any gaps in there I just filled with gaps and cracks spray foam great stuff which is great and also very messy make sure that it is the first thing that you do in your bus and not after you've laid down your floor because once you're done it looks like an alien cocoon in here gonna cut off all the little pieces so I have that lay down at first it was like over 200 cut individual pieces that I had to lay on the curve if I had to do it all over again I don't think I would do it that way I would do the spray foam insulation the entire month of July pretty much a nightmare but you know living you learn on top of that I did double rap reflectix and then a one-inch air gap with spacers with spacers in there and then putting the original panels back up I glued another lay layer of bubble wrap reflectix on top of that so the only thing that's touching the ribs of the bus are the tech screws that are holding up these interior panels so if you touch the roof panels on a hot day it's nice and cool and comfortable it's like a thermos there's a there's an air space you have very little conduction so you're thinking about insulation and you're thinking about conduction in this face like this and your metal enclosure so it's important and yeah as far as insulation goes same thing with the walls I didn't end up doing this I just have regular pink foam insulation in the walls I think I used a three inch fan foam insulation don't lose a lot of heat in the walls or gain a lot of heat in the walls but I think still if I had to do it all over again I would do spray foam and possibly bubble wrap insulation with an air gap to keep that conduction down really don't want to skimp on any type of insulation the floor is insulated with inch-and-a-half hard foam which I think I already mentioned so I'll pick up from there we lose a lot of heat and gain a lot of heat from the windows so we decided to I see a lot of bus conversions that remove certain windows or all of them we decided to keep all of them nice and bright in here is just something that we've wanted so but we made these curtains which helped a lot but you still gain and lose a lot of heat and through through the windows so a work in progress you know we might upgrade that in the future to do some boa reflectix to you know whole dinner or heat or keep it out I originally built this small space in here to have bubble wrap reflectix roll down on either really hot days or really cool days I'm just one side the bus so if you're parked you park towards the Sun on that side of the bus to keep the heat out it's really been fine so far like we've been running out it's fine we've slept in the bus on cold main nights and warmer Arizona you know days and I think it's been very cool and comfortable 99% of the time no fire so just conscious of how you bark and where you're parking in the Sun it's wintertime right now so the Sun is not as high in the sky and the curtains really do help they do also so blackout curtains which we have yet to install which do a really great job it's really it's just a very thin like yeah material blackout is and yeah they sell it you know by the yard as you would fabric so on our curtain that we have which I highly suggest a curtain across the front to kind of block the front cab from the body of your bus with that curtain I sewed in a layer of black out so it's nice and thick and if that you know as soon as you cover it you can feel the the heat or you know the cool in here so much more so it really helps significantly and it also looks really nice yeah you can saw right to the back of your curtains or have it as a separate curtain it'll always be a working part it's just like owning a home you're gonna be thinking about things you can add thinking about what you're gonna upgrade we're gonna continue our cabinets over here to have more story more change so that's one thing we've realized so far we don't have a lot of stuff we got rid of like 90% of our belongings before we left main but still we need a little bit more storage space because a small space like this 165 square feet and it gets messy really fast so think about that how you live your life how much stuff you have and you know having it kind of tucked away in a cabinet or something neater really makes a big difference well one thing I want to touch on too so I did all the woodworking myself not because I'm a fancy woodworker just because YouTube is available and you can learn all these things I have power tool experience and stuff like that but that's very simple and anyone can learn it one tool that I recommend if you're doing your own cabinetry and I used it for so many things the bus is a pocket screw jig it's fantastic it's a method of joinery that you just drill an angular hole and then you're able to make cabinet carcasses any type of box it's just it takes all the time out of it everything I mean anything that any built-ins the cabinet's the couch everything everything screwed screwed jig yeah if you had glue to that to like that's not a thing your boss is gonna shake and rattle and hopefully never roll so glue screw everything you can there's a lot of weight inside your cabinets if you're hanging them so you have to make sure that you bolt them not just two panels but you got to go right through into the actual ribs of your bus everywhere you can positioning really yeah Tek screws are your best friend use them and and overkill is definitely important I didn't do any runners going in this direction at all this is all just the panels are just screwed into the original ropes of the bus and so like these are secured at these points and then also along here these are put in with just regular regular self-tapping screws as well I see some buses that leave the metal like frames around the windows exposed so we had extra flooring so we used every bit of this reclaimed floor so we used it on the window frames here