Couples DIY School Bus Conversion Built To Live Debt Free & Travel

[Music] hey guys welcome to the bus i'm devon i'm brianna and welcome to our home welcome into the bus as you step in the first thing that you're going to notice is we actually have this really nice shoe storage we kind of have it broken up into hers over here just because a little more shallow then we have all of my shoe storage over here a little bit deeper got all my shoes really throw your keys and everything right up in here as soon as you come in the door so that all works out really nicely you don't have to come in much further to see the next big feature that we have we have a lot of people talk about this because it's pretty cool but this is actually our litter box so we have a cat named tillo and a dog named archie and so we had to figure out kind of a nice creative cool spot to put the litter box so we slapped it right underneath here you can see it's got nice little hooks in there so it stays shut whenever we're driving then we're actually able to empty all this out and then just store this away completely whenever we're driving down the road so also we've just got kind of a custom little i guess command center you want to call it we just kept the switches that we needed tried to keep it pretty minimal it's just open and closed door nothing like too crazy here but yeah just try to clean it up and make it our own thing okay so just a couple specs about the bus it is a 2001 bluebird school bus it's 39 foot long so we've got plenty of space and it's got about 110 000 miles so this thing is just getting started since it has a diesel 5.9 cummings engine so next up we've got our two twin couches which are mostly used for storage we also store our table over here which can sit like six people can also sit down in the middle and turn this into a full bed for guests my wife brianna is the first love of my life but you're going to meet the second love of my life and this is my gaming slash workstation here this is a 34 inch ultrawide monitor in a bus and it's a full gaming pc i can play anything at max settings you nerds know what i'm talking about so i absolutely love this whole setup and that we were able to bring that into the bus so another really cool feature of our build is this cubic mini wood stove that we have here it's made by cubic mini wood stoves as i said but we had to find a way to really heat the front side of the bus and we thought going natural like if we're in the back woods we need to just find wood that's all we need so we bought this and put it in here it fits perfectly just looks really good and it actually puts out a ton of heat this is archie's kennel area over here before it was arches kennel area it was actually brianna's desk space so the really cool thing about these is since you need to maximize your space inside of a bus we actually have two little tabs that you hit and these can fold down completely against the wall and both desks do that so you can regain the space you can even put extra seats here if you want more guests now you're coming back into our kitchen area uh we built i think a pretty big kitchen we wanted a lot of space for cooking again i've talked a little bit about guests already so we just wanted to keep it open you can see here we actually have a full oven which i don't think you'll see in a lot of buses so we really love that we have that cause my wife loves to bake you look in here again this is just an example of maximizing your space i built these cool little drawers so that we could kind of get that vertical space and so that everything isn't just falling around while we're traveling you can see our countertops here we actually just bought these at menards and cut them down to size this is butcher block but then we finished it first we just tried to oil it keep it really natural it just didn't work out for us very well it was kind of staining so we put water locks on it and it worked out awesome it's got that super smooth finish can't see any lines or anything and you could technically cut on it but we don't just to be safe you step over to this side here we've got that same nice countertop and we've also got a couple different options to get water we have a 100 gallon water tank in the back so that we can actually go off grid for quite a while along with a water pump and solar but we can also just hook up to a campground and get shore power and shore water just right there so i wanted to talk a little bit about the fridge because when we first started we actually had an apartment-sized fridge which i think would work just fine we went with another option because like i talked about before we really like to have the option to go off-grid and so this actually allows us to hook up to either electric or propane so that's always a nice feature to have if you want to hit the back roads another thing you'll see here is our custom pantry that we built all with locking latches just to make sure like nothing comes out while we're driving got our trash can down here and this is all just basically food storage so probably one of the things i'm most proud about in this build is my progression woodworking and here's one example of that got this really cool bi-fold door it just kind of separates the front area from the sleeping area now we're going back to the sleeping area of the bus which again is kind of divided up by some doors but we have two bunks again for guests because we love having people over so we've got a top and a bottom bunk each one of them has their own little usb charging as well as some cool little night lights and then we've also utilized this space because again you got to use all the space as some little clothes storage so this is where most of my clothes live right there and if you come all the way down you're going to get into our solar setup obviously not the panels but we have all of our batteries inverter solar charge