Family Of 4 Lives Full Time In This Gorgeous Raised Roof School Bus Conversion

[Music] you [Music] everybody Chris here from tiny home tours in the off-grid schooling today's video features Adam and Liz they live full-time in a raised roof School Bus their bus is called deliberate life bus they live full time on the road rock climbing exploring with their young children homeschooling all that awesome stuff so you saw from the thumbnail this is a very beautiful school bus it's one of the best that I've ever seen I also want to take this time to think today's sponsor nest bedding in my school bus I actually have a Alexander Signature Series mattress and we are doing a giveaway today so a thank you to all of you that have watched this YouTube channel I appreciate you all so very much because I would not be in this bus I would not be living full-time on the road if it wasn't for all of you so we're doing this giveaway all you have to do is enter your email and the link down below and one lucky winner will be randomly chosen to actually win one of the Alexander Signature Series mattresses and as long as you live in the lower 48 it'll be shipped to you for free and all you have to do is enter your email down below like I said nest bedding is a family owned eco friendly business here in the United States and they were nice enough to partner with me today so I thank them and I thank you once again we'll catch you guys next week hi I'm Elizabeth and I'm Adam and this is the deliberate life bus okay so we bought the bus in 2016 in February we're from North Carolina and we bought the bus in Albuquerque New Mexico and one-way plane ticket yeah that was fun picked up the bus sight-unseen drove it almost 2,000 miles back home the bus is a 1994 Thomas safety liner with a pusher so it's got the rear-engine 8.3 Cummins diesel and allison 643 transmission it's about eight miles to the gallon or so something like that whether it's full or empty the name of the bus is a deliberate life bus her nickname is Libby Libby that's right we had the living room and we have just a little side table over here that we've got our kids games board games stuff like that cards coffee table book basket full of our cords and stuff like that and then we have our couches couch over here on this side is seven and a half feet long super long couch there's a lot of people in here when we if we have like a big dinner we said we have a table that we can actually bring in from under the bus and we can actually see quite a few people here we actually had a pretty big Thanksgiving feast in here so both of the couches lift up so there's storage underneath in this side we have craft supply sewing machine fabric homeschool stuff so for home school we do a little bit of everything you know sometimes it's going to visitor centers in national parks you learn about the geology sometimes it's you know writing projects reading you know we have math workbooks and all that kind of stuff so they'll sit wherever we have some TV trays they sit on you know on the couches with the TV trays and work on those or we're outside a lot of times honestly we send them outside to work on their stuff you know in the fresh air and the Sun this side over here under this couch we have all of our electrical again it lifts up we've got all of our electrical under here we've got 8 155 amp hour 12 volt batteries wired at 24 volts so basically 620 amp hours at 24 volt system so a lot of battery power our charge controller is down there our inverter chargers down there all that stuff so we've got this whole couch is all electrical so the the batteries that we have are AGM batteries so they don't need to be vented like liquid lead acid filled batteries so they're not vented but they're they're sealed ideally I would have another vent on going out the side of the bus to help you know just let some of that heat out but as of now it's it it doesn't generate too much heat down there so it's fine the couch is Elizabeth sewed all of the cushions so we just ordered foam online and she sewed the cushions and she put zippers on the back she's really proud of that so the zippers on the back are nice because already twice in the last month we've actually had spills or just you know stains over the time so we were actually able to unzip them pull the cushions off the foam and just put them in the washing machine which has worked out really well the foam from the on the seats came from online we ordered that online the stuffing for the pillows actually came from the stuffing out of pillows that we had back home so our couch was pretty much destroyed back home but the thing was all fine so we took the stuffing out and stuffed the new pillows with them the Front's of the couch are actually old cabinet doors that Elisabeth parents when they did their remodel in their kitchen they gave us all of their cabinet doors and so I cut the cabinet doors down and kind of made it you know use them to panel the cow at the front of the couches with it so that turned out really well the floor is lifeproof vinyl plank click together flooring from Home Depot that works really well it's waterproof and it's scratch resistant so it's having the girls in here all the time working on the floor and doing stuff it's nice to have something that scratch resistant and waterproof we don't have to worry about spills or anything like that the ceiling is quarter inch tongue and groove pine paneling that we got from also from Lowe's difficult to work with but it looks great and we whitewashed it before we put it up and we're pretty pleased with the look of it it's one of those things where it might not be the most durable but so far so good we like the look of it and as long as it holds up for us we're pleased with it so yeah the white on the ceiling definitely helps to like lighten up everything here as well we used a lot of 12 volt LED lights so it's definitely bright in here the lights are 12 volt LED lights that we got from eBay they're not recessed puck lights they're actually surface mount lights so we just had to have the two wires coming through the ceiling and then you just screw there's a plate underneath the dome you just screw the plate in or wire it up screw the plate and put the little dome on there and it's really simple and they were actually really affordable too I think we got 20 of them for I don't even remember like 45 bucks or something like that you know the whole all of the lighting in the bus was just you know 12 volt LED cheap stuff from eBay but they actually turned out really well some LED lights have that kind of bluish kind of cold look but these have a nice warm tone to them so we installed a maxxair fan for ventilation it would have been nice to have gotten a couple of fans but with we have six 250 watt solar panels up on the roof we just didn't even room for any other fans there's literally no more space in the ceiling for fans so we're stuck with what we got but that fan does a pretty good job of you know when we're cooking or something we can turn the fan on and help to get some of that out of here roll the windows up so we're not splattering on the curtains or anything like that we find that when we're cooking we use a lid on almost everything that we're frying just to kind of keep that down but so the maxxair fan we went with I don't remember it's called like the deluxe or something it's kind of their their higher-end fan the nice thing about that one is that it has a rain cover so you could run the fan during the rain and it pops up when the fan comes on and that cover keeps rain from getting in so whether it's raining or not it doesn't matter you can run your fan it has exhaust mode and ceiling fan mode and another thing that we can do is we can actually close the the rain vent or the rain cover and turn the fan on ceiling fan mode so you're not actually bringing air in from the outside but you're able to still circulate the interior air just like a normal fan in a bedroom or whatnot benefit there would be that if we were running the wood stove and we have our chimney literally