HOW MUCH WE SPENT Turning a School Bus into a Tiny House: Full Cost Breakdown

welcome back to gilligan phantom in this video i'm finally going to tell you how much i spent on this bus oh my god it was a lot of money but first i need to preface this by showing you exactly where we are so that i can explain to you why this was 100 worth spending all the money that we spent let's go outside so right now we have our bus parked in big sur california overlooking a beautiful spot on the pacific ocean the reason that that is incredible is because if you wanted to have a home anywhere near here you probably need at least two million dollars two million dollars is not a sum of money that i ever expect to spend on any kind of housing anytime in my whole life it's simply not in the cards for me with this bus i get to have my primary and my secondary home right on the pacific ocean where after i'm finished telling you how much we spent on the bus i'm gonna go surf which is one of my favorite activities and when i'm done i'm gonna come take a hot shower in my house but that's not all hold on one second i'm getting a little hyped sorry okay so you might be thinking to yourself all right so what i could have a car and drive here or i could live in a van and do that too but the thing for me is i've got a family i want them to be comfortable and i want to be able to have this experience while they're also happy so check out what's happening right now while i'm making this video and when i surf we're chilling you know my family's over here watching movies overlooking this beautiful spot so basically what i'm saying is that for me every dollar and every hour i spent on this bus was a hundred percent worth it this is an experience that only some of the richest people can have a beachside home where they can go pursue their favorite activities and then come home and relax and you can do this for much cheaper you don't have to spend as much as we did at the end i'm going to tell you about how there's other ways there's cheap ways to do it all right so just a few things to know before we get started i thought i had a really great accounting method i used mint.com to track all of my expenses but part way through i accidentally deleted a credit card from that information and i wasn't able to get it back but with like 95 certainty this is what we spent on the bus each category is an estimate because of that i didn't track exactly how much it cost in each of the categories that are coming up but they're going to be very close the final number really is what we spent on the bus when people say and this is the question i probably get the most how much did it cost to build your schoolie to the standard that you did it in i think what they're asking is what's the financial impact going to be on my life i think that a lot of schooly build cost summaries sort of fall short of telling that whole picture because they just say what the material cost is what the price of the bus is but they don't talk about other things like holding costs storage tools random things that might be totally different for you and your build that are going to add up to a lot of money so i'm telling you in these numbers what the actual financial impact was on us not so much what it will be on you because your situation is going to be slightly different maybe you have all the tools maybe you have to pay for parking maybe you don't show me the money so for us we have what the bus costs the bus cost is just part of the acquisition cost of the bus you got to buy it but then you also have to drive it home you've got fuel costs you might have to do an oil change maybe you have to pay somebody to drive it for you because you don't feel great about it so for us the acquisition of the bus it was seven grand for the bus about a thousand dollars for me and andrew to fly out there from philadelphia and south carolina to la and then drive it home and then we also spent a thousand dollars in fuel to drive him about 2 600 miles so 9 000 is the total acquisition cost for gilligan phantom now you're ready to start doing demolition you're going to pull out the seats you're going to be pulling off wall panels for this all you need is tools really demolition tools blades all that stuff costs about 200. now at this point if this is as far as you get in your bus conversion and you realize that this is not something that you should continue it's like taking up all of your time you feel super unequipped to handle it financially and physically your family is unhappy this is the time when you should exit because all you've done is bought the bus and paid for the demolition tools and did some of the work the bus is basically still worth what you bought it for at this point maybe even a little bit more because you can say hey look i already did the demolition and if you don't mess anything up then the bus is good to go now is the time to sell and exit if you go on from this point you need to fully commit to finishing this whole thing because otherwise you're going to end up with a lot of sunk costs and you're not going to be able to sell the bus and get your money back the decisions that you make on your bus devalue it for other people just so you know all right so next up we have subfloor and furring strips that meant foam board insulation adhesive and then plywood screws the total cost for that was a thousand dollars from there we replaced our school bus hatches with marine hatches we spent a long time looking for the perfect least expensive hatches that we could find for the bus these can range anywhere in price from like 200 at the low end to 700 each of the high end i don't think you should spend that much money on marine hatches for us it was a splurge it was a luxury we wanted to have a skylight and roof access so we spent 700 on the marine hatches and the roof sealant and the screws and hardware we took off every single window we cleaned off the old adhesive and we spray-painted some rust-oleum and some spray paint back onto the bare middle of the bust we used the butyl tape to seal the windows back up total cost for window replacement was 200 then we bought a five gallon bucket of henry's tropical we could have done with less i think two gallons would have been enough but after the tropical the paint rollers and paint brushes which will be thrown away you cannot clean the tropical off them it's impossible we spent 350 that's a place that i think you could save some money i don't think you have to get henry's tropical if you're on a budget at that point we started installing roof racks we went with these iron ridge roof racks they cost 550 for the roof racks and all the hardware so one of the cool things is is that when we got those roof racks the solar supplier had 11 solar panels that they were just throwing away and they said hey if you want to put these in your van they're all yours so they gave me 11 solar panels for free and not something that we lucked out on but you might not end up getting solar panels for free so i'm including them in the cost and we got 2430 watts and that would cost approximately two thousand dollars if you can find used panels you can get them cheaper we put a mini split air conditioner on the back of the bus that was a great decision going with the mini split we spent about a thousand dollars in the mini split and then another 300 on the racks and hardware to install it and also to pay for an hvac technician to make the final connections and pull a vacuum and put the refrigerant in there so the one that i bought is not sold anymore so i'm going to put a link to my current favorite in the description below if you need help deciding on what mini split to buy all right i'm gonna speed this up for you guys so you don't want to spend all day hearing me talk spray foam eighteen hundred dollars rough wiring we got all the marine wires you can go cheaper with cheaper wires but i like the marine stuff outlets all the connections that was a thousand bucks covering all of the walls the ceiling the trim in birch plywood you can definitely get cheaper plywood this is another place that we spent some money birch is expensive we spent about fifteen hundred dollars covering all of everything in birch plywood from there we built all the interior walls like the well actually was just the bathroom but we also had the plywood walls to do the refrigerator cabinet the closets the pantry with the electrical cabinet in it all of that plywood costs another thousand bucks the plywood's really going to add up guys just buy a cheaper plywood so that plywood i had a problem with even though it was so expensive it still wasn't top of the line it was made in vietnam i could tell that it had a lot of formaldehyde that it was still off-gassing it really like stunk up my car and i was worried about that formaldehyde off-gassing because we're going to be in some hot locations so i bought a 500 first of all i let it bake basically in the bus for the whole month of august 2018. baking it gets rid of the majority of the formaldehyde super expensive no voc formaldehyde sealer and finish was 500 kitchen cabinets they were from ikea that was a really good choice because they were very easy to build and install kitchen cabinets and other miscellaneous items like the clock the bar and lots of other kitchen items added up to 3 500 then we went with quartz countertops these would normally cost more i'm not sure how much they would cost but we had a friend who hooked this up basically at cost with these countertops we spent 600 in them i think they were a great choice they're heavy but they're super beautiful and durable so we're happy with them tile backsplash 200 nova's bedroom which is basically just more plywood another 200 the couches what's up ah that was turning into a rascal lately for the couches we decided to go with a basic cheap easy base and then have the cushions be the couch the cushions really form the couch so that kind of made the couches a little bit more expensive we're paying for the labor for other people to do all those things the cushions the mattresses the slip covers plus the plywood bases for the two couches which are both like seven or eight feet long was fifteen hundred dollars we're very happy with these couch cushions you can still get them on amazon links are below we went with an ac apartment size refrigerator induction cooktop