DIY Double Decker Bus tiny house conversion - Family of 8

everybody my name is dane irely my kids call me big papa i've got six kids and my wife we live here in our double decker tour bus that we've converted come on in and let's check out my house [Music] all right walking in the front door we have my my home office uh slash cockpit of the bus um this is just where i do all my work we've got my computer screens that we set up whenever we get stationed somewhere and uh all my gps things like that right up here up front so uh moving from the uh from the office back in the bus we've got our kitchen area so starting off we have our fridge and freezer fridge on one side freezer on the other and then we've got our full kitchen back here so on on the driver's side is really just the cabinetry um with our our countertop and then storage below it and then on the passenger side of the bus we have our sink that's a 30 inch sink and we've got a two burner stove and an oven there as well a little bit of storage on this side we wanted you know we did this whole farm farmhouse style um and we chose to do an induction oven just because we we didn't have any gas in the in the bus other than that would have been anyways so we went ahead and just did the induction oven we did a two burner because frankly we do a lot of things in our insta pot and then we do a lot of cooking outside and we knew uh we weren't going to be using it very frequently so we just did a two burner stove and then we did a pretty deep sink so it's the 30 inch and it's actually pretty deep with the cutting board and the rack on top of it so back behind the kitchen we have our dining area and one of the things we really love about this space is really all the windows now we've got these big giant windows that was one of the reasons why we bought the bus in the first place and so we get all the natural light in here the backs of these seats fold up to create a dining room table and dinner as a family is really really important to us so that was a big deal then we've got this whole area that's just full of storage where we can you know the kids have their cereal and things in here in the mornings we've got a lot of the food that stores in there and that goes pretty much all the way down to the floor and then above it we've got our air conditioning we have two air conditioners here we've got one for while we're driving and another one for when we're parked so one of the things with these two ac units right here we don't really feel like this one is sufficient while we're driving and so we really wish we would have gone with something a little bit bigger for this driving ac and for the one here um i going back and doing this again i probably would have put a second unit down here in the downstairs probably one up closer to the front and rather than just having this one well i mean it does keep this area cool it has to be pumping all the time so it's just kind of a learning learning curve there we've never done something like this so that's that's a learning curve for us all right so here towards the back of the first level of the bus we have our bathroom and it's a smaller bathroom obviously the toilet sits really low that's because our we've got some access panels there that need to be able to open and with the bathroom we've got a macerating toilet that just basically means that it pumps everything up to the black tank that sits higher than the toy that is um so this is our little bathroom down here sink pretty basic stuff uh and one of the things here is that this is not the only bathroom we have in in the bus so we decided to have two separate bathrooms and then an entirely separate shower with eight people living on living in this space we wanted to make sure that we have everybody has access to what they need when they need it right so we didn't put the shower in any any bathroom area that's a totally separate space and aside from this small bathroom we've got another small bathroom upstairs as well [Music] yeah so i mean the the real reason that we wanted to try uh something new something so drastically different than we'd ever done before is just that we were we felt so tied down to chasing money for happiness uh thinking the more money we made the more the better job title i had the happier we'd be but ultimately chasing that money meant spending more and more time away from the family and we realized you know we were actually on a road trip and we were driving back from utah we were just with with we had all the kids in the van and we'd driven up to utah and just to kind of see some of the sights up in utah and then as we were driving back we drove past the great sand dunes in colorado and at that point i just got really upset because i looked in my rearview mirror and i see all my kids they're all really well behaved they're all doing really really well and my wife and i are really happy and i just i immediately knew in that moment like this is this is happiness this is what we want and so what are we rushing home for what are we rushing back to texas for um when this is really the happiness and ultimately we were rushing back to sit behind a desk to get two hours a day maybe with the kids maybe get two days a week with them and two weeks a year right that just seemed like such a small amount of time to spend with my family over the course of the next few years as