Family of 5 Left Canada to Live in a Bus Conversion in the USA

[Music] hi we're Taran and Jon o Talis and we have three girls 975 and we're homeschooling them on the road in a schoolie for us we've always had a motor home dream so we we wanted to travel North America in a motor home and we first looked at motor homes we started shopping around and most of them were not in our budget and not our style and they didn't accommodate three kids very well we'd have to renovate them so we started it was an Instagram which they was listening to me that algorithm and it started showing me schoolie accounts and that's where I started to fall in love with the idea of customizing a school bus bought the bus for 10,000 Canadian M built fully built out we were into it for about 3540 th000 Canadian uh we did all the work ourselves I did hire out the spray foam cuz just it just made more financial sense to do that this bus is a 2003 Bluebird uh it's a flatnose 35 ft long we have 100 gallons of water 60 gallons of fuel our bus did it's so it's a front engine and front engines typically don't have a lot of storage built underneath so I had to build our own solar lighting at night it just kind of like does the perimeter of the bus I do also have I call it like desert security lights uh I can pop those on from inside and it just like lights up the whole perimeter for a few hundred feet in here I have the bus battery down here is my generator cabinet here's the heat pump for our mini split I chose to mount it underneath just cuz I I just liked it visually a little bit better um I did cage it uh these mountains are in Canmore this the three sisters we have three girls so we had a friend his name is Daniel wagler he hand painted this on both sides of our bus and we just love it it's it's our favorite and he kind of made it so there's the the Bow River which is a main river where we're from I also have Shade Sails which we often have on the south facing side of our bus it just kind of Shades Shades all the bus Windows CU it can get pretty hot in here if we don't have that when it when the sun's out up top we've got a rooftop deck it's 8 by8 we access it through the the hatch that you can kind of see open up there I think um you can only access Our Deck from inside um underneath the deck I got a few security cameras going on just for when we're not around the bus or even when we are um it can pick up if someone's around our bus and just notify me and then on this side I've got my my largest solar panel um it's from my rear system of our solar and it's on gas strut so we're able to tilt it in the winter when it's a bit harder to get direct sunlight so that's what's going on over here here's the storage that we built uh it's it was a labor of love it was one of the first like metal jobs that I had to do on the bus and and uh I did in a way where these can open up and these actually hook on these cables they're they're adjustable so we can kind of level this out but it's it's great we cook out here I use it as a work table so this is the entry to our home we call it our mud room we have an area for the kids to put their shoes right when you get in and then here it looks like an art piece but it is actually for the girls coats so when they come in they have a place to hang their coats right away so we have that we have a little decor here this was actually a headboard of a 1930s bed that we actually repurposed to just give nice wood features up here and then up here is our baskets all the girls homeschool supplies are in this basket so this is the driver's area jonno is the one that drives the bus I have attempted one time to drive it um I probably should learn house so in case something happens to him we would be okay but he's the driver so this is our living room and we built this in a way that we could have it for like like a multi-purpose room we can do multiple things here and then we also have our tables behind so what how that works I move the pillows and I flip this over and the legs this way come out of the arms and this is what usually when we're doing homeschool in the morning like the girls will have breakfast and they'll come sit here have their breakfast and then as soon as they're done their breakfast we grab out their homeschool supplies and this is where I do their school before the day begins once we're done their book workk then we Adventure the rest of the day we also can pull up the couch here and here's a bunch of storage we've got all the girls craft supplies they've got knitting the other way we use this room is for piano lessons it's really neat how this folds up you turn it off and it folds in half and then we put it under our couch here the other thing we can do I can flip over the other side and we can have our whole family dying around the table and there we go so we can see 8 to 10 people around here the girls saved all their rocks and seashells and they were able to play a part in making this table they put them all into the table and now it's a nice little Conversation Piece when we're sitting around the table as a [Music] family for us got married young realized quick um that we wanted more options in our life governance of our time we want to be present in our kids' lives and parent and whether it's parenting or their education and this bus life like living in a schoolie has kind of come in and encapsulated that quite a bit at least at the stage of life we're in right now how we fund our life is we we've actually built up a company that uh utilizes a handful of different e-commerce and web-based platforms um it allows us to maintain that grow it from wherever we are as long as we have access to the internet our Mantra is we do hard things and we like to show that to them I think I think they get to see that in real time way we're getting to educate our girls and go to all the places where we not about it in a textbook that we actually go and take them there and experience the culture experience people and Community um yeah our girls are thriving in their relationships with each other they're learning how to have great sister bonds and that's what we're schoolie life has provided us and it and it's also just like a little crazy like we like to be The Crazy Ones in our family as we meet Americans on the road they don't always know about our Canadian money so we put a little Tony here that's $2 and sorry for the bubbles it's not perfect but that's that part of our money and then we have a looney which is a dollar um on the other side of the [Music] table and then we come into this space our kitchen area and over here is our pellet stove and this has been so great and so efficient for heating our bus it can go about 8 to 10 hours if we run it all night we don't have to constantly feed it and you can set the temperature and it can go off on it own so that's been great in our kitchen