Couples DIY Off Grid Raised Roof School Bus Conversion Tiny House

hey everybody my name is jordan and i'm steve and this is the wilderness welcome to our kitchen our sink is a pretty decent size we can fit a ton of stuff in there i love having the pull down option for this and the grate in the bottom of it is really nice too to just keep everything off the bottom of the sink we have a four burner stove that's got cast iron all the way across and an oven so it's just basically an apartment sized set up we did them both intentionally on this side that way this countertop is completely open and we can kind of use that for prep space or work space or whatever so this is our pantry and our trash can space as tons of storage options in there for our food and then we've got the apartment sized fridge and freezer option on here we wanted to have the freezer on the bottom because that helps keep it cool but i also wanted to be able to open them as opposed to a top loading one just for organization tons of storage space up on the top we've got the bar and spice rack over here which is pretty crucial piece uh addition to the bus there we did rebar across the front of that just basically what we kind of had laying around and it does a really good job of keeping everything and it kind of adds a cool rustic feel to it and yeah besides that i got all the cabinets from habitat for humanity and i just repainted them so that was a really cool way to upcycle some stuff one of my favorite features about the kitchen is our live edge countertops huge thank you to our neighbors john and regina for gifting these to us they're a beautiful accent piece they are black walnut countertops our neighbors pretty much taught us how to do it from start to finish how to turn them into countertops and they're probably one of my favorite features of the bus so our curtains are made of burlap i really wanted to be able to have light come in but still have the privacy behind that and i got these from another youtuber but basically um the tops are hooked up there and then the dowel in the middle comes through so we can have different options for letting sunlight in so actually one of the biggest things for me with the kitchen i was worried about storage space because you can accumulate so many different kitchen utensils that you think are essential and we have so much more storage than we actually need and steve and i can actually be prepping and cooking back to back and not bump each other and i've had friends come and be like oh my gosh your kitchen is bigger than mine in their apartment or whatever so it's it really is just about the intentionality of how you build it and to me this is all the kitchen space we really need [Music] so i spent about a year living out of a toyota tacoma and it was the happiest year of my life i'm an outdoor photographer so i was working and just i don't know let a lot of things behind i guess and focused on what i love and i'm just super happy and i came home for a little bit met jordan fell in love and she joined me on the road and it was just like dang i'd love to take you all over but uh a toyota tacoma is a little bit small for a guy a girl and two german shepherds and we went to the asheville van life rally and that year they had buses there for the first time i think i've shown her pictures and she had to leave early but she said something about oh i'd live in a bus with you and then when he brought up the idea i was like don't joke around about it because i'll do it so then she trapped me with her good looks inside for all this this work [Music] all right so welcome to the front of our bus or the mudroom we'll call it we've got an insulated plumbing cabinet right here so we can take the bus cold places and not have to worry about you know any of our heat or anything failing uh a little bookshelf up front our map collection over here we used some some scrap wood and made some speaker boxes because we got to be listening to tunes all right so welcome to the bathroom um we put a glass door to try and keep things open as we got to the front of the bus we run out of money if you can't tell so we want some cheap metal put some extra rock left over from the fireplace on the floor we were able to reuse the emergency window in here and we've got a little piece of wood so we can pop it out and use the other shower head outside if we needed to or just kind of have this open you know if you're in the woods all right so then once you actually close our front door it kind of becomes the bathroom we've got our composting toilet back here the his and her set up for all of our bathroom stuff and uh we made some side doors over here we've got our vacuum and then our composting stuff we just mix in peat moss or ash or ash from fire pits wood chips and then we've got some you know smell good stuff in there just in case i thought that composting was going to be kind of gross it hasn't been gross it's it's actually not that bad and the amount of water we're saving and the amount of like i guess ways were being green by doing so is kind of way cooler than using a toilet anyways this is different than most buses they usually tuck their bathrooms on the side or in the back somewhere but we thought that we would put this big front door and have these walls here that we could insulate fully so not only do we have a little bit more of a means of security and privacy but we also have the whole entire bus all four sides and top and bottom covered in over two inches of foam if you need some privacy uh you can just slide this and uh do your do your business so this is kind of like our living room kind of the living space my favorite part about the bus is this wood stove right here we got it off a park ranger in tennessee it was upgrading because they had a big cabin but it turns out that this thing