they're they're really young and growing that seemed like such a small amount of time so as we passed the great sand dunes i kind of had this conversation with my wife and we were chatting with the kids and i just said screw it the next thing we pass we're gonna stop there i don't care what the roadside attraction is we're going to stop and we're going to do it and if i'm late getting back to my job who cares right like that i no longer like i don't know there's a switch in my mind that i just didn't care about that money anymore and so we we you know we kept driving we were we were a little ways past the great sand dunes at this point i saw a sign for capulin volcano in new mexico and i've driven utah to texas plenty of times before and i went to i went to college up in utah um so i mean we've i've been back and forth up there but i've never seen capulet volcano i didn't know what it was but sure enough we decided it's a few miles down this road so we took the road we went over there this ancient volcano walked around the rim of it walked down inside it you know we just had a really great time and when we got done doing that and we got back in the car and immediately i looked at my wife dina and i said you know why don't we do this all the time i work in software i if i want to i could make my job go anywhere with me and so we talked about it a little bit more and before we'd even gotten you know two hours away from capulin volcano we were researching rvs and what it's like to be full-time rvers and living on the road all the time so we we immediately joined some facebook groups before we even got home joined some facebook groups about full-time living um and started looking at rvs class a's and and fifth wheels and we quickly decided you know a schoolie would be super cool to do so we were looking at some schoolies we were looking at entertainer coaches because they already have bunks in them and then maybe about two weeks after uh we had gotten home we saw a double decker and we just knew right when we saw we were like that's that's what we want to do a double decker would really like be different and at the same time you know it would be everything we want to do we would be able to go around the country towing our van and seeing all the sites giving this life to our kids and also spending all this time with our kids in some of the most precious years that they have all right so now that we're done with the downstairs we're gonna go ahead and walk upstairs and i'll show you everything around up there so about halfway up the stairs we have our shower and it's a full-size shower i'm a little bit of a bigger guy and i've got plenty of room to move around in here and take my shower it's got the nautilus door on it that we really love because it just hides out of the way really easy and this you know we cut this door or the shower into the storage area of the bus so we'd have a full seven foot shower so that actually the shower head is above me and we can get you know all the all the shower we need without scrunching over and having too tight of a space so the other thing with this shower is that we chose to do a cedar shower um and cedar is water and mold resistant and and and we've sealed it with with some oil to make sure that it's going to last a long time longer than we'll even have the bus so it's uh it's pretty nice and it actually smells real nice in here too all right so up here at the at the top level of the bus um we have our washer and dryer this is a ventless washer dryer combo unit uh we actually we wanted something a little bit bigger but we ended up with this one and it it's just really nice to not be able to not have to switch out laundry and things like that just to have the one unit in the bus it doesn't take up as much space so with this smaller washer and dryer this is a 2.5 it's a lg 2.5 cubic washer dryer which is a lot smaller than what we were used to in our house before and the unit we wanted was 4.5 or something like that and this definitely is smaller and because it's smaller it means that we're either running it all the time or we'll have to go to you know laundry mat periodically we try to avoid that as much as possible and just just try to use this but it means that it's running all the time and it really means that we've got to be hooked up to water a lot and just because you know it is using water so there's some pros and cons in in this washer and dryer for sure so another unique feature with this bus and i don't think we've showed this to anybody uh but one of the things we wanted to make sure is just cleaning the bus with six kids obviously we're gonna have a lot of dirt moving around in here and stuff and we didn't just want to sweep that all down the stairs and so up here we actually put a a it's called a sweepo vac underneath the washer and dryer so right here under this washer and dryer we just sweep everything right to it push this button and it gets everything in there and it's easy to clean out takes all of our makes makes cleaning the upstairs much easier and we're not just brushing everything downstairs for a bigger mess all right so moving back in the bus at the top of the top of the stairs we have the kids bunks each of the kids has essentially it's a twin size bed it's an rv twin um and then they've got these shelving units at the end of their bed as well um this is the only one