also with the the face of the cabinets and then also with the couch so we'll move on to the couch so I was mentioning that we used every foot of this reclaimed wood floor in other places too so we used it on the faces of the cabinets and all of the window frames here up and down and then also on the couch here Ben I'll let Ben talk about how awesome this couch design that he found on I don't know where you found it but it's awesome asmath pretty much every tiny home idea interest in YouTube and all those fun sites this is where I got the inspiration for that but I use this here yeah let's get this out of the way so this is the couch we're using it for storage mostly now but it does pull out to a guest bed if anyone is brave enough to come stay in our bus with us we had leftover flooring pull that like that interlock the tongue and groove and it also lifts up like a chest so when your bus are always thinking about extra space anywhere you can store things we have some books in there right now but it's a really simple design if you do want to have a guest bed it's just you're screwing every other slat to a piece of wood so they you have a stopper and then you just screw in here's a good example of that pocket screw jig in action I used it for this as well everything looks more complicated until you start doing it that's absolutely true so for something like this which looks intricate it has moving pieces to it honestly I had a hard time finding a how-to for this but I did see a lot of pictures and sometimes it boils down to just sort of inspecting the different pictures that you can find online of you know the little pieces and making up as you go oftentimes once you start most of the the pieces inside this bus and most of the the woodworking a stunt starts with a box everything's a box and you go from there so this is a box with some tongue and groove flooring screwed to the top of it and simply interlinked it's also over the wheel well right yeah you know if you made use of that you know the covers your voice the generator pops up a little bit underneath here and the wheel wells over there so you think about ways you can cover up the unsightly parts of your bus but still make them functional and create at the same time exactly create storage a so like you know you see things online where that's a curve like no jigsaw not hard once you get going it's easy you know this oh no moving parts not a big deal you just put a piece of wood to keep everything from falling down here and you screw it in this way so this space is kind of we left it open we have a 75 pound dog so that's kind of his bed area here Ben and I made these these little chairs too this is a good example too of like something we found a tutorial online we love these chairs can buy them I don't know $5,100 who knows how much they are different places I know l.l.bean cares anyway you can buy these chairs top dollar fifty dollars or look up a tutorial online and build it yourselves I think this is just a fun afternoon project that we did today to make ice on the top and been made the wood bottom and these are definitely online you probably find in a simple search a hundred different ways to make folding wooden chairs yeah weight cheaper to make them yourself so our table is lower than your standard table so buying a chair wasn't you know a great option for us we didn't have chairs for a long time because we couldn't find ones that we liked we really do his stool do we do this everything was either too high or too short so we made our own mooses dog bed area here we left that area pretty open for him since he's so huge and then we're moving over here to the wood stove which is Ben's favorite part of the bus he jokes around that he built the entire bus around the wood stove so I was talking about how you know a large regular-sized wood stove obviously wouldn't work for a tiny home but we found tiny wood stove calm tiny wood stoves calm yeah and this little dwarf stove is awesome we love it so I'll let Ben kind of talk about the setup and he built this really awesome hearth around it as well and reinforced it so I'll let him talk about that yeah so this definitely was a project it has so much ambience and homey feel which was very very important to us again it's a tiny space it's all we have and the last thing we wanted to feels like we're living out of a vehicle we want to feel like this is home so this little guy is a four kilowatt dwarf stove from tiny wood stoves calm they make their own which is the dwarf line and they also I believe sell a bunch of other lines like The Hobbit and stuff like that so they are really great resource it came with pretty much everything I think you just had to buy one additional length of stovepipe yep which is pretty simple so like you you don't have a standard pike with a small wood stove like this but you got to be careful not to mix up the the I think this is a three inch or four inch diameter you can find that diameter in a lot of hardware stores but it's made for pellet stoves and they can't handle the temperature of a wood stove so we have this little bend custom-made at just your regular wood stove shop very simple fabrication yeah they it was just I don't know maybe $40 or something like that not hard not hard to find and they can give you the right gauge of steel for that and then going through your wall especially with your insulation you don't want to go through your wall and worry about lighting your insulation on fire so you have to have a double lined stovepipe and this thing can be you know up to up to 300 400 degrees and you can still put your hand on this and you don't have to worry at all they provided the double line as well as the the top which we can look at when we go outside it was a whole tiny home kit which worked out very well for the bus it's made to secure it's made to be mobile so I would definitely check