here my favorite feature is this vintage stove I love the color we found it on Facebook Marketplace for $100 and I think it was pulled out of like a 1960s camper so pretty cool I mean the con of it is it's a bit small for an oven but we're making it work it's working great we also in here had to do these skylights so instead of raising our bus my husband 62 he needed to be able to stand and so he did this as a solution instead of raising the roof he put these highlights in here this is how it can light up the space or we can have we have things to cool the space here as well cuz it can get hot but yeah he stands in the kitchen and does all the cooking he's the chef in our home so he's able to stand in here with these pop-up skylights you are also building a mobile dwelling and in need of off-grid electrical components like solar panels lithium batteries or inverters I've been researching this for more than 5 years now and the absolute best prices for now are at signatur solar.com they even sell solar panels in pallets of 10 for only 27 cents a watt and I've never seen anything that affordable ever on the market before now if you check out use my code Juicebox and you'll get an additional $50 off back to the show we have these Swinging Doors this is like my favorite thing they swing and they also can be used we latch them here it holds our fridge shut while we're driving we've never had an issue with food falling out while we're driving and at same here this is how we latch all the drawers so nothing there comes out again while we're moving the bus so in these drawers we keep all of our Cutlery you know the big cooking utensils we have a junk drawer just like everybody that's one of those all our storage containers this is like the snack cabinet so we fill all our snacks up there and these are all of our spices and then these two act kind of like Pantry for us so we keep all of all those dry Foods in here and the pots and pans are stored in there this custom Cabinet and then all our cleaning supplies are under the sink and our pull out we have a pull out garbage can and then this is our big sink so we got extra counter space but this block does come out in this cupboard we keep all of our bowls and cups and mugs and then right here this is our mini split so it runs the AC and the heat we also have a vent here for when we're cooking it turns on right here that and it gets rid of all the smells from our cooking which is a really nice thing to have from the bus so this room is our compost toilet and it's also the room that I get ready in so I keep all my skin care and I also have all my makeup stored here and I will usually sit there and use the mirror and yeah it's a multi-purpose space and it also has a door for privacy the other feature we did is we soundproofed we use soundproofing material on a lot of the walls of the bathroom and this is our shower room our shower head it's adjustable so when the girls are showering I can lower it so we use the nebia shower head as it conserves water um it uses 50% less water I believe than a typical showerhead we have 100 gallon water tank under our bed and we actually for a family of five we usually can go about 10 days with our 100 gallon of water and we each get two showers [Music] you're now standing in our bunk room which which is the kids bedroom um at the front of the bunk room we've got storage here so this side is joh and I keep all our hanging clothes we've got a hamper as well stored there and then lot of utility things also stored in the back of the closet and then here is a really nice hidden feature it pulls out Jal just built this recently and both of these things we can just latch like this when we're driving they don't come open now here is our daughter's bunks so our oldest sleeps here they each have like their own little plug-in outlet and a night light and then they keep all their stuffies and toys on the sides and then our middle daughters sleeps here in this bed and then our youngest sleeps here and then we have an awesome feature here we made a little playroom for them we felt this was really important so they could have their own space for playing at one point we were going to just make more drawers here more storage maybe put a washer dryer but last minute we said no uh we want to make something that's just for the girls so they can have ownership in this bus and so this is their special room they love it we've got another shelf for all their books so that they have on display and then they've got ladders on their bunks that's how they get in their bed and these ladders also go up to our rooftop deck so that's a way to get up here here is our roof deck it's great we actually put our camping chairs up here often so we can watch Sunset taking the stars um and yeah it's really great up here we also have extra room for some panels and our starlink is strapped up here as well we usually take that down for driving and it's pretty simple process to put that away as czy as this may look this is an unorganized Gathering that happens every year in the Arizona desert and it's usually 7 to 10 to 14 days long where we gather together and share bus stories and welcome to the back of the bus which is our bedroom it's very cozy in here we've got the Back original bus door that we can still open up and look out at all the views and then we did all this the woodwork in here at the back side of our bed our headboard is all these slats that's actually the same cedar wood that was used in the bathroom was the leftover and we were able to make that feature this actually flips up there's gas stretch so we can access under the bed and the front half of our bed Is All Storage we keep all our seasonal clothes under the bed we have a printer and then the back half of the bed is our 100-gallon water tank and then we also have some of our hopefully none falls out as I open it um but yeah all of our casual clothing is stored there and then at the end of the bed we have these little popup doors at a lot and we also have Windows that open up here as [Music] well if I can encourage you in anything if you are interested in this type of Lifestyle the main thing we have learned is that communication is everything having a plan doing the research sticking to a budget um all those things allow us to have yeah a good well-functioning family system living tiny on the road thanks for watching it's been great getting to show you our home if you want to follow along more on our journey we do have an Instagram at bust. free.if you can check us out there

Channel: Mobile Dwellings

Views: 27,478

Keywords: skoolie, school bus house, home on wheels, tiny house, skoolie family, rv family, nomadic family, school bus tiny house, bus conversion, buslife, skoolie tour, bus conversion tour

Id: DqtsV1wTmmg

Length: 14min 54sec (894 seconds)

Published: Wed May 29 2024