right beside the fan we wouldn't want to be bringing in smoke right from the chimney and blowing it back into the bus so we can close the cap turn the fan on and that helps to circulate the warm air and it helps to kind of move stuff warm air into the back of the bus alright so now we are back in our wood stove area and kitchen so for our heating and the bus are only heating source is this wood stove this is the tiny wood stove dwarfed 5 kilowatt it's the biggest one they make it's actually fairly oversized for our bus but being that we kept all of our original windows we knew we were going to just have some serious draft enos and our insulation levels you know not what it could be in a tiny house or something so we went with the biggest stove and what that does is it allows us to be in really cold temperatures and know that if we work this stove to its full capacity we can heat this bus in pretty cold weather the coldest we've stayed in is probably in the teens maybe down to 10 degrees at night those are pretty chilly nights and because we have walls here it does make it a little harder to get the heat back so we really crank the heat up here which allowed enough of the heat to make it back to keep us warm but we did have to wake up every few hours through the night to keep this thing running on full blast if we load it up really good so a lot of times on cooler nights we'll we'll pack the firebox just like you know maybe halfway or even more full of wood like packed really tightly in there if we've got a good bed of coals already then we don't have to worry about whether it's all gonna catch on fire because it's gonna kind of work its way through and that's gonna last us four to five hours and then we can get back up and there'll be plenty of coals left in there that we can just throw some more logs in and it'll catch back on fire itself there's pretty good air controls too so when when we really want the heat to crank we open up the air flow there and we open up the air flow there and that allows the fire to burn much hotter and much quicker once we've got it going nice and we're going to bed we'll just push these down they're kind of hot yeah and that helps it burn a little bit slower so tiny wood stove actually sells all the components to install your stove whether it's on a bus or an RV or a tiny house and the picture they have on the roof there's a silicon boot that actually is super flexible and we weren't sure we were gonna be able to fit it just right on our roof because we've got a channel running down the top of the roof but it was flexible enough that we were able to fit the curvature of the roof but also go over the little channel and get a good seal and just put some screws in through it so they sell all kind of different components and it fits with all kinds of different shapes something that's optional on these stoves that we got was and it comes in through the back of the stove is a direct air intake so that allows us to pull the air to feed the fire from the outside that's especially helpful in a drafty house like a bus as much as you insulate and try to seal it's gonna be super drafty and your bus if you've got if the air is being pulled from your house to fuel your fire that's just pulling more cold air in from the outside to fill the void of that air that fuel the fire so our air comes from outside meaning we can keep our cozy warm air inside so when designing the space for this stove we we needed to make sure that we weren't going to catch our bus on fire obviously and you know we didn't really know exactly if we were doing all the right things so we did do something we over built it a little bit which allows us to be super confident in the space we have the tin roofing that we got from the same farm that we got the a lot of the wood on our bus we love it because it's it's the cool corrugated metal but what makes it really special is all this like patina of the Blues and the rust and the greens and it gives it cool character it's spaced about an inch off of the walls behind it so that is the heat shield and it allows the heat to be dispersed through airflow that happens behind it and that protects your combustible materials that are behind the heat shield for extra security because they weren't sure we also put a concrete backer board behind here too so we have no concerns about anything catching on fire from our stove for the hearth of the stove we there's all kinds of different things you just have to have something it's not going to catch on fire but I guess we kind of like the idea of something that felt like a hearth and so Adam poured made a mold and poured a concrete block I'm he put rebar in it too just for the concerns of cracking since buses you know move and twist as you drive and then we cemented this to the ground so there you've got like a 300 pound block of concrete in your bus 150 pounds stove and because of the concerns of it potentially moving which it probably never would because it's so heavy we actually have the whole thing through bolted from the stove legs through the concrete hearth down through the frame of the bus so this thing isn't going anywhere we actually have an extra space a lot of times people will have their stoves in a little nook we didn't build in any firewood storage but we give ourselves this nice extra space here which will put you know a bucket of kindling maybe we'll keep some of our wood to reload the stove throughout the night here and then we have the potential to maybe build in more of a wood storage area in the future so now we are looking at the kitchen you may notice this is a really large kitchen for a tiny house this is actually probably where we spent most of our time building the bus we put most of our priority on the kitchen space I mean as with any house the kitchen is your space that people spend the most time it's the gathering space and it connects freely to the living room area so this whole front of our bus is like our hangout zone for friends and family we've even hosted Thanksgiving in here I've cooked an entire Thanksgiving meal it cooks an entire Christmas dinner and I really love that I've got everything I need to do all the cooking and baking that I like to do when I was at home we decided to go with a regular household stove and oven it's one a lot cheaper than buying an RV one also I know that it's gonna have enough space for all of my standard pots or all my standard pans to go inside of it I bake a lot of bread I love cooking so I knew I really wanted to make sure I had something that was fully functional it I've heard mixed reviews on the RV ovens a lot of people just tell me they use them for storage so we bought this I think it Lowe's it was just kind of like whatever cheapest GE oven we found it's a gas oven and range that came with a conversion to propane so we converted it to propane all of it runs on propane we found it takes a weird amount of electricity to run the oven I don't know if it's something to do with keeping the temperature monitoring the temperature the igniters but it runs like electricity the whole time so that makes us really happy to have all the solar we have because it's taking so much I mean obviously it wasn't designed for people living off-grid you know I'll give them that but if you aren't running a lot of solar running an oven like this could be difficult so you might want to do some research to find out how much power it takes we did a little research to try to figure that out but the information is just not out there because if you're you know living in a house you're plugged into the grid who cares if your oven yeah it takes runs with like 20 amps so our wood countertops are something that I love in the bus they actually are the same wood that we had up in the front mounted on our kind of front cap all of that wood came from the same property that we were able to get the old wood that had just been stored outside for years so it has a lot of character it's even got a lot of the saw blade cuts I've done it it was really rough cut wood when we bought it with