them out and the stove bolts right into so that's another thing they're made to just not go anywhere when you're driving so another example of us kind of using what we had and as much secondhand as possible the granite slab that you see it sitting on we picked that up at a yard sale it used to be attached to like this wooden kitchen cart I think it cost us $20 so we pulled that off of it I sold the wooden cart part of it and we use the granite in here so boom really worked out but we're driving 55 60 miles an hour and this is 100 pound wood stove so you got to make sure you secure everything down everywhere so the granite you can just use a carbide bit drill bit for that drill holes into that and then Lag bolted everything through all the way through to the wheel well it there is plywood underneath here as well and then the hearth this was a tricky tricky thing because this is actually hollow this is fake brick and tile so a lot again a lot of vibration or if somebody comes over and they want to lean on this thing you got to over build stuff so it's very simple though I just made a plywood form and then I put some cement board down on it I asked the guys at Home Depot what is the best mortar you can use stickiest for a mobile situation so I don't know the name of it but you know they pointed me in the right direction yep I haven't had any problems with it but with a thin wall like this I had to make sure that it couldn't flex at all so you pop your tiles off so I just took some steel flat steel here and then square tubing steel all along here and I just screwed all that into the wheel well into the wall to keep stuff from moving and super solid simple as that I used an angle yeah I didn't need a wet saw from that you know a lot of times you'll see tile cutters it can be very expensive I just got a diamond bit for my angle grinder which if you're doing a bus conversion you don't have an angle grinder you're not gonna do a bus conversion so that was I don't know ten bucks very simple you can cut all the tile with that I had no cracking it was fantastic and this thing heats up the bus no problem really you know you could go a little bit larger if you're in really cool climate so I would build with the five kilowatt but you know and you'll get a longer burn time because you have a bigger box oh we don't plan to be in cold climates for very long so and then he has this really nice wooden or wood storage really nice wood storage area to the right of the stove so kindling in the box behind cars so yeah those elements like the wood stove like the couch the chairs the you know these little things that we've done ourselves really make it feel like home and I think that's so important I actually kind of had a bit of a breakdown right before we left on this trip because we had just moved out of our apartment you know it this was it like it wasn't just this thing we were looking forward to in anymore we were actually going to live in the bus and it was scary it's a little bit scary you know but within a day or two of you know actually reaping the benefits of all this hard work in this homey space we've created it was awesome it really was yeah so now I'm sold I'm totally into it it's wonderful move on to the bathroom situation it's one of the like most frequently asked questions I where's your toilet where's your shower what do you guys do for that because we don't have any walls put up so it's kind of a different we went our own way with the bathroom situation so I'll let Ben explain so so we have a composting toilet it is an airhead there is much debate about the airhead in the nature's head I think both are fantastic products totally worth it totally worth and you know all in all you're you don't need a black tank when you have a composting toilet it takes care of all of that separates the pee from the poo so you're not creating sewage and it's as simple as when you stop at a truck stop you can dump your pee down the toilet and once the compost is done doing its thing you can get about we haven't gone through a full cycle of this yet but I hear about a month's worth of full-time use with two people you do yeah you're gonna spend you know 900 to 1100 dollars for a really nice composting toilet but you get all the components with it and you don't have to spend that money on a black tank so it's really it's not that expensive it's totally worth getting and it doesn't smell at all there's a vent that goes through vents out the bottom of the bus would definitely be careful where you put that vent if you have any intakes or anything like that any fans just be aware of where that's venting out and you also want to be aware that you're not creating and you're like we're back drafts when you're driving so you want to have that that negative suction continuing to make sure that you're not getting any weird Wafi smells roof but I mean you can literally open it up and there is no smell at all because that fan just keeps things going in it yeah fan runs off our solar it's just a small DC computer fan and that has to run a hundred percent of the time so make sure if you are hooking that up to your battery bank that you have enough battery power to make sure that that never stops running cuz then this melt will happen so it's really simple we this is our nightstand and our toilet so I hear a lot of schoolies and conversion vehicles kind of joking about like where their toilets are on their bus and some people can make breakfast and sit on the toilet at the same time ours is our stand and it's our toilet doors open up that swings up if you wanted to keep an open concept and still have privacy we have considered the idea of just having some fold up curtains that come up after you open and you can have this complete enclosure what's great about keeping the original panels instead of doing wood paneling is that everything is magnetic which it was