controller and our ac panel right under here so having solar panels was super important to us we kind of talked about it just a little bit but having that the ability to go off grid and just a boondock for really as long as we have water and so 740 watts will let us do everything all of our lights are 12-volt it could power our lights for a year probably and so we have no problem powering that our refrigerator any electronics laptops charging even my gaming computer can run off of these panels right here just across from the bunk beds we have our fully tiled bathroom with a shower okay so this is our bathroom definitely one of our best features probably one of the ones we get the most comments about it features a composting toilet made by nature's head right here so again we keep that boondocking theme we've also got as you can see the full thing is tiled with a full stand-up shower and one of the coolest things is we didn't do a roof raise on the entire bus if you look up we actually did a roof raise on just this part of the bus all right so if you look over to the left side of the shower you're going to see that we have a full bench and that actually goes into storage underneath it where we store all of our shower stuff so here's another really cool door that we made it's got like that asymmetric design just absolutely love this thing and that is the bedroom door which we're going to go to next so come on back to the very nice and cool air-conditioned bedroom um actually a ton of space we have a full queen-size bed plenty of storage in the left and right over the bed you can see our mini split back there we just got all kinds of good things so if you look right here we've got our hamper which is right above our washer and dryer if you go to the other side this is where the rest of our clothes are they're actually just right down here and these bends kind of folded up most of my clothes are right here and then a lot of brianna's clothes and hanging clothes just go right above that okay so this is our washer and dryer by splendi this thing is absolutely awesome it both washes and as soon as it's done washing it'll start to dry so why a bus over maybe like a sprinter van or even an element what do you think um i feel like when we first found out about schoolies it was really attractive and this cool thing that we thought we could totally do and we are totally doing it and we do love this lifestyle but for me personally now living in a school bus i want to downsize to a sprinter van just because and we haven't even started traveling yet but when we do travel there are places that i want to be able to explore inside my home and the bus is a little bit too large to go you know up the mountains and like explore cities and like tighter um city spaces i guess that you really can't take a school bus um but a sprinter van you can park anywhere and live anywhere take it anywhere and so i only i already kind of want to downsize right and i'll kind of work from the other side a little bit but the the main thing that a bus offers you is a lot of space so if it's only going to be travel especially if you're going like campground to campground i think a bus is an excellent idea because you're basically getting a class a motorhome rv it's perfect for way cheaper and you get to make it whatever you want so that's i think that's why a bus can can be an awesome option depending on what you want to do with it yeah the why is pretty big and it's the whole idea of i guess it's just a millennial idea that we don't buy into the american dream where you have to have the huge house with the three-car garage and like that's your goal and that's what you should be going after because really what you're buying into is debt and we just don't like that so we we built this bus paid cash the whole way it's part of why it took so long but it's ours and it's our house um we really love to travel so our goal is to travel in our schooly eventually find where we want to set some routes down buy some land and build a home so hopefully while we live in the school bus we can just follow our dreams of travel and where we want life to take us in the end so surprisingly we actually had really good reactions to telling their parents and our family that we were going to downsize limited bus of course they thought it was a little bit crazy but even before we showed what the bus looked like we had you know just good vibes all around especially once we showed everybody what we turned it into and we could really make it look like people loved it and so i would encourage like more millennials to kind of think outside of the box and really anybody not just millennials just think in a different way do things in a different way because i'm not going to say that we've been tricked but we've all just kind of bought into this idea of that this is what life should look like and it's kind of time for us to write our own story and make our own path yeah our main plan is really just to get out of here right now we live in illinois we live in the midwest and once winter comes there's really just not much to do here you're kind of just waiting for spring and summer and so you're waiting to live again and so we're just really looking forward to going west and seeing everything that it has to offer we love the snowboarding we love the mountains and everything so that's just where our hearts are right now and so if anybody's going to be in the southwest just look us up and we really look forward to meeting you guys out on the road you

Channel: Tiny Home Tours

Views: 987,003

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, bus conversion, family travel vlogs, school bus conversion build, off grid, bus conversion build, bus life family, skoolie family, skoolie conversion build, school bus conversion ideas, skoolie conversion

Id: 2QEWUBJcIdI

Length: 10min 48sec (648 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020