Ex-teacher Creates Her Dream Tiny Home On Wheels

[Music] and by putting it on the angle it really gave me this unique opportunity to figure out what to do with the space behind it I've did all the electrical myself which took nearly more brain capacity than I thought I had honestly like the bathroom of my dreams I decided to push forward with it even though it seemed impossible a lot of the time hi my name is Destiny and this is Dolly my tiny home and mobile recording studio on Wheels come on in and check it [Music] out welcome inside the bus this is doll's kitchen and I basically wanted to make sure that I had everything that I needed but that I didn't have to see everything that I needed out all the time so I have a lot of things that are tucked away and hidden away I have a standing desk because I realized that as a tall person I was always leaning on things so I built in a standing desk that flips out and has a little extension here to support it and also hidden in there are bunch of tables and little things like that as well as three Outlets to power my all electrical kitchen I don't have any propane I have an extension for my prep space here so that I can prep and talk to people watch TV at the same time and I don't do a lot of cooking so I made sure that everything that I needed could tuck away and not take up permanent space on the counter I have a 10-in-1 air fryer convection toaster oven thing that does pretty much everything you would ever need it to do and I have a microwave here that everybody thinks is a TV but it is not a TV it's the only rounded back microwave I've ever seen and I thought it was perfect to kind of just tuck it away and it's you know very low power con considering that it's the microwave so my fridge is usually a very popular topic of conversation everybody loves the blue it is not vintage it's just retro it's a gons and it holds a ton of food probably way more food for one person I know many families that have these on the road with kids and it's a great capacity I have dry food storage in the pull outs here I have tons and tons of drawers with way more cooking storage than I could ever possibly need and underneath every single cabinet is hidden to kick storage as well I also decided to tuck away some things in hidden places like behind the fridge I have my spice rack which one day will actually have spices in it but I wanted to make sure that I had somewhere to put spices if I ever decided to get [Music] spicy my sink cabinet is built on top of a 1930s desk that I got off of Facebook Marketplace it was in really really ter terrible shape when I got it it had like five layers of paint so I had to do a lot of Rehabilitation there but it was also way too short so I built an extension on top of it so that it was my height all the counters in the kitchen are a little bit taller than normal cuz I'm a little bit taller than normal a nice big Ikea sink cuz it's the only sink in the bus so washing dishes brushing teeth washing your face all happens here I have tons of storage overhead for toiletries and cleaning products and then behind this panel is my water heater and I have six junk drawers on this cabinet six entire junk drawers in this cabinet is basically what it amounts to so I think my favorite thing about this side of the bus is like a two-part thing number one that this entire thing ended up looking exactly as I designed it in my head there are very few things here in the bus that that ended up happening and then that this cabinet was the only thing in the bus that happened in one day start to finish nothing went wrong and I'm kind of reminded of that every time I use it that sometimes things go to plan it's cool you can do it keep trying I really enjoy this side of the bus as a reminder that if you plan really well things can go well the name Dolly came from sort of the process of deciding whether I wanted to actually dive into Nomad life I was trying to figure out if it was for me and I went down that YouTube rabbit hole that a lot of us go on and as I was watching these videos YouTube suggested a video of Dolly giving a tour of her tour bus and as I was watching it it kind of clicked in my head that yeah of course Dolly Dolly's been doing this for an entire lifetime and she's done it in a much smaller space CU she always had to share it with her drivers and her other bandmates and musicians have been doing this forever so of course it's totally possible and it gave me kind of the impetus to to push forward and then the bus came to me pink so it just kind of felt like serendipitous had to happen had to call it Dolly so I bought her in Spring of 2022 and I turned her into a tiny home and mobile music studio on Wheels so everything was done in about a year and a half with the exception of the shower I can kind of break things out a little bit cuz I think that's more helpful to anybody that's interested I do this so the bus itself including the RV registration to make it you know kind of road legal was $4,000 and then the repairs that I put into it to make it Road worthy I think 4,000 between the repairs and the new tires so I had to get six new tires they're not cheap and the solar and electrical I would say I've put in about 10,000 