is just enough and more for our bus we've been in below zero and been toasty in here so it's a swiss high flame and we get a log burning then once we close this thing down it'll burn all night i guess it's probably still got some from last night yeah smoking in there we put stone in here you know buses carry a lot of people and we wanted to put you know weight in there we got a lot of solar batteries and equipment under the couch over here and we wanted the bus not to you know be heavy on one side especially with the fridge back there so we thought we'd use real rock my best friend back home he does stonework and this was a kind of one of the last jobs he did as a gift for us so we get to carry that with us you know wherever we go it's pretty cool and it's local rock from home too so it's nice to be able to take a little piece of north carolina with us so the couch hosts our entire electrical system and a little bit of like long-term storage but it's kind of really become our dog's bed um and then when jordan's out of town some of my buddies will we'll sleep on here and hang out all right so power uh we're big on off grid we actually built the whole bus off grid in a muddy field in north carolina we've got 1200 watts of solar up top that comes into our battery bank down here we're just under 900 usable amp hours it's a lead system but we've been working with it for two years and it's never let us down i'm a big fan of the victron products i really like having that bluetooth app on my phone and being able to monitor things without having to check too much one of my favorite parts too just to use the most of the space we built this slide-out table and we both love water so this is a map of all the rivers and waterways in north carolina we eat dinner here a lot but we can put another chair here another chair here if we've got friends that are traveling with us once the table goes in and out of the way you can then move the closet door and slide that down where we've got some hanging space for both of us once that's closed we also have access to our drawers so we've we folded things and made a way to make it work but honestly we've gotten rid of a lot of stuff and it's like it's been a blessing to just do a load of laundry and that's it there's not like a mountain hiding in the closet somewhere you know um another favorite part is this is our laundry chute so we we put our laundry back here we don't have to have a like you know a big bag in the corner or whatever and there's a magnet on this so we can just pull that off and when it's full we do our laundry [Music] the coolest thing about this build though is the community we we built this thing not knowing this is our first set of power tools and we couldn't done it without all of the incredible friends we have you know we've got a welder buddy we've got a stone mason buddy cold mountain conversions is the place where we built our bus and while we built ours ourselves there's no way we could have made it look like this if it wasn't for story and tara um and all of our friends i mean yeah the biggest thing in life that we've learned that i've learned is if you don't know how to do something find somebody that does and you know use your resources and we we're like living proof of that the community that has just totally supported us through the field yeah i hope that you know anybody that walks in here can can know that like two normal people that like you know i owned a power drill before this you know can configure some things out and make life work for them yeah [Music] all right welcome to the bedroom we have a queen-size mattress in here so we have tons of space we've got our tv that acts as a second monitor for steve and we have a big shelf back here for storage we have a mini split over our bed which really helps with the heating and the cooling also one of the things that's the most helpful actually is this window right here we initially installed it just because we wanted to have a window by the bed but we really quickly realized if it feels hot because we're up so high if it's hot in here you can open the window turn on the max air fan and it just sucks cool air across us while we're sleeping which is super super awesome to have our lights actually also are in two separate zones so we can leave the bedroom lights off and have the kitchen lights on so steve is a really early riser and i like to sleep in so if he gets up and wants to make coffee we can leave the lights off in here and it's a little bit darker for me to still snooze while steve gets ready in the morning or vice versa [Music] so you can tell the budget was running low we just bolted this thing together and chopped some things and we added a little scrap wood to it had some extra stain lying around and we put a dead bolt on it um just to you know have that extra security we could have saved a whole lot of money if i was the same size as jordan but we had to chop the roof so we raised it 18 inches which i've got respect for anybody that's ever done that it's a hell of an endeavor busting out all those rivets and replacing them you know we like the woods we want it to feel like a cabin so we tried to carry that through the outside and you know line the windows with some wood gave it that same walnut stain as we have inside up top we've got our racks made by my good boy ty over here grateful for good friends jordan would go have girl weekends and ty would come over and we'd just get to weldon and we'd have so much fun camping out in there we we've been living in the bus before it was finished it's just been rad so grateful to have you here sir we've got our water tanks trapped under the bottom uh you know we welded them too just to make sure that they don't move anywhere they're insulated and they're heated um we like cold weather and we live in the mountains