that actually has a window and that's just because um this is the child that we feel most comfortable having a window without without uh sneaking out you know so this this one's got a window and each of the kids kind of picked their own space as we go along they'll be modifying and kind of personalizing their own space right now they all look fairly similar though so moving back a little further this is the second bathroom was just as small as the one downstairs maybe a little bit smaller even but that's the one that the kids primarily use because it's right here next to their beds so back here at the back of the bus there's this seat i use this my wife uses this to read the bedtime stories to them when they're going to bed at night and then on either side here is closet space so they've all got their stuff hung up here being that there's eight of us in this bus we've minimalized a lot so it's not like they have a ton of clothes to to put back here but we've got you know the towels and things like that back here as well and then the kids will use these hooks to hang whatever they feel like they need to all right so as we move to the front part of the bus upstairs we've got a little bit of a bench here and then we've got this is really our living area the backs of the chairs do the same as downstairs where they fold forward and we've got one bench that's full of all of their schooling stuff because we homeschool the kids and then another one that's full of all of our board games and fun stuff um here this one and then we come forward we've got another mini split unit again just like downstairs i wish we had a second one of these up here i think it would have just made things a little more comfortable but upstairs in this bus gets really really hot um i don't spend as much time up here it is a little bit shorter of a roof and but the kids are up here quite a bit so this area i wish wish we maybe would have had a second mini split unit up here but this this suffices for now and then as we move forward from here we have our our king bed and kind of our area we use this area obviously my wife and i this is our bed that's in here this folds up with a headboard and a foot board at night but during the day we wanted the kids to have area that they could play so it folds down where they can play with anything that they need to we store a bunch of their toys up there in the front uh in front of the dresser and i mean you can see the the nerf blaster hanging out over there and whatnot so this is kind of the kids area during the day and then at night we convert it into our bedroom we really wanted to make sure that the kids areas didn't have to you know most rvs the kids areas have to be converted especially when there's a big family we wanted the kids to have their own very private personal space where they can kind of get their own retreat so we decided to make our area the area that would be convertible as we go [Music] yeah so so all of that took place um in 2020 that was uh july of 2020 when we were headed back from utah uh we we typically spend fourth of july up in utah so that was july of 2020 as we were coming back to texas uh we bought the bus in august of 2020 dropped it off at the builder in september and uh and then we actually picked the bus up from the builder in december of 2021 it was not completed at that point uh when we picked it up but we picked it up in december of 2021 brought it back down to texas to finish the build and we actually will be hitting the road full-time in three days and so we'll be hitting the road full-time really soon so sorry the kids aren't in here right now and this probably looks a little cleaner than it will in a few days um but that's that's kind of where we're at right now with it we have spent a total of seven nights in the bus as we've just been testing things out we've gone to a few different places and just tested stuff with the kids in tow and had a really good time so got a little bit of a taste for it so far but not much we're really really new rookies to all of this um but we're enjoying the experience of learning everything as we go kind of our plan as we go is just well a chase 70 degrees um we don't like cold weather we don't like hot weather so 70 degrees is kind of where we set up like that's that's ideal and that's what we're going to chase so we're going to chase 70 degrees wherever that takes us with the plan of spending on average two weeks in each of the lower 48 states and we've we've told our kids that if we can manage the two weeks per state if we can do that over the next two years then we will fly to alaska and hawaii so that they'll have all 50 states under their belt so that's kind of the plan for the next two years and then beyond that like we don't really have a plan we've talked about a lot of different things uh continuing on in the double decker going on a you know a world world cruise going just country hopping you know doing airbnbs and just taking airplanes uh doing some country hopping or just settling down you know we don't we don't know we think that it's really important to involve our kids in all of our decision making this is obviously a really big life change not just for us but for our kids it's going to have a big impact on them so we've talked about just reassessing every six months reassessing is this what we want to continue doing do we want to change