the countertops we sanded it enough that you could like wipe the food off but I left a lot of the little markings which gives it some character you might also notice we have a lot of stuff on our countertops none of this that gets to stay here when we travel so I know a lot of people build in frames and fixtures to allow their stuff to stay on the countertops we may do that in the future but right now with all this stuff on the countertop we do have kind of a process to pack up our bus we have to take all this stuff put it inside the cabinets or inside the bathtub so we've got this funky little box that rises up of off of our countertop the initial purpose for this was a water heater that was inside of this cabinet the water heater needed to be vented to the outside and was too tall so we had to build a box to give it room to vent outside underneath here and we thought it would look funny to have a little tiny box so we just built it all the way across and it kind of gives us a little feature space where I've got a couple little baby-baby succulents and we keep our napkins up here and pens and things like that since then we had to replace that water heater it wasn't working properly it was an eco temp water heater it wasn't designed for indoor use I don't think that was the problem it was also a refurbished one that we bought and it had some issues at leaked water it would randomly go off and then leak propane into the cabinet and so we had a couple times where it just ignited in the cabinet and wasn't super safe so we replaced it with an Excel water heater just recently and we're loving that we can take showers without exploding our house yeah we would have to have a monitor so if anyway our or use hot water someone would sit down here and monitor it and like check the leak like we had a frisbee underneath for leaking actually it's still there and then you'd yell if it went off be like it's off we're glad that's over once again this wood also came from the farm that we got the rest of our and a decorative wood from this was just kind of keep stuff the rest of it was a nice thick boards this was probably just you know thin little pine planks but it worked really well to give us an accident wall with some cool character because it had been sitting outside for many years we debated what kind of pattern to do you see all kinds of cool patterns that people do on buses and I we're just really inspired by lots of the different patterns people do so we started laying it up there and came up with some sort of sort of herringbone looking pattern they worked really nicely and I like that it's not flat like there's pieces that stick out there's holes there's space between the pieces but we were able to get a pretty nice line down the edge yeah said doing this actually was surprisingly less work than a lot of the stuff in the bus I just kind of drew out a pattern on paper for how I wanted the boards to lay and how I thought they would fit up there nicely and then with the chop saw Adam just cut them in place you know we would position them make sure everything was good and then nailed him in with the nail gun he'll see other stuff we brought our nice old school analog clock in the bus I like having a regular clock you don't see a lot of regular clocks anymore but it's nice for the homey look but also you know helping the kids learn how to read time rather than just looking at my phone and seeing what time it is these racks we've had for years just sitting around our house a bottom at IKEA one time they never fit in any of our kitchens and amazingly they did fit in the bus so this makes a good space for us to hang our cups most of our coffee cups and you know regular used water cups we hang here got some little bells are nice this is Adams source of peace when he is driving things are rattling things are shaking he was driving a 40 foot and house down the highway and so when it gets you know intense are stressful all he has to do is tap the brakes a little and they get some nice little jingle bells too to bring some peace we also we have a big berkey we've seen a lot of other travelers that have the bur keys in their vehicles they're great for travelers because you never know where your water is coming from the Berkey filters out everything I mean it even takes care of chemicals you know bacteria stuff like that so if we're getting our water from a sketchy store sometimes the gas station has like a free pump and it tastes a little funky you never know how clean that water is we know that we can safely drink it with our burka we can even fill from streams and creeks and we're not camping in the desert it is that's how use this for all of our drinking water and all of our cooking water and the sink is really that water is used just to fill the Berkey and to wash our dishes our sink is really large so we went with a big double basin stainless steel sink as we went with it more like a neighbor gave it to us so a neighbor across the street was remodeling their kitchen we went to Habitat ReStore a few times we checked out you know stuff at Lowe's buying new but we did a lot of repurposing in the bus for three reasons one it was cheap and two it allowed us to reuse stuff that otherwise would have you know gone to a landfill or been in the trash so big double bass and stainless steel sink allows us to do dishes really well with our girls our kids actually do pretty much all the dishes so we can have one kid here washing then we've got our rinsing sink and then we've got drying and so that's really nice super functional for us the stainless steel faucet we Adam found it on the side of the road and was attached to this really nice cast iron you know enameled sink so he even picked up this like you know 200-pound sink threw it in the car and we removed the faucet and were able to incorporate that into our bus as well we didn't put any upper cabinet storage in our kitchen initially we planned to but then when we saw how much cabinet space we had down below we thought we probably could do without it which gives us a really open feel but we did build in one upper shelf that allows us to display one of those special tchotchkes that we just couldn't get rid of when we were minimizing when we moved into the bus we we literally got rid of everything that isn't in here with us we don't have a storage unit back home I do have one box about this size that has kids baby clothes and photo albums and that's it that's all we have left that isn't in our bus so this is kind of where we kept those special items we couldn't get rid of so we've got a lot of cabinet storage in our kitchen the doors here are the same material that was on the front of our couches and in the front of our bus it all came from my parents kitchen remodel which is cool because these are the cabinet doors that I grew up with and so it kind of gives you that like homey feeling the stuff that we store in here is actually a surprising amount because I do a lot of baking so you know inside here I've got a stand mixer I've got my food processor I've got all kinds of food storage goes in the bottom shelf here we've got all of our plates and mixing bowls and there we've got only got two drawers which initially we thought might not quite be enough but keeping our silverware and one and all of our other small utensils and the other was plenty we've got a pantry in this one where we have pullout drawers we keep a lot of other food and then all of our towels kitchen towels in there underneath the sink we keep things you would normally keep underneath the sink and then we've got this thin cabinet which we have our trashcan which is a old large paint can that we got I don't even know where we got it at a flea market somewhere but we we've used it to collect our change for years and then we moved in the bus we decided we probably didn't need you know like 50 pounds of change sitting around so we repurposed it into our trash can this is also where we have our Excel water heater one of the first people we met that lived in a bus was the Blue Ridge Mountain bus in Hot