Family Of 4 & Their DIY Raised Roof School Bus Tiny House

today's video is brought to you by omaze head on over to amaze.com forward slash tht to learn more i'm abe miller i'm micah miller these are our boys asher and lave and this is a 2005 bluebird all-american rear engine and we've been in it for about four months now and on the road for about a month and we're super excited to share with you guys so you can check out what we got inside and how everything works day to day [Music] welcome to our living room we have a ton of couch space we have eight feet of couch on this side four feet of couch on this side what we love about it is they both fold out into beds they also each fold up and have storage underneath so we use this space a ton we actually just bought a four foot table to put in between the couches as well so we sit on either side and we can have dinners as a family together because we have limited space right here for our bar seating i did choose this faux leather because we have two rambunctious boys and it doesn't stain or tear or anything like that a question that we get asked a lot is do we have seat belts and where are they so when we park we have four seat belts on this couch and two seat belts on this couch and when we're driving the kids are both seat belted in in their car seat [Music] this is our dinette slash bar top we it folds down when we're traveling and um the boys typically sit up here and eat breakfast while we're kind of messing around in the kitchen and we also do a lot of homeschool and arts and crafts projects on this table the one thing we do like doing is folding it down for instance during christmas we had our tree here so this was down a lot it just opens up the space and we can hang out if we're having gatherings or having people over and um so it does open up this space a lot this is our fan that we converted from a walmart 17 box fan but what we did was we basically just kept the emergency exit as is we spray painted painted it all white and then um while we use it we pop the hatch up and air can flow out we can also use it when the hatch is down and it acts as like an interior fan if we just want to circulate the air in the inside we're super happy with it we kept both of the emergency exits in the bus the front and the back so if there were to be a emergency we can always pop that out easily and hop out the roof there as well as in the back the whole setup the fan was 17 and then spray paint and some wood for the screen and then the screen lining so maybe 30 bucks all in we can use this fan on or off grid we do have to be careful because it pulls more power than a regular dc fan would but we have a generator and we have a larger battery bank [Music] we owned a home in california for about five years we bought it and it was a complete dump we gutted the whole thing and basically made it our own and then we were like why are we doing this we want to travel we want more time together he was working all the time i was at home with the kids all the time and so we just kind of wanted something different we got introduced to the schooly lifestyle and that kind of just brought it all home for us we were sold and there was no turning back it was an interesting evolution because we were we knew we were selling the house we knew we wanted to travel we found ourselves wandering through rv lots looking at like b vans and even a couple of class a's wondering you know trying to figure out how much space we were going to need and it just i don't even remember the full evolution to like let's build it ourself but it was a lot of like hey we remodeled a house why don't we build a bus it should be easy yeah we like making things our own and custom and so this kind of just fit everything the travel flipping things and just we love it hi i'm kat with tiny home tours today's video is brought to you by omaze we're partnering with omaze tiny heirloom and the charity organization girls build to bring you the chance to win your very own custom built tiny home on wheels worth 150 thousand dollars that's right you could win your very own custom built tiny home on wheels built by the awesome folks at tiny heirloom the team at tiny heirloom will provide you with a personalized design consultation to make sure your tiny home has everything you've been dreaming of from beautiful architectural design features to luxury finishing touches enter now for your chance to win with the added bonus of the opportunity to help out our charity organization partner girls build girls build is a non-profit organization whose goal is to help inspire curiosity and confidence in girls ages 8 to 14 by teaching them practical skills in carpentry electrical bike maintenance and more head on over to www.omaze.com forward slash tht for your chance to win and to learn more to our kitchen this is my happy place i'm i love cooking in it's super convenient and um comfortable to cook in here so have what we did when we designed it was we did want open storage on the wall a lot of people our most asked question is don't things fly off the shelves when you're driving and we don't drive with our bowls and our plates up here but everything else is fixed down i wanted a large sink um something that we had in our old house and so i just wanted to kind of bring it over and feel homey and comfortable in here so this is a 24 inch farmhouse sink and we love it this is also one of the things i wanted was a big faucet that i can kind of clean easily out with the sink and so this has been really nice to have we do have a large apartment size