this and that's kind of where what our goal is right now and so for our six first six months of travel um that the first six months will take us back here to texas which is kind of home base for us and we will reassess again kind of at christmas um just if this is what we want to continue doing i mean the plan is two years but if you know if the kids are really not into it or if my wife is really not into it if i'm not into it at that point then we'll totally reassess and make some changes um you know it's one of the things with this lifestyle i feel like is you can you can make those adjustments it doesn't have to be permanent um but it allows us that opportunity to get out and explore and do things that we otherwise wouldn't be doing you know and and the proof of that is that we've we lived in texas we owned a home here and and you know we we started a family here and never did anything but travel to utah back so like that's just the proof that a lot of people get stuck in that routine you do the same things you take the same vacation every year because you get two weeks off and and two weeks is not a lot every year to spend with your kids in their youngest ages so that's kind of the plan we've got now is to to go around two weeks per state all right so that's it for this level of the bus the second level of the bus let's uh go ahead we set the ladder up so let's go ahead and go up to the roof deck up here on the roof of the bus we have our deck this is really just an area we like to lounge the kids like to put up a hammock between the two rails and when we're driving these rails are down and and it makes us you know 13 and a half foot tall so so we're we have no problem driving it but when we get where we're going we put up the rails and the kids can come up here and hang out they love hanging out up here we do movie nights up here quite a bit and kids like lines around in the hammocks or in the trippy outdoor chairs that we use and this is just really uh just kind of more of a private outdoor space for us we don't have any slide outs or anything like that on the bus and so this kind of gives us that little bit of extra space that we need and it's kind of a cool space because we're up so high and we've also got our solar panels front and back we've got uh four uh 355 solar panels so they work really well for us and get us some some power when we're off grid so one of the things about building this deck up up here you know that the top of the bus is not reinforced and it's actually really slippery as well if it was just the bus stop so we went ahead and we put down boat decking and it's just adhesive boat decking that makes it so it's just not it's more anti-slip and it's a little got a little bit of a cushion and it's not very thick that's the other issue we saw and we had when we see all these other schooly builds that have like wood decking and that just it was going to be too much there wasn't enough space to put something like that up here so this you know faux decking it's just it's boat decking and it comes in all sorts of different patterns and colors we went with this one that looks like wood but it really works out really well to make it safer for the kids they're not slipping around up here and things like that and then the other thing we do just for safety for the kids when we come up here it's usually i come up by myself through the front hatch and then i'll come you know i'll work my way through through the solar panels and set up these rails we set up the rails on either side those are held up by some gas shocks and then we have and we don't have them up right now but normally we've got these rails down here that we then pick up and and they actually pin into either side so that it makes it a lot more secure we've got those front and back and that just gives the kids a little bit better of a area they know to stay in and we're not having kids walk towards the front or back of the bus where they shouldn't be messing with solar panels and falling off the bus all right so here we are on the outside of the bus um we have we have a little bit more work to do on the outside we're going to put graphics and stuff on it so it looks more like an rv a class a rv and less like a bus one of the things we most recently did is is we replaced all eight tires on the bus i actually did that yesterday um so not a cheap not a cheap thing to do but uh the tires that were on it were had some sidewall cracking they were seven eight years old and you know when it comes to the safety of the family there's there's nothing that uh no no amount of money that would prevent me from from doing that so we went ahead and put put the new tires on there it's ten thousand dollars worth of new tires and uh all the way around we've got eight new tires so that's probably the biggest expense we've had on the exterior of the bus so far we're going to redo this wrap it's this gray wrap is really really terrible job that's done on it so we're going to redo all that and and get the get the whole graphics going on here we've got some some seals and things to do as well one thing that some people may notice is that our front tires and our back tires are the same but these drive tires in the middle are different so the front and back are michelins and they are 365 70r 22.5 but these center ones um these are the drive tires these are actually yokohamas