early on we we actually broke some things due to the cold so everything's heated now taken care of and then back here is kind of neat we're still working on it but since we have wood storage and a wood stove under here will fit our firewood and we'll be able to hopefully hold enough to keep us cozy for a little while this thing's a beast it's a lot to drive so we we chopped the bumper and we moved it two and a half feet out we've got this inset wheel chock and i bring my motorcycle it's a super moto so it's on off road and that's what we'll use to get our eggs and our milk and you know run into town or go to a trail head instead of taking this monstrosity then we've got our ladder to the roof uh it's the you know the canoe rack with a cocktail bar you know depending on the day in order to keep the space kind of clean and simple inside we thought we put all of our like fun stuff back here so it's it's our garage it's the tool shed and where we keep all our gear so we can actually fit two mountain bikes back there we're still finishing up the construction process so we do have a lot of tools but we we backpack and i'm an outdoor photographer so a lot of my outdoor gears back here we've got everything from a heated wood stove tent to hammocks and you know our winter and summer gear so we can we can kind of do do it all just from the back of our bus [Music] and we totally realize you know everybody's built to live in a bus but more power to you if you're just giving up a little bit to have a little bit more you know we we realize that we all can't make a lot more money sometimes but you can always spend a lot less and just have a little bit more yeah we've been doing it for a year and a half now and like no regrets we survived quarantine and didn't kill each other that says something right like we have found one tiny slice of something that works really well for us yeah it enables us to just live more freely kind of foster the things that are important to us and like have more days each year that we remember at the end of the calendar year and that's that's kind of the secret to life we don't have rent we don't have a mortgage or all these bills like you know we can go to the islands in the winter or fill that bar with some some good bourbon yeah better quality liquor or whatever and you know i was so scared when i quit my job that i'd be in this position where i had to take all these gigs in order to like you know have that same salary but by cutting all this and having a little bit more freedom now we get to take jobs that we we like and we enjoy and now we get to go backpacking for work somehow yeah it just feels like we're really living as opposed to like trying to work really hard so we can actually live the life we want when we're older i do outdoor photography and travel photography for a living it's been wonderful i've been blessed to work with a ton of outdoor brands over the years and state government tourism agencies and the bus is kind of a culmination of you know our dream home and really we can take this uh this cabin we've created and then i can plug it into a wilderness and get to know that area on a deeper level and then capture it in a way that you know i see fitting um and you know you couldn't do that through hotels you couldn't do that and you know i don't mind sleeping in a tent but sure is nice to have a hot shower and be able to cook a meal and this journey's been really cool me and jordan were actually offered a job we work for backpacker magazine now um and we're actually creating a video series that comes out this may called the get out more tour um and we're we're crossing our fingers we're gonna be taking the bus and showing people a little bit more of this lifestyle yeah it's basically an educational series of how to backpack what gear you need what to do what not to do and uh just kind of inspiring people to get outside and get out more tv if you like outdoor um photography or some of the wild adventures we get into you can find me it's at steve underscore yoakum our bus we just made the page but we're planning plenty of fun for it it's under wilderness bus underscore bus wilderness underscore bus and um we didn't have a name for most of the build we're gonna call it something that was a little cheesy um and then we parked it out in the woods in pisgah national forest for a long weekend and in the wilderness and it's kind of like our little homie cabin i think you were p you were peeing and you like lean kind of out you're like what about what about this perfect yeah my instagram handle is j a meeks m-e-e-k-s-9-1 um that's just my own personal page there's nothing i'm not a professional photographer i'm not anything that's just like a real she's a total goofball there's a lot of good behind-the-scenes in there and then if you are interested in following our work journey uh it'll be called the the get out more tour and it'll be a youtube series coming out this may thanks so much for taking a tour with us look for us on the road or uh sometimes we we stay home in carolina for the winter so if you ever pass through say hi yeah cheers my crap [Music] well [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Tiny Home Tours

Views: 431,309

Rating: 4.9536166 out of 5

Keywords: tiny house, tiny house on wheels, living big in a tiny house, tiny house movement, tiny home, small house, small spaces, small house design, alternative living, architecture, affordable home, off the grid, small space living, tiny house life, diy tiny house, diy home, school bus conversion, skoolie conversion, mini school bus conversion, school bus build, rv conversion, vanlife build, bus conversion, skoolie tour, tiny house living, skoolie conversion tour, van life

Id: myhjMI5RC7o

Length: 17min 15sec (1035 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 11 2021