oven and stove it's a unique stove the unique is the brand and it's considered an off-grid stove the only thing that draws from electric is the light and the convection oven fan so other if you don't want to use those items it's all propane so it's really nice when you're boondocking or off grid backsplash is actually real brick i that's one of my must-haves i wanted something super homey um and that just is really like a warm feeling for me um so but it is the veneer brick so it's skinnier it does add a little bit of weight to the vest but um something that we weren't too worried about so we went with a butcher block countertop from lowe's and what we did was we stained it and then we sealed it with some tongue oils on either side of the oven i have a spice rack over here and i have essential oils up top we also have storage under here for more pots and pans baking items this is a pull out as well we have a dish rack some cutting boards we wanted to have a somewhere to hide our trash so we have a slide out trash can as well utensils up top here plenty of we have utensils for eight people so if anyone wants to come over for dinner baking items and knives we have more baking stuff whisks and cheese grater and then down here we keep our glass storage containers okay so on this side of the kitchen we have our apartment-sized fridge it's plenty of storage we go we can basically go about a week without going back to the grocery store it is efficient but it isn't dc so it draws more than a dc or propane fridge this is what we like to call our little coffee bar we keep our coffee cups and coffee items up top we have our junk drawer doesn't everybody have a drunk drawer where we have our kitchen towels and pot holders and then down below we have this pull out storage for pots and pans and then we have our blender and mixing bowls and our crock pot down below above the fridge we have more storage and one of my favorite items in our kitchen is our pull out pantry this is where we keep all of our food and it's plenty of storage for us for about like i said about a week we go to the grocery store and it's super heavy so we have put 25 pound to 25 pound magnets so it sticks and it stays closed while we're driving something that we also wanted was the ability to close off the front half from the back half so we could put the kids to bed and still be able to hang out comfortably in the front so we did this little pocket door here and as a bonus when it's cold weather the back half of the bus stays about 20 degrees warmer than the front half so it's been really really nice [Music] um going into this into this lifestyle for me was was really just acknowledging how wasteful we tend to be when we have limitless resources available to us you'd shower for extended periods of time like now even when i shower in a like a hotel or in a house i turn the water off when i'm soaping just out of habit i had to let go of the idea that showering every day and blow drying my hair was something that i could do that's the off-grid side of things the unique thing about this bus is that while it does have off-grid capability it does have this very um you know it doesn't it feels like home i mean you still have the ability to do those things blow dry your hair shower every day you're that's usually in a situation where you're grid tied but you do have the ability to live that way or if you want to just get out in the woods take it one shower a week and just enjoy nature you can do that as well [Music] welcome to the back half of the bus as you can see myself at 6'5 i'm standing comfortably we did raise the roof on the bus which allowed us to do like a standard size doorway and then of course have all this headroom i love it because before the bus was literally i was like walking through a scrape in my head so we've got plenty of space in the back half of the bus you start here with the tiniest closet in the world and we use it for all kinds of storage we have a table that we bring out when we have more guests if we have guests signing with us a stool for micah to be able to access the the fan that you saw earlier it's nice to have a closet most of our clothing storage is drawers everything's small rolled up but if you need to like hang you know a jacket or bulkier items you can hang in the closet here so we got our boys in bunks with sliding barn doors so they have their own little private space which has really worked out well these guys when they need to just go unwind or if they want to have a place to call their own or you know have a friend over and take them to their room they're able to bring them into their bunk they have all their fun little stuff they have a window to the world over here in the bottom shelf is a hidden cubby where they're able to put you know more toys or whatever little treasures they come across we did put power in each bunk so you have two outlets as well as a little light so it just kind of gives them this like you know their own room kind of feel which was something that was important to us when we were designing our bus so that everybody felt like they had their own space underneath the bunks we have clothing storage for the boys so these pop out and you've got their clothing so in designing the boys bunks we did a window that doesn't open we did that so the boys weren't popping out in the middle of the night to go run through the woods but that did also create a situation where we don't have great ventilation if they have their doors closed so my vision is to add some sort of vent fan or like a small dc powered ventilation