so far and that was with me doing pretty much all of the labor with the exception of the solar rack I had someone do the solar rack and then I would say I put about $2,000 into tools alone so I could build another bus for way cheaper now and then I would say maybe about $8,000 went into the actual materials to build the bus including the appliances the air conditioner and things like that I might add all those things up someday when I feel very grave so we're at the entrance of the bus and I wanted this space to feel as open and homik as possible as you can inside of a bus so I wanted the couch to be a little bit deeper than normal couches that I tend to see in a lot of buses so I made sure that it was about a third of the space and then it also converts out to a Shaz or a dinette or a bed there's a lot of different configur ations that I can do opening of the space was really determined by this angle that I put the TV at and the TV is the frame TV and I kind of built the whole living room around it cuz it was the only bougie thing that I actually wanted in the bus and so I put this at an angle it's like super lowprofile you don't really even feel like there is a TV in the living room and a lot of people when they come in they're kind of surprised they think it's either a chalkboard or painting or whatever and by putting it on the angle it it really gave me this unique opportunity to figure out what to do with the space behind it so I put it on a hinged wall so that it opens up to my hidden walk-in closet there is tons of space back here for all of my gig clothes as a musician I have like special clothes I have to wear on stage and this is a really convenient way to tuck it away make sure that it's hanging and nice but I don't have to get into it every day and I made it intentionally difficult to open so that it doesn't open when I'm driving and just like all the spaces in the bus I have lots of areas for my chachkies and knickknacks and those are the things that make this place really feel like it's my home and not just kind of a temporary space that I'm living in on the road which is really important for me so in the hallway I have another closet which was originally going to be the closed closet but after that ended up being such a perfect space up front this has turned into the electrical closet but we like to call it the confessional that was not an intentional design choice I just really wanted retan and I realized that if I went all the way to the floor with the retan my cats would destroy it and so thus this shape and everyone decided I have Catholic Vibes so it's the confessional and inside is my electrical system and some extra cubby storage and I've did all the electrical myself which took nearly more brain capacity than I thought I had but I'm really proud of myself for sticking to it and and doing it all myself I learned such an incredible amount from the resources that are available on YouTube and the internet I also consulted professionals which I highly recommend if you ever decide to do something like that by yourself so there's 3200 watts of solar on the roof I have a 200 amp hour 24v battery here but I built this wall to only go halfway down so that I can continue to build out the battery Bank to up to 800 amp hours so that will give me more battery storage than I could probably ever even think of using on a daily basis and then once I had all the electrical in place I knew where my negative spaces were that I could build for extra storage so I built little cubby system where I can store all kinds of extra stuff usually this is craft stuff I have my photo and video gear down here here and um and then a lot of these boxes are completely empty and which is great cuz I have room to grow and I think that's super important in any home but specifically in a tiny space all right so we are now in my vintage Vibe bathroom I was trying to keep up with the same aesthetic that I started with in the kitchen and I did a very ambitious tile job in this in this bathroom it was an immense amount of work but I am so so so happy with how it's turned out and it has been just as functional as I planned it to be and once I'd gotten it to its functional space I added all of the extra stuff which has turned it into honestly like the bathroom of my dreams I am sitting on my compost toilet which is on top of a wheel well and is very high up in the air which is apt because I use the throne system to build this compost toilet and you really do kind to feel very Regal when you mount this thing all the way up here and speaking of which when I built it I didn't exactly have a plan in place for how I would get up here so this is a recent addition it is a step stool it's a Squatty Potty it also has extra storage and it's been super useful in making the space as functional as it can possibly be so the shower in here is totally operational like I could use it every day if I wanted to but I do prefer if I ever can find a hot shower in someone's house or a gym or a host location on the road that's what I'm always going to go to but I have 75 gallons of fresh on the bus and 65 gallons gray and Military showers don't take that much water so I use it whenever I need to and it's it's a