Springs North Carolina we went up and visited them and they have an angled sink and something about it just felt really nice in this space instead of like having a wall I just felt like it kind of flowed through so they really inspired us with our sink placement a lot of people ask well like isn't that weird you're facing the corner but the way it's angled I'm like I feel like I'm just looking out the window which is kind of traditional sink placement so that actually brings us to our window coverings we spend a lot of time figured abating and figuring out what we wanted for our window covers we like the smooth look of a curtain that just hangs straight down rather than bunches up to the side but we also wanted to be able to have privacy at the same time as we were able to have some ventilation in the bus so we have this system that we're able to move these rods up to the top for full privacy the rods can move down to allow us to have ventilation but still maintain privacy and they also roll all the way up to the top to have like our full 300 degree view out of the outside of the bus which I love this corner packs in a lot of stuff we've got all of our knives here on a magnet block when we pull we pulled them off the block I don't know if they would fall but it seems like a bad idea if they did fall so we've got our knife block here I keep my cookbooks I actually did bring the joy of cooking into the bus because I do a lot of cooking and it's a really helpful book when you don't have internet access and you need to learn how to clean a fish that somebody just gave you woulda liked which happened on one of our early campsites keep all of our fruits and veggies that fit and this thing got some other little containers that store our food up here on the wall this is a recent addition we were camped in some BLM lands and a couple came over and asked us if they we could help jumpstart the vehicle when Adam went over and helped him jump started they brought us this watercolor that they did of our busts in the field and we just thought it was so beautiful and they really perfect for our little accident wall they're one of my favorite features is the wall-mounted bottle opener when we bought our first house before we moved into the bus the one thing I wanted to do immediately was have a wall-mounted bottle opener so we of course moved it in the bus you've got this little catching basin so you open it just fall right in alright so that brings us back to our fridge this is just a standard 110 apartment size fridge again way cheaper than buying the RV refrigerators we got some Black Friday specials about $300 here and it does run off 110 power so it's it's not as efficient as if you had like the 12 volt or the propane powered RV refrigerators but it does give us a lot of space we have a lot of food stored in here we were able to have like a really deep refrigerator because there's not like components that have to be behind it and then freezer 2 which is also really important which allows me to cook food and store leftovers in here also I can buy a whole bunch of meat by me right now we've got about 2 weeks worth of food in our bus I know that we're not gonna have to move the bus to resupply up above the refrigerator we've got a small cabinet for various storage at some point we want to build the door over this and then we've also got our solar monitoring components up here so we can see how much power we have left and make sure we don't drop too low down beneath the refrigerator we lifted it up because it was such a small like apartment sized refrigerator we lifted it up so that it would be at a more regular level which also then gave us this extra storage down beneath where I keep things like large Tupperware enormous bags of cereal and other kitchen supplies when Sadie who's eight years old was young I wanted to have you know one of those places where you mark your kids height on the wall but being in rental houses we knew we'd be moving around a lot so I made this what looks like a giant ruler measuring each foot and so we've moved this from this is probably its fourth house that it's been in and we've got all of our kids Heights from the time they are you know around six months old up through now on here and that's really cool that we're able to take this wherever we go because when you aren't stationary it's hard to keep those kind of kids keepsakes it's like somewhat flexible as to whether the heights are accurate because you know since it comes off the wall and I learned after I started making it that I maybe didn't measure it super accurately so it's not exactly one inch for every what I thought was an inch close enough well hello so now we're coming back from the kitchen into the kind of bedroom back area of our bus we put this pocket door in to allow us to close off the front area from the back so if the girls are sleeping in their beds then we can be up in the front hanging out it's not like the sleep blocks out a bunch of sound or a tiny house but at least it kind of gives that semblance of their in a quiet zone sleeping and we're hanging out up front the pocket door we actually built with the closets that have like the doors that kind of slide across each other so we bought that Hardware cut off the second track and then mounted this door that we bought at Habitat ReStore onto it which is working well for us and was a lot cheaper than pocket door hardware apparently a pocket door kit is like $300 so I wasn't about to spend that on the driver's side of the bus we have our bathroom we also put a sliding door on our bathroom it is it uses some barn door hardware which actually is designed for cute decorative cabinet barn doors it only is designed to hold up to 75 pounds but when you're making your door out of half-inch plywood the weight she wasn't as big of a deal and so it was a lot less expensive we decoratively gave it this nice sort of barn look without that went nicely with our bus it's still super unfinished you can even see like the little markings that I have on here that from when we constructed it will probably pay to stay in it at some point we spent way more of our time on the living area of our bus since that's where you spend most of your waking hours and then when we were ready to hit the road we don't really feel like finishing up all of this so we just made it good enough and left on the red so in the bathroom we have the ever-present nature's Head toilet that everybody uses it's it's pricey but it also it works really well and I think that's why everybody uses it so we've been really happy with it we kept reading like how long it's gonna last before you have to empty the solids compartment and turned out that was a little bit off because with a family of four we have to empty it every one to two weeks at the max like that's the longest we've ever been without having to empty it we've never had any problem with the smells the problem we have is like it gets so hard that you can't turn the crank I was joking that if you hear somebody grunting in our bathroom it's because they're trying to turn the crank on the nature's Head toilet it's super easy at the beginning but when that thing fills up it is rough and then once again with a family of four the liquids container it has to be emptied about every other day which isn't a big deal we just carry it out and a little bit aways from camping dump it outside we have talked about plumbing this into our gray tank that was another one of those like let's hit the road kind of things I do think eventually we would like to plumb it into the gray tank because that is you know every other day tasks to take the pee out and then you know wipe the container down and then you got to go wash your hands and all of that so eventually I think it would get plumbed into the gray water tank so our emergency exit door for a bus is actually incorporated into our bathroom because of the roof raised Adam actually had to fabricate a new section for the door so this is just our insulating piece that we put here because it's super drafty so Adam extended