system just to keep airflow in here in the hallway here you see one of three interconnected smoke detectors so when we were building the bus i was thinking a lot about like safety fire safety early warning getting in and out we do have emergency exits in the front and in the back here if you had to an emergency you could go through the window but if one smoke alarm goes off they all go off so if you have a situation in the front you'll get warning in the back and i have one underneath the bed over our battery bank so if there's any issue down there boom we're well informed they work great they're very loud welcome to the bathroom in designing this space we were being conscious of space um but we were able to get a pretty decently sized uh space bathroom we have a 30 by 30 inch shower pan with a it's called a duma wall it's a duma wall tile it's pvc vinyl type material super lightweight when we were designing the bus we had talked about doing actual tile but we start as we were building and going through the process i started to pay more attention to like how much stuff weighed because it's it's something you do have to be aware of the chassis does have a weight capacity that you can't go over so the shower works very effectively i'm able to stand upright in it we've got the vent fan above it so it's able to draw all that you know moist air out when you're showering nice rainfall shower head and then we built in our own custom little cubby for soaps and shampoos that sort of thing also in the bathroom here we have our custom made sink this used to be a serving bowl and we drilled a hole in it with a diamond bit and plumbed it in so on board we have a hundred gallons of fresh water storage we have 80 gallons of gray water storage and we uh we utilize a composting toilet for solid waste behind the toilet we have open storage we have more of that chicago brick that mica showed you out front in a chevron style in here the open storage gives it a nice open feel and then for travel or transit we move things that you know might be breakable or need to come down but a lot of stuff is actually just fixed to the um to the shelving and we've traveled 2 000 miles no problem stuff stays on i think for us going forward even if it's not necessarily the bus i think us just being more efficient in our in the way that we live is going to carry over to when we you know do a house or a homestead or you know whatever whatever type of structure comes next a lot of people ask us like how do we do this and how do we you know afford life on the road one it's not as expensive as i thought going in if you utilize the the off-grid capabilities the boondocking capabilities if you're you know if you just eat cheap and clean you can save a lot of money that way a lot of resources that way but we also were able to flip a home in california when we sold when we say we sold everything we literally sold everything so we were able to use you know reinvest some of that money into our actual build and into ourselves and then by doing this it also led into other opportunities where now i'm able to consult other people on their builds and just you know general tiny home living um we're able to share our knowledge and experience in that way micah does brilliant photography and she's able to now it's a different type of photography i mean you have to book on the road um so when we get to an area we know we're going to be for a while she's able to connect with that you know local population and help people in that way if it's something that they're looking to do we've done you've done a wedding in dallas um you know photography in california a bunch you know we've been back and forth we built our bus in western pa and now we're making our way back west to towards california [Music] all right so stepping further down the hallway here you're going to get into our walk-in closet slash laundry room area so to my left here we have our washer dryer combo the washer dryer we only use on grid it draws too much power and water to be used effectively off-grid it could be done but it'd be like one load above the washer dryer behind the butcher block is a pop-out wall and behind there is all the control panels my dc fuse box some switches for water pumps the fan for the toilets and then also have wires stubbed in to add water level gauges and inverter controls and then i have another fire extinguisher i have three fire extinguishers on this bus one back here one in the kitchen and then one by the driver's seat up front so you may have noticed there's no ac units in the ceiling or on the roof our ac unit and we also it's actually an ac heat pump combination is mounted underneath the bus and it's ducted into the hallway here and in the kitchen uh underneath the pantry so our ac unit is is out of sight but works great and it's also a heat pump but we in hindsight i probably wouldn't have sprung for the heat pump aspect of it because it's not a super effective way of heating a small space like this for pound for pound on my right here we have our office slash uh clothing storage so you have above on the top here opens up into office space we've got printer paper and we actually have our wi-fi router there's power in here so you're able to power your printer power the wi-fi router and then below there we have drawers that serve as clothing storage and then toiletries you know bathroom stuff bottom drawer here another little built-in is our clothes hamper in the wall so it's designed to look like the wall but you see this little tab here and it pops out and then dirty