the reason that we wanted to keep it the cybermen kind of keeps the original look of the bus which we like and again you can put magnetic curtains in your shower you can do it in your toilet and you don't have to sacrifice all of your space it uses zero water aside from us doing a little spritz every now and then to clean it so like we have just a 40 gallon tank in the back for our fresh water our drinking water and our dish water and everything like that and it can last us two weeks like no problem so without toilet water you can go a lot longer this year is a work in progress at the moment but again it was the wheel well came out to here and we had to cover it up with something and hey we need a shower right now we have solar shower outside works fantastic and even if you have an interior shower gotta go with an outdoor solar shower as well and makes life a lot easier when you're just doing a quick rinse but this opens up to a Japanese soaking tub which we'll show you later when we're done in so basically it's just a box and has a liner inside with a little seat and a drain at the bottom if you open this up there will be your faucets here and if you want to take a shower you can just sit in there and use the wand or hang it up and have magnetic curtains that will come up as well if you're feeling luxurious and you miss home and the warmth of taking a bath look into Japanese soaking tubs there are a great option to have a tub in a very small space almost a little bit better because you can sit down when the water goes right up to your neck rather than having to lay in a long tub so there's a little luxury that we weren't willing to sacrifice so another luxury that we weren't willing to sacrifice on is the bed so we had this awesome memory from bed at our apartment before we moved into the bus so we wanted the same situation queen-size bed all the way and lots of storage underneath so that's what we created here the bus had these like metal pole stand things about nine of them with a top and a bottom screw holes around each I you know I'm just like drawing it in my brain right now but anyhow we used that as you know the frame underneath the bed and then built a wooden frame on top of it and then the mattress just sits nice and tight right on top of there so again this was a YouTube video of somebody making a bed frame there's probably 100 em out there but you just look up queen size king size whatever you're gonna have and super simple it's too high 6s flat very very simple build video to do that and then if you you know like Megan was saying we did have some like neat metal stands that we use to hold the bed up but it's as simple as using something like iron pipe yeah with the little tops and bottom screwing that in I could hold your bed in place and then you just want to make sure you also screw it to the walls to keep it from shaking when you're driving so the bed you know is kind of a our dog goes up on there sometimes it's a very comfortable place for us to feel like we're at home so we love it you know and eventually we'd like to build some I see some buses that have like you know bookshelves and some storage space at the foot of the bed I love that I'm so this summer we're thinking of adding that space over here because we do have some kind of dead space at the foot of the bed so storage opportunities there so underneath I love this part so we downsized our clothing so much I probably only kept about 10% of what we owned so we each have been made these really nice flush drawers which again one of those projects that seemed a lot you know more complicated but once he did it was a WoW that's you know just a box it came out really well and it's just a box so anyway we have his and hers you know that holds all of our clothes right rides right out and then we have these nice little locks which if you forget to lock it it's the worst when you're driving to book very simple and then underneath that kind of holds our electronics and stuff like that and also doubles as a little step up onto the bed because our beds a bit high so yeah so that's been kind of enough storage and then one other little storage area which I'll let them explain because it's one of his favorite things again yeah aside from the wood stove this is my favorite from the most it's my secret storage compartment very pumped about that yeah there's some very secret toilet paper stash away in there super fancy so the rest of the storage that we have underneath the bed is accessed from the back door and we call it the garage our solar you know components our batteries are underneath there what else our freshwater tank our backpacks those are big and bulky for hiking and other fun things so that's something down there too it was important to you are being full-time and you're gonna be in cold climates you got to think about your freshwater and freezing so we chose to keep the fresh water take instead of being mounted underneath the bus we keep it inside I have heard people also mounting underneath the bus I'm just insulating it in a box itself you can be as simple as putting a light that shines at it which will keep it from freezing but if you're going to be in really cold climates for any lengthy period of time you're gonna get freezing problems so we keep that underneath the bus there it is not all plumbed into the sink yet but when it is another another aspect of keeping things from not freezing is that we're just gonna have some exposed pipes and go across the top sort of just play off that industrial look that's very popular and coppers good you know thanks that was so at first we thought that we would be able to survive off of a Yeti cooler definitely can't and only takes you so far so we actually got a smallish fridge which holds everything that I mean and we're big on healthy you know I cook all of our own food and everything we cook all of our own food