the door to make it taller the idea was that maybe eventually we would put a set of steps that could fold out of here so we could go in and out of this door as well and then when we empty the toilet instead of having to card it through the house because I have this fear of link dropping you know two gallons of our family's urine in the house we can actually just take it out this side door so yeah it still functions and we can use that it doesn't seal and so we went Adam drives down the road the toilet paper will just start like unfurling in the bathroom because of all the wind and that's why I made the insulating piece that goes in there to try to help with that a little bit curtains were I don't know I guess a bedsheet I found it in the first store and I thought it was cute and looked kind of bathroom me so I just sew it up some quick curtains up on the curtain rod is copper tubing the toilet paper roll is copper tubing so our towel hooks are also made of copper tubing we've we did that because we like the aesthetic that matched with our shower so our shower uses all exposed copper piping again this was like one of those how can we be cheap and make it look nice at the same time all the components were just expensive for the exposed piping when you buy exposed shower materials our wall is just the piece of 3/4 plywood so we didn't have anywhere to go inside the wall to hide the components so we bought a bunch of copper pipe found some you know kind of garden hose looking components here and attach this on there weirdly we couldn't find a blue knob we wanted to do like a blue and a red for hot and cold so we did 2 Reds and then online somebody commented it had a bus that they could only find blue knobs and we thought we need to meet up so we can like exchange one knob so then again with the copper piping we went around and made this angled shower curtain we just wanted to angle it with the roof of the bus everything kind of functions on this funky angle and a bus so we decided to keep our shower rod doing the same thing so then the curtain just pulls around and you close that up when you're using the shower trying to be cheap again cheap and cute we looked around for like the shower pans to fit our space we looked at like the RV shower enclosures and I really liked that idea because it would keep the space dry and you wouldn't have to worry about leaks as much but we'd already kind of designated our bathroom space and built the walls in I couldn't find anything the fit right it was just like not the right shape so we ended up getting a feed trough from like a tractor supply type store and we painted the exterior just with like a satin black and coated the inside with one of those like tile refinishing kits I think it's like home X so if you have ugly tiles in your house you can make them white we've heard mixed reviews of a lot of people that have we've seen do it say that it starts chipping really badly but we just went for it anyway so we'll see in the tub we wanted to have like a teak floor but teak is really expensive and we found that Brazilian walnut was another material that works really well for wet environments and so it's a raised removable Brazilian walnut shower floor and that just means we don't stand directly on the metal floor which seems to get kind of achy and the wood just feels nice on your feet it's kind of a high step to get in and out of your shower so our five-year-old actually can't straddle this I have to pick her up to get her into the tub but you know give her a couple years she'll be able to get in and out it's like everybody who has a shower in their RV or bus is mostly storage because we're usually been docking we don't want to use the water that it would take to shower because that means we have to leave our boondocking site sooner and to get water so what we tend to do is just store things in there we put our dirty laundry in there we don't want you to see that so we take it out but we'll shower in there maybe once a week and it's a quick shower you know it's like turn it on get wet turn it off and get all your soaping and then turn it on rinse turn it off so back behind the toilet on the wall we mounted some like wicker type baskets we're looking for some sort of way to store all of those things that you might store in like a bathroom cabinet or linen closet or something so they're just mounted on some like shelf mounts we bought at the hardware store and it's things in here this is like our medicine cabinet and this is our toiletry supplies I have like the very small amount of makeup extra bar of soap I think I have some fingernail polish in here they're not really going to that one very often so across from our bathroom on the passenger side of the bus we have the kids bunk beds these are one of those another one of those areas where we just like didn't quite finish it when we got ready to hit the road we just like slapped up a couple 2x4 so whoever's in the top bunk doesn't roll out and has a way to get in because it's a ladder and we just hit the road since then I put up like a coat of paint which is quickly wearing off so I may need to figure something else out but eventually we want to like let the kids choose how they paint their bunks we want to give them some freedom because we haven't really given them any design freedom in the bus yet but that way they're able to like design their own space they love the bunks so our older daughter Sadie she's eight and she sleeps on the bottom bunk and our five-year-old Arend gets the top bunk this was a decision we made because they've been in bunk beds together for years and RINs always have the bottom the Sadie's always had the top so we left them swap and Ren just loves her little like upper space she likes to peek out of her at the door and look towards the front she thinks it's cool to try to get grab things out of the cabinet that she can reach around the door when we were designing our bus we didn't want the beds to be something they grew out of quickly I mean eight-year-olds are not that far away from having like a really big growth spurt so we designed the kids bunks full length like a twin size bed whatever that standard length is but we narrowed them a little bit because even as the kids grow we don't know how long we'll be doing this but we wanted to be flexible that we could do this for very long term even and you know into their teenage years so we've got the length we just narrowed it by like I don't know six eight inches and we feel like that's gonna be plenty of space for them to grow into the bunks the only problem that causes is with sheets so obviously sheets don't fit bunks that are beds that are narrower and also the mattresses we have are only about six inches thick they're IKEA mattresses so it makes it a little harder for sheets to fit and then the fact that they're like wedged into these little cubbies makes it really hard to actually put the sheets on the bed and like make the bed and keep it looking nice so we just recently got new bedding for them it's the Betty's bedding which is like a zippered bedding it's really cool they make their beds by zipping it so you just can open it up it's like this cozy fleece on the inside and then if they don't want to be wrapped like zipped up they've got this extra flaps that they can like it'd be cozy in it without having to zip or if it's real cold those it themselves closed but that allows the kids to actually make their beds not like they do I mean we tell them to it's not something to do on their own but it makes it super easy so when we do make the beds it's a lot quicker and then has like a whole lot of elastic underneath it like sometimes fitted sheets have like just the corners of elastic but this has got like kind of a heavy-duty elastic all the way around and I found that that kind of helped hold it in place on the really thin mattress is a little bit better so you might notice we have an enormous teddy bear in here minimizing the kids stuff was easy for Sadie who's our older daughter she really got into you know let's well only keep