clothes that takes us right into the master bedroom now you're probably looking at this and you're thinking you guys just climb you just charge that every night going to bed you just hop up in there actually fun little thing we've got a drawer we've got a step built into our bottom drawer so you just pop that out and then climb yourself into the master bedroom night at night so bedroom master bed it's a it's built as a queen size bed we have on both sides we've got um i guess you'd call it like a nightstand it's uh so you've got his and hers nightstands you've got his and her lights on separate switches so if you're somebody's reading the other person's power and down we've got power in there as well so if you're charging devices or you know working on your laptop or whatever super functional that way and then to the right here you've got our window to the world one thing i would really possibly reconsider if i did a re did another build would be to do like a double pane glass because single pane glass is super inefficient as far as from an insulation perspective so i would probably look into like a double pane glass we were able to get these windows for almost nothing we took them off of another rv um found a guy that was selling them so that kind of did influence our decision and they work great i mean they they're um they open allow air good air flow and stuff so so underneath um this monster here is pretty heavy we have it on a 200 pound strut but it's a it's a storage area and then if you look in here you can see our battery bank we have 500 amp hours of agm battery and a 4 000 watt ames inverter i will be redoing this when i started designing the electrical system in the bus i didn't really know what i was doing actually so i had to in the process of doing it i started to learn like what's better so i will be going after lithium batteries just for the space they're so much better around the corner we have two sea flow 3.1 gallon per minute pumps dc pumps and our water tank is underneath some of the stuff that you see stored in here [Music] for power we're currently using plug-in and a gen an on-board generator we're going to be adding solar i designed the electrical system to easily take a solar setup so i'm in the process of doing that we have three 20-pound propane tanks at any given time there's two tanks hooked up and then there's one tank in reserve so we always have plenty of propane we do have here our outdoor shower coming soon we we plumbed it in we will be adding that in and so you'll have the ability to shower outside here's our toe we have a jeep wrangler great tow vehicle you can flat toe them without any problems the transfer case decouples so you can just roll and we did our own setup did some custom work here on the bumper to get it set up like i said we've towed it about 2000 miles and we've only had one small issue the first time we towed one of these arms actually separated and the jeep was hanging on by one arm we were very fortunate didn't wreck us we were going downhill we just kind of coasted to a stop and then we came back strong with cotter pins and a lot of welding if you're gonna tow with a bus you do need to be aware that it does change the way that you drive you have to be very aware of what's happening behind you i will be adding a rear view camera i didn't put that in my original design i didn't think much of it at the time but the ability to be able to look back here and see what's going on with your tow vehicle would be huge so i've already started to work on how i'm going to add that into our current uh our current build but all in all we've been super happy with everything and it's just awesome to see it working if you're seeing this and you're into the idea of doing a tiny space and you want to talk it through with somebody you can reach out to us on our instagram is probably the most ideal way but if you're a tic toc user and you want to dm us that way please feel free whenever i was getting ready to do the build and when we were discussing doing the build i don't feel like i reached out to enough of the community to fully understand what i was getting into after we realized that the community was so generous and sharing we you know we use that resource and we can you know kind of come together and just help one another we are that miller life on instagram youtube and we just started a tick tock so i have my personal instagram page as well michael and miller and i book photography and videography through that we're so appreciative of the community that we've connected with throughout this process that's been the biggest blessing i think through this whole thing i mean it's great to have this amazing tiny home but it's i think very people yeah very special to connect with people that we otherwise wouldn't have connected with yep and if you're if you're looking at this and you're thinking man i'd love to do that or i'll do that someday just do it now even if it's just evaluating your life right now and getting rid of stuff you don't need and just get yourself nice and light and then get out there and do it thank you so much for checking out our tiny home we look forward to connecting with you and give us a hunk if you're on the road thanks for watching today's video for more information on how you could win your very own tiny home on wheels head on over to omaze.com forward slash tht

Channel: Tiny Home Tours

Views: 301,187

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

Id: Z9lXPXiTg_Q

Length: 25min 53sec (1553 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021