pretty good experience I decided to get into bus life or just Nomad life after going through the experience of being a teacher during the pandemic I had been a teacher for a long time and like many teachers you know was feeling the grind feeling feeling like maybe is this something that I want to continue with and once Co came along and there was sort of that fear of both not being able to do international travel again and also sort of wondering if I'm ever going to be able to afford a home on a teacher's salary I looked into Alternatives and went down the proverbial YouTube rabbit hole as we all do and really thought that this was something that could fulfill all of the things that I wanted to do which was travel and be able to perform live because that was something that was missing in my life in Co and really start to expand my travel opportunities to not just being in the summer when I was a teacher and so I I decided to take the leap and I'm really really happy that I decided to push forward with it even though it seemed impossible a lot of the time so we are now in the back half of the bus which is both my bedroom and the recording studio and this was sort of the entire purpose of the bus to begin with I wanted a space that I could dedicate to creating music recording music I'm a live Music Streamer on twit switch and I wanted to make sure that I had a place to continue doing that while I was on the road the studio was really important to me not only for how it was set up but that it was able to actually function as a recording space and I was finally able to kind of put the uh the proof of the project into place and like test it last fall I recorded my first single in here and was able to produce that and put it on Spotify and it sound sounds good to me sounds good to the people who liked it and listened to it and all of that so it was a really big moment for me to be able to show myself show the people that have been supporting me through this process my my twitch followers my YouTube followers and stuff like that that everything that I really envisioned is able to come to fruition and so now that I know that it works as a recording space I'm planning to record my full album this year and hopefully get that out before the end of the year and I'm really really excited about that and I've got lots of other hidden things around here as well so this desk opens up to a regular computer desk if I need it to this electric piano is fully locked in for driving but it's easily removable so that I can take it to a gig if I need to and these monitors just quickly tuck away with one of the thousands of Bungee systems that I have around the bus for keeping things in place while I'm driving and putting the house into earthquake mode I built in a table over here that also opens up for extra jewelry storage and and accessory storage and I have all of my clothes in this file cabinet and in all of the bigger drawers underneath are some more clothes and music gear I built an instrument rack over here for string instruments and still working on my method for keeping them strapped in place for driving but at least while I'm in the bus it keeps them nice and tidy in the corner so this is the bedroom area of the studio I am on my queen-size bed that I got from my apartment it was one thing I wasn't willing to negotiate on I didn't want to spend more money on a mattress that I had a perfectly good one of so I made sure that I accommodated for that space and the only issue I think that I would have is if I ever wanted to replace it because it took like an act of God to get the thing in here without breaking stuff but it is so comfortable and it it really was a seamless transition in terms of adjusting to to bus life being able to sleep on my own bed that I'm used to I have the senville mini split it's a 12,000 BTU it really does a killer job of keeping stuff cool in here I'm in Florida it's hot it's muggy and this thing has been able to keep up it was a total game Cher the day that it went in I was so so so happy to have it and then I have wraparound shelves that go all the way around from here through the studio and they're good for for putting my my knickknacks my chachkies and I'm also wired for Led strips which I'm still planning on putting in as we always have 20 to 35 projects to do on a bus it's never [Music] done if you're interested in listening to my music I'm on Spotify I have hundreds of covers on YouTube and you just use my name as the search Destiny Gara which I'm sure there's going to be links and things like that down in the description I also live stream on Twitch which is another form of my income my name again is the thing to search for there and yeah that's that's the best place to find me thank you for stopping by hopefully I'll either see you on the road or at one of my live shows in the [Music] future

Channel: Tiny Home Tours

Views: 86,134

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, skoolie conversion, skoolie tour, skoolie build, skoolie bus conversion, skoolie life, tiny house design, bus home tour, tiny homes, simple living, skoolie build ideas, skoolie build on a budget

Id: f2b-VTQ2WJM

Length: 17min 26sec (1046 seconds)

Published: Sat May 04 2024