the things that are really important to me what is it yeah what's the stuff that I really play with and what's the stuff that I just kind of leave sitting around my room but our younger daughter Ren had a lot more trouble with it she is really connected to like everything she loves all her things she lost all her stuffed animals she loves all her books so helping her choose what to get rid of was really hard and when we told her we were gonna get rid of Big Bear which was our normos teddy bear she was just devastated I mean she had the saddest face I've ever seen she was crying and asking asking us to take pictures of her with the bear to remember him by and we're like okay we can't get rid of this bear so Big Bear lives with us he is like our third child but he's not allowed to leave the bunk cuz there's just never him so at the end of the kids bunk we've got like kind of a little partition wall it gives them a little kind of cubby inside their bunk but also the idea is that in the longer term we can create a door here and so we can divide the adult bedroom off of the kids bedroom again it's not like it's gonna give us a ton of privacy because it's gonna be like you know a half inch of plywood or something but it sort of makes you feel like you have privacy we've got some pretty big closets for an RV this one we found these doors at Habitat ReStore initially planning on painting them but I just thought this like fun silvery purple finish went well with the outside of our bus so we haven't painted them yet this door we have all of our linens and I don't know what's behind that all of Adams clothes all of my clothes more of my clothes and you know just those random things that you like can't get rid of but in a tiny house you don't know where to store so I've got like bug spray in that cabinet and a bag with goggles and diving toys when we go to pools and then down on the bottom here we've got books we had a lot of trouble minimizing books so the kids have just so many good books like I can't get rid of like the Little House on the Prairie series or the whole Harry Potter series so we brought a lot of books with us in the bus but we keep them all back in here and that way when we want to fish a few things out the girls can keep a couple books and their beds I keep a couple books behind my bed so I always got kind of like my next reading ready for me and we've got you know things like some toys like pick-up sticks and connects sometimes there's some homeschool stuff sitting around still working on the organization and kind of where everything goes and how it gets stored so that we can access it then our other closet is on this side we put a closet right up in it so we could hang some clothes down inside it we've got like winter stuff like our heavier jackets our mittens or gloves or hats and then a couple long boards in here camping on BLM lands we family can't use the long boards because we're always on dirt roads so we'll need to find some good smooth pavement some time to play with this and finally the master bed so it's really really high there's a story behind that we wanted to save money by using like the big 55-gallon drums for our water tanks so we had them under here we had a mount for it they kept him on an angle Adam had gotten all the plumbing in and we finally got the plumbing done pressurized the system and they leaked like they leak like crazy and it was just like not something we were gonna try to deal with having leaking under our bed for who knows how long so he had to rip those out but we left the original height of the bed it doesn't actually need to be this high now so we had to get a stool long term we want to have like a little fold down step here which would be kind of nice so you would have to like kick it back and forth so anyway our super tall bed got a step and it's not that bad getting into it it was just kind of hard for the first week or two and we didn't have the step here now that we do still have our water tanks under here so we got 246 gallon water tanks that are underneath the bed and they really only come up about this high and they don't take up the whole depth of the bed so there's a pretty good amount of storage space under there too so under here I also got a made a hanging storage system which actually kind of didn't fall apart but fell off of like the rails so it's not working anymore which is why there's no reason to look under the bed because it's just a pile of stuff on top of water tanks but under here we store all of our sleeping bags all of our climbing gear all of our back I can gear as we do so much outdoor backpacking and climbing we have a lot of stuff I mean we probably have six to eight sleeping bags between the four of us you know for different weather so that was like a storage priority for us maybe not everybody would commit that much space of their tiny house two sleeping bags but it was important this is another area of the bus it's not finished we have you can see we have a lot of like rough unfinished metal we just got a sheet hanging across the back right now eventually we you know want to build out some sort of end cap like we did in the front we want to have some cabinets for now that's what it is another reason the bed had to be high like we didn't have to have it this high but we had to have it high is because we have the rear-engine bus the engine is actually under here too we moved the bed forward for some unknown reason I don't know it was like two years ago so the bed actually has a lot of space behind it and we haven't decided what to do with it yet so we stuck some couch cushions back there and decided it was a reading nook sometimes we'll let the kids go back there instead of like a laptop and they can watch movies and it's kind of like a little cozy zone for them but this is probably our most unfinished area but it works we just sleep here so doesn't really matter I do like that we have the room to change it to go this direction so if we decide like I'm the climber over so putting the bed sideways you know you've got the person who sleeps on the outside who doesn't have to climb over but gets climbed over all night so it didn't really matter who had to climb over versus who got climbed over so I'm the back person and I climb over but because we have that extra room back there if we decide we're sick of that we can reorient our bed this direction and that would allow us to not climb over each other and get and then we'd have storage on the sides but that's for down the road if we actually feel like doing more work on the bus I kind of like it going side to side because when we run level it's usually they were unleveled this way like sideways rather than front to back and so you know whichever side is higher we just move our heads to that side of go back and forth we don't have like any headboard or any reading lights or we just put our heads on the side that's uphill so now that we've made it to the back of the bus we've really covered everything inside we're gonna head outside and show you the exterior okay so on the outside of the we've got as you can see now you can see the transition for the roof raised 14 inches like I said and one thing that we did that a lot of people that do roof races didn't do or don't do is we actually raised the roof while maintaining all of the original school bus windows so we did an under window raise which is fairly rare it took a lot of figuring had to remove a bunch of rivets so the sheet metal was freed up from the ribs and then you know basically just exposing all the internal the metal I was able to then kind of figure out what it was that needed to be done to do the raise the the white panel that you see under the under the raised windows white panel is actually repurposed sheet metal from the the headliner inside the bus so when we did the demo we took all of the sheet metal down from the ceiling of the bus and we repurposed it for under the windows and then also for the 45 degree angle transition in the front and again like and not a lot of people do a rear transition so we