so it's been completely sufficient it has a tiny freezer which doesn't work that well but that's okay it runs off of our solar so that's really wonderful I think we got it at Home Depot again like a sale thing I believe it was about a hundred dollars for a small fridge like that and honestly some people ask about the propane electric hybrids which are really great but propane makes me uncomfortable especially because I have what's over here so simple is running a tiny dorm fridge often solar works great works great so for our drinking water we keep this murky water filter filled all the time this is wonderful I believe that was about three hundred dollars pricey but Wow it can filter out just about anything we put all kinds of different you know sort water sources into it and it generates the most delicious water ever so we always keep this full bar drinking water and then the fresh water that we get from you know wherever we are we use for dishes and things like that so the Berkey is wonderful for drinking water that thing will they use that in third-world countries and honestly can filter out the nastiest looking water the way we tested to make sure that the filters don't need to be changed is you put food coloring in your water and they'll filter out food color and come out clear so that's the kind of power that this thing has the filters last about six months to a year depending on your usage of it and we've never had to change them yeah because we're not going like wild with it until right now but it's definitely worth the price that it is so when we bought our bus it was this kind of scary shade of black / red / dusty rust the condition of the paint was pretty good there was just surface rust nothing no pinning no holes or anything like that so that was one of the major reasons why we purchased this bus was because the body was in such good condition but we knew that we had to paint it like from day one we were not going to accept the way that it looked before so we at first thought okay we'll do the interior conversion and about the painting part so we got three quotes all were within the range of nine to twelve thousand dollars minimum to get the bus painted and that was even with us doing some of the prep work that did not include any bodywork at all so I'm talking $15,000 for a professional job all in exactly so that wasn't something that we were willing to put in so we started to think of ways that we could paint the bus ourselves and what we realized is that it would just require a significant amount of elbow grease not as much as we ended up putting it or we didn't anticipate how much work it would actually be it probably took us we just worked on weekends because we both had full-time jobs during the conversion so we just worked on weekends and it was in pretty favorable temperatures and it required both of us you know 10 hours a day of meticulous sanding bended a lot of bondo I did some bondo to yeah so that's something that I think was a little unique to our bus it having been converted into a mobile command center and the people who did that conversion just put a bunch of bolts through the walls so when we bought the bus and finally removed all of the old stuff it looked like Swiss cheese so when dealing with holes you can bond to it you can weld in new panels we don't have anything big enough to require welding at all so we use like metal and for metal enforced yeah so there is the basic like bodywork pink bondo stuff which is a great product but I wouldn't recommend it for an application like this as it will crack over time and you'll have ruined paint job so I ended up putting you can put sheet metal behind the hole on the interior side and then there's this metal reinforced bondo you can get it any napa whatever store like that is rated so that you can actually drill into it it dries really really hard and it'll flex with the temperature change of the metal of your bus that stuff is fantastic I use it on all the holes I would absolutely recommend it and I haven't had any cracking issues on our paint job at all so that was part of the prep month I guess I'll call it you know it's a real test of our marriage / the whole bus life thing in general that I reached a breaking point on one day remember where I was like I don't think I can do this I'm sick I'm covered in sand and dust and we've been doing this for so many hours I don't think I can do this but then we got to the weekend where we were actually going to paint so we went to a NAPA Auto Parts and we went with a three part automotive paint - stud you know the primer and then the color coat this is my favorite color on the planet by the way I like to be surrounded by it I went with automotive paint we bought like kind of a cheapish sprayer a spray gun I see some people rolling some people spraying Harbor Freight has a great paint sprayer it's a good quality the guys from Napa actually recommended it to me I think around 60 bucks or something like that totally worth it and we're fantastic we had no problems whatsoever biggest thing if you're going to be using a paint sprayers make sure you have a good compressor you don't want a tiny pancake compressor you got to borrow somebody's larger compressor really important because you will start to lose your pressure fast have to wait uneven and it's all about timing we're doing a job this big so there was two of like you know just Ben and I on the paint day so I was kind of like the mixer and Ben was covered in a like a tie back type suit and doing all of the the spraying and I was prepping the paint and you know feeding it in because the sprayer itself well they're very big so we had to refill it several times and we were like running against the clock kind of thing if you are lucky enough to be able to paint your bus in a clean room Wow hats off to you that's so awesome we had to paint it in like a sand