and that's just because the company that we built we bought the bus from before we did the build had converted the front and back and they'd already changed them over to this size of tire and michelin's the only one that makes this size of tire so and we went ahead and did that and then the bus company um had us do these and and we made sure that all the weight ratings are correct the bus itself is just over 47 000 pounds we went and weighed it we weighed all three axles on the scales and made sure that the tires that we put on here are safe for the weight that we have going down the road and then we've also got an outdoor shower um and in this area here as well as this is where we open up to get into our black tank and so we do we can drain everything from here and just a big storage area that we've got back here so our all of our tanks are back here and just anything that we need all our storage everything we carry along with us while we ride is back here in the storage area and it doesn't have to be accessed through there we can also access it through this door where we can just walk in to the bus so back here is where i'm saying we can walk into the bus we have our black water tank that sits up high and then we've got our fresh water tank kind of in the middle and our gray water tank down here a little lower and the the black water 70 gallon and then the other two are 75 gallons each so it gives us kind of plenty of water as we go you know we try to stay hooked up to water wherever we are but if we're not we've got plenty of water on board with us and and that works pretty well with the one tank that you don't see back here is actually our fuel tank which is 166 gallon diesel fuel tank common question we get is about the fuel mileage we get and fully loaded we're getting about six and a half miles a gallon uh depending on headwinds right i mean if i'm getting a wind coming straight at us we're obviously getting a lot less because it is a brick um so but i mean typically we're running about six and a half miles a gallon all right over here on this side of the bus this is uh really kind of our power bank uh where we've got eight lithium ion batteries these are from lion energy they're the safari ut 1300 batteries um i think they're each 105 amp hours and so carrying all this back here and we've got our 6000 watt inverter and then we've got just our all of our power stuff back here we do carry a generator with us just in case but we've never had to use it and i don't expect we really ever will but i didn't want to be without without that if we really got into a situation where we needed it so this is kind of where all our solar comes in and this what powers our bus when we're stopped at any place we just hook up to shore power 50 amp shore power um and then we've also got our water hookups here and back back in here you would see we've got a a 20 gallon residential hot water heater [Music] so yeah i mean i know a lot of people are interested in those travels and in our two weeks that we're going to spend in every state and all the things that we're going to be doing obviously a big part of this is to also inspire others to get out there maybe make it take take that leap uh that that that huge risk in your life uh it'll be worth it you know that i i never set foot in an rv before doing this and so it's totally new life to me but the i think the reward is is well worth the risk that we've taken um and so you know if anybody wants to follow along on our journey and see the things that we're up to and the activities that we're doing and the you know the parks we're visiting or the hikes we're going on anybody can follow us like across social media whether it's facebook instagram tick tock um youtube anything we go by double decker family or double decker fam we also have a website that has nothing to do with our travels at this point we'll probably put stuff on there but it's just dbl dkr stands for double decker um the same as our license plate um we've got that website that we just ultimately it's a blog with a whole bunch of troubleshooting stuff for different appliances and whatever but we will at some point start blogging about our travels so across the board if somebody wants to follow us that's where to find us um but we'll be out on the road we typically are going to be posting obviously for the safety of our kids the safety of our family we're gonna be posting delayed uh it's not like if you see a video it's probably not gonna be from today it's gonna be you know four six weeks delayed and that's just for the safety of our kids but certainly if we roll into your rv park if we roll into town and you see us don't be afraid to come say hi we're definitely up for meeting people and and sharing our adventures with you so anything any questions you have feel free to ask here on this channel or or visit one of our channels ask us any questions that you've got we're happy to answer them [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Tiny Home Tours

Views: 7,115,294

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, tiny house living, tiny house tour, tiny house design, tiny house build, tiny homes, tiny home build, small house design ideas, double decker bus conversion, double decker bus converted to tiny house

Id: jK9spxXUeV8

Length: 26min 25sec (1585 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 06 2022