used it in the rear as well to step back down to the to the original height in the back of the bus so we had heard you know I'm not a I wouldn't call myself a skilled fabricator I've worked with metal over the years and done things here and there but we had heard or I had kind of read and you'll read anything online so take this with a grain of salt but we had heard that the endcap the rear of the bus holds a lot of structural integrity so we didn't want to really mess with that and then I figured since we were already doing a front transition I already knew how to do that so I was able to just kind of repeat the process in the back and you know to be honest I kind of like that symmetrical look if you will when we did the roof raised we went up 14 inches that actually was dictated by the width of the ceiling panel strips that we had so we were able to take the the ceiling panels down off the inside rip them in half so we had you know they were 28 inches wide so we just ripped it down the center and that kind of dictated the the height that we did the raised it's kind of a coincidence that the the Rays happen to leave the windows lined up with each other so the front window the top pane matches up with the bottom window of the race I think aesthetically they kind of work together came up with a good look I think so because we have a rear-engine pusher the engine is in the rear meaning there's no driveshaft that comes up to the engine in the front obviously it's not there so there's no drive shaft and that storage is just pass-through storage so we've got two doors on this side two doors on the other side and underneath there we have our gray water tank all kinds of bins for storing you know tools we have camp chairs down there axes we have a chainsaw for for you know getting firewood and stuff like that so quite a bit of storage down there and that was one of the things that we really wanted when we got the bus so it's nice to have that we didn't have to fabricate something to mount underneath we do have a CT 90 that we use is kind of like our towed we have a hitch mount on the back of the bus it's light it's like 180 pounds or something like that dry so I'm able to I don't have a ramp even to get it up on to the rack I literally will just like get the front tire up on the rack then lift the rear tire back on the rack and then strap it down so it's nice and convenient for just kind of puts it around to be honest with you we haven't used it for trips to town or anything yet we've just but since we stay on BLM land so often it's really fun to just hop on go back into the BLM land just explore the mountains back you know around where you're camped so that's been great so here we have our power Inlet for our 30 amp service that's our direct air intake for our wood stove this was the vent for the original hot-water heater that we talked about so that serves no purpose anymore although the excel that we do have puts off a lot of heat and so that will allow the heat to escape from under the cabinet so that still does help a little bit we blanked out a couple of win a few windows this one is for the shower on the other side of the bus we've blanked out a window in the closet and behind the refrigerator so you know just with those few windows blanked out it still gives it that feel of a full you know school bus windows the emergency door that leads into the bathroom is here and if you look there's a line right here it's not perfect but this is where we had to add the sheet metal so all of this is new sheet metal again Reaper from the headliner of the bus so it's nice as she was saying earlier it's kind of hard to get in and out we would it would be better if we had some steps or a stool or something to get up into the bathroom if we needed to the idea is you know if the kids are out getting muddy they can go directly into the bathroom shower off use it kind of like an entry or a mudroom in those circumstances back here we have our water fill we did we have the double so this is for gravity and then we have the city hookup so if we're hooked up at a campground which we never are we could just leave that hooked in and it'll just pressurize our system one thing that I did that was pretty cool is I was afraid that filling up with the gravity would be slow and kind of like Gergely I didn't know how it was gonna work it actually works pretty well but we still every time we feel will hook into the city water and the way I've got it plumbed under the bed is I've got a valve so I can actually turn a couple valves and route the water through the city water directly into our water tank so I can sit inside have the water hooked up turn it on go inside then open that valve up I can watch the water fill up the tanks and then when it gets to the top I can just shut the valve off on the inside so I don't have to guess work sometimes you know if you don't have a tank monitor people will just like wait till water shoots out the vent you know and so it's nice having that option to be able to just use that valve on the inside so in our circumstance we wanted to get out on the road at a certain point we were just ready to go I think we had originally planned to tow the vehicle but instead we opted for putting on a motorcycle rack on the back and driving the car separate we don't have our seat belts in the bus fully operational yet so the kids driving the car with Elizabeth and that's safer plus we'd really try not to move a whole lot so we're going you know in the last month we've only driven the bus about maybe seven hours total so you know if we were driving both both rigs and all the time everywhere it would be you know a lot of extra gas but but we found that having a car and just being able to zip around you know take it climbing take it to town do laundry that kind of thing it's nice to just have that separate maybe one day we'll tow it but right now we kind of like the way it is it's like a 2004 Toyota Matrix so it gets good gas mileage it's a four-cylinder her name is Donna the matrix so but we've got our bikes up top we could put the kids bikes on the back you know we've also found that since we've been on the road we're actually not riding our bikes as much as we thought we might the kids are but our bikes generally stay on the car full-time unfortunately so maybe we can get those out more soon we do have the original air horns on the bus which is fun you know every now and then it's nice to use those and then up top you can also see we have our chimney pipe next to the roof vent and we also have a large storage container up there well because when we were moving from a 1,300 square foot house into a 220 square-foot bus we really didn't know how much storage we were gonna actually need so we wanted to make sure that when we had all that under storage but also interior storage and then we got the roof top box for extra door equipment or whatever it might be yeah we have a collapsible ladder and that works pretty well the one we got was kind of cheap but I think the concept is great and I'd like to get another one it just collapses down to about that size and you know it can just throw it in the under storage bit on the gray water tank and it's just you know it's easy to pull out lift up run up on the roof I also like the idea of having a ladder that's locked under the bus that way when we're not here at the bus nobody can just climb up on the bus and take my solar panels or try and break into the storage box up there so it gives me a little more sense of security so this is the driving area since it has the rear engine everything up here is really smooth and quiet it's nice to be able to drive and not have the racket of the engine so loud like right here in front of you a lot of the other front engine flat nose buses the engine sits right here beside the driver and we've heard people have a hard time even having a conversation across the aisle so there was some things that we wanted we wanted a rear end pusher we wanted either of for 66 international or the 8.3 common so we were looking specifically for two engines and we wanted to make sure that we had the 643 transmission or we wanted the 30 60 transmission we wanted those engines because this was we wanted the biggest bus possible we've got two girls five and eight and so we wanted to make sure that we had plenty of space on the interior but having all that space we wanted to make sure that we had a motor that could push it and so far it's it's been really really good and same thing with the the transmission I'm not a mechanic but I've heard that some transmissions like the 545 is not great for mountain driving and we're rock climbers and backpackers and you know we got to be able to go to the mountains and that's why we went with what we did some other things that we specifically sought out in a bus was the under storage which we can take a look at later but the under storage is huge we've got two doors on each side and they're passed through because being a rear-engine there's no drive shaft that runs straight up the center under the bus so our storage is huge down there so this is the first time ever driving a vehicle this large so when I picked it up in New Mexico it was it definitely took some time to get used to luckily it was on Interstate 40 where I bought it and I live on I interstate 40 almost 2,000 miles away so it was pretty easy to just jump on the highway and finding the center of the lane was honestly the hardest part I found myself veering into the rumble strips over and over and over because of the width of the vehicle and seeing trucks coming up behind me pass it and I was just a little nervous but you know quickly got over that and so now it's actually not too bad to drive being a flat nose bus we actually have a push the front wheels back further so your turning radius is actually pretty decent for a 40 foot vehicle so it's been pretty easy to maneuver so when we did the demo we did cut some of the bussers the old emergency exits when you open those doors up the buzzers kick on and it makes it so you can't start the bus by at the ignition so what we end up having to do for now is turn the key on and then I have to go to the rear of the bus and open up the rear hatch and start it back there not ideal and eventually hopefully we can get that switched over but right now it works fine the entrance to the bus we got some unfinished parts you know the door gasps we just need to cover that up but we have a nice shoe cubby for all of our shoes to shove in here that was one of the things that when we left home a few months ago we didn't have this was just open and we had a plan for it but I was to be honest a little bit burnt out on building and so I wanted to just live for a little while and kind of just enjoy the road however when we got to Joshua Tree last month we met up with another nomad and he we did a barter I bought or I made him a pair of sandals and he built us this shoe cubby it's kind of cool we built that a desk so we can sit here put a laptop here and do work read a book have the kids do schoolwork something like that so that worked out really well then up here we have you know just some basic hooks eventually I want to do something a little bit nicer for our you know for our coat storage and we have just an old box that we found in an old garage back in North Carolina the old place we used to live so we took the you know these two boxes we got from properties that we lived in North Carolina and you know we think that they kind of capture the the charm of the you know rustic southwest or southeast rather our whole bus is filled with other things that kind of say South East you know kind of that farmhouse kind of look so we got our books we have our DVD blu-ray player which hooks up to our TV up here and this wood came from a piece of property that we rented and our landlord had five houses and bunch of barns in a pond and the city was putting their highway bypass right through his property and so I knew that they were gonna have to tear down his barn so I contacted him and he said yeah come on out and he you know said there was some barn tin roofing covering bunches you know a ton of wood he said go through it see what you want let me know and so we pulled out a bunch of slabs and some tin roofing and when he came back he said just take it so he gave us all of that wood and it really you'll see you know later back into the bus we have quite a bit of this wood all through the bus I think it gives it it again it gives it kind of a southeast farmhouse charm yeah so finding repurposed materials is rough because you're you know you're wanting to build right now like if you're trying to if you have a build planned in five years then you can kind of get your plan set up and start collecting you know repurposed materials but like when you're building and the design is coming organically which ours did we didn't have the chance to you know stockpile materials so you know I think we did pretty good for for not being able to do that this the front to the dashboard I actually call this our mantle but the the front of the dashboard this material was cabinet doors from my wife Elizabeth's parents remodel so we actually repurposed all of their cabinet doors and just kind of made them as kind of a sort of paneling so that's that worked really well and again that kind of goes back through the bus and that's a one of a you know a reoccurring theme through the bus so the front of the bus this the window is just white material with reflectix sandwiched inside so basically my wife made a a sleeve slid the reflectix in there and then sewed it shut so when we when we drive we pull that out and it just rolls up and then we stick it into the tub for traveling and that's worked out pretty well it's nice to not have that Sun beaten in if it's warm in here you know it just kind of helps to regulate the temperature however we still are considering putting up an insulating blanket through the front and the reason being is we still have that window and we still have the door and this wheel well just the the heat and cold just comes right in so it's still somewhat of an issue and I'm not sure exactly what we'll end up doing but we are considering a insulating blanket going across there yeah so if we end up putting that blanket across the across the front here then we won't be able to watch TV so I don't know if we can just have it take it down for movie nights or whatever and put it back up but overall this this does work pretty well one more thing that we that had mentioned for the entry we kept the gas powered or the air power door so there's a valve right here we can open and close and if it's open allows the air out so then we can just open the door manually and close it manually but as I'm driving I can pressurize that and use the the lever up at the driver which is kind of cool well thank you guys for watching and checking out our school II build as a reminder you can go follow us at deliberate life bus on Instagram and we also have Blagh deliberate life bus dot wordpress so if you have any questions about any of the things you see in our bus our tiny wood stove or Berkey really anything feel free to reach out to us we're happy to answer questions you can use any of the links below also if you're interested we have a couple things we do on the road for our income we don't have you know full-time income yet but Adam makes these custom-made minimalist sandals he's a retired climbing slings which is really cool and if you're interested in those you can check him out deliberate life designs on Instagram and also reach out to us with any questions or if you're interested in getting a pair [Music] [Music]

Channel: Tiny Home Tours

Views: 1,305,626

Rating: 4.8488159 out of 5

Keywords: tiny home, tiny house, tiny home on wheels, van life, camper van, shipping container, design, tiny houses, tiny homes, tiny house tour, skoolie, school bus conversion, family travel, homeschool, unschool, diy school bus, diy skoolie, road trip, family road trip

Id: ng6wNc3DwoE

Length: 61min 34sec (3694 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2019