pit it was a sand pit yeah it's kind of parking lot kind of like this but you know I know it sounds like every professional painter in the world would be like what you know sandy place that's totally stupid we were gifted with fantastic weather and one little trick is to wet your area with a hose to keep the dust down it's hard to find a place to park a giant rig like this to have it sprayed so you've got to work with what you got we did the best with what we had to work with and we think it came out awesome so all in um doing the paint job ourselves cost us I would say about $700 and if you compare that to nine to twelve thousand minimum we're pretty happy with it workwise at least let's say 10 20 40 Suzy probably a hundred hours both of us at least and that's 90 percent prepping the paint job itself took one day hours yeah it took four hours the actual paint I remember we started lying in painting 4:30 p.m. and we ended around 8:30 and by the end of it we were lighting the bus with our headlights because it was dark hidden main at that point so you know it was it was crazy but yeah it was so weird how you spent an entire month basically prepping it to do four hours of work at the end to make it yeah as much prep work is you're gonna do you'll always feel like you could have done more but at some point you got to just call it if we can go back in time sure I might have to ground a little bit more down and smooth some surfaces up a little bit more yeah if you're dealing with a bus that's got old paint and you have chipping paint then you have to feather it real smooth so that you don't see the old paint lines but with the great thing about a bus like this is got Rob rails it's busy already no one's going to be looking at it with magnifying glass I don't stress about stuff like that right it's more about protecting it that's what we were really concerned about because we had the bus for over a year before we painted it and going through a northeast winter you know I don't know we wanted to protect it so now we feel like it is and we're really happy with it so you get the paint job done but there's still quite a bit of work after that because you have to take off all of your hardware before you actually paint it so we kept all of our original hardware and we used um rust reformer we loved we probably used I don't know 10 cans of this it's a black rust-oleum product rust reformers so I just did that on all of our hardware and then a nice coat of black gloss cuz the actual hardware was in rough shape but it's better than buying brand-new stuff and we have plenty of mirrors so we drove it all the way across country and been super happy with the mirrors I would say yeah when you're driving something like this it's not like your new RVs with the awesome views and the and the curved glass you have a lot of blind spots so lots of mirrors if you don't have a lot of mirrors on your bus it can get some more I have three mirrors on the driver's side one flat and two that are convex that allow me to have zero blind spots when somebody's passing you because that's your biggest concern when you're Lane changing you want to make sure you're not merging into another car that you can't see and these front guys are my like primaries I'm looking in these all the time they'll show you all the way from the nose earr bus to the tail the only blind spot I have in this thing is in the very back you can't see behind your bus obviously you just get a reverse camera and it's no problem whatsoever very easy setup there even the school buses with the bottom window in the door really easy to mount or reverse camera totally worth getting okay so we and I've seen some buses that don't have any exterior storage we have a bit of it we have a full spare tire on the other side and then these two metal storage boxes I think holds our tools like we have a cargo toolboxes in there two regular sized toolboxes in here for just like on routes type stuff wrenches and something like that this is our starter battery this is not lock that pulls out in the slide as well I would like a little bit more storage and we have a spot for it yeah there's a couple extra spots this generator here so this generator came with the bus it's we used it more before we got solar we have two 300 watt panels on top that power pretty much everything we use inside the bus right now so we haven't really used it since we've been on this particular trip but prior to it was essential when we were painting the bus we ran our compressor off of the generator which made for an interesting day because we had to kind of cover up the generator but allow it to breathe but it's been really great in any case where we didn't have power when we were working on the bus we were able to just start it up started up a 50 amp generator so you can power power tools it's great we really lucked out with that with the bus which is out here in Arizona we don't have to worry about cloudy days right now so we haven't had to use it but when your batteries start to die make sure you tie in your generator to your battery bank and you can flip that thing on and keep them topped off because you don't want those to get too low it will ruin your battery bank so originally we went with alt E which is a great company out of Massachusetts we went with a solar kit they have a tiny house kit so we have two 300 watt panels on the roof and 400 amp hours of AGM batteries anyone with the AGM batteries instead of your standard lead acid batteries because they don't require technically and they require venting in a catastrophic but they are closed they don't leak hydrogen gas like lead acid batteries do so they're a little less maintenance a little more expensive but not that bad and the reason we went with a kit was because the solar was the one area that we weren't super well-versed on and it's nice you know to have that face to face via the phone about what you need what you don't need that kind of thing so the kit kind of came with everything actually came with some extra stuff that we worked with this really knowledgeable a friend of a friend who helped us install the solar I was essential and he was able to tell us exactly out of the kit what we needed what we didn't so that might be an area where assistance is very welcome yeah I would definitely recommend going for if we were do it all over again now that we know what we need I don't think I will go with a kid I would definitely pick our components how the way we want to customize it you let me learn you will pay more with a kit and you will definitely get probably more than you need which is not a bad thing we have really great charge control or midnight solar charge controller so I'm never worried about our batteries you know getting overcharged or under charging them like that our inverters really high quality as well so I'm thankful that we went with that but talk to an expert to a couple of people speak to weren't you the guy who's gonna install it it's not gonna be you if you don't have any experience and you're not very comfortable electricity absolutely go with a professional and who has done a solar application these panels will collect electricity regardless if they're plugged into anything so when you're mounting them that is something you have to consider it's not like tying yourself into the grid so what we run off of it we didn't mention this inside actually but we have a small refrigerator it's like about this tall with a tiny freezer it holds everything that we need it's been great so far on this trip so that's always plugged into the solar always running and then we have our fan for our composting toilet we have a couple of lights and I run the coffee grinder immersion blender small appliances like that's totally fine so it's it's definitely sufficient for what we need and you just work on your timing of things you're gonna be charging your stuff during your debt and during your day and running your blenders and your vacuum cleaners you can handle that you just don't want to do it at night there are a lot of old parts that came with the bus like different AC units and fans and other things so there was something under here before that we we ripped out as part of the back seats keeping your feet warm kinda stuff a storage box under here like Ben said we would love to have more exterior storage so we have opportunities for that to expand on one of the projects on our to list for sure so going on back to the garage that is where all of our components for our solar is on one side and then boxed off we have our freshwater tank on this side we did end up going with a portable grey tank and I think we're just gonna sell it because it didn't fit under the bus yeah we're gonna go with a mount now that we know that we're not going to be in freezing cold temperatures all the time and it's kind of cumbersome so it's great but it didn't work for applications culinary culinary you learn those things as you get on the road it's okay to say forget about it we don't need it anymore we're not using it and don't force it it's a metal fabrication we'd like to do out back like we used to have a 24 foot pneumatic antenna on the back that the mobile command center used as an intention yeah surveillance we took that off but it that's kind of a yucky looking you know metal area there so we're gonna do some some projects to cover that up in the future oh one thing I wanted to touch on is the roof paint we just painted it white with a roll-on rust-oleum we didn't spray the roof because no one's gonna see it we didn't want to waste all that time and energy and money on using auto paint for the roof it's fine rust-oleum white paints great a lot of people use the elastomeric so a nice coating for the roof and honestly I think that's great we're probably going to switch over to that once we do a little bit more work on the bus totally worth it I hear wonderful things about temperature differences once you actually have that on there I think it's Henry's is a great product but we've actually I mean I think because of the work we put in with the installations hasn't been necessary hasn't been necessary but overkill is good thank you so much for coming over to our bus and taking a tour of the inside and outside it's been really fun so we're on instagram at wild drive life where we post all kinds random things interior/exterior lot of photos of my dog and hiking and all that stuff but something that we really focus on is being debt-free we're super passionate about it when Ben and I started this whole you know dreamin process we had about $100,000 of debt student loan and vehicle debt we paid it off we made a plan and paid it off and three and a half years just working our tails off and implementing some different you know lifestyle changes so it's something that we're really passionate about and would love to share in a bigger way so that's part of this it's not just about the bus for us it's about that message and delivering it so I have a website the wild drive calm and we're also going to start a YouTube channel focusing on the financial elements and how this whole lifestyle can be feasible and enjoyable and you can live large in a small space and see wonderful places in and live free live free because you're not free until you're dead free so the links will be in the description of our social accounts and our YouTube channel and our website so please check it out thank you again thanks for coming you [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Tiny Home Tours

Views: 1,052,566

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, diy skoolie, skoolie build, custom skoolie, custom skoolie build

Id: 4C89MQX_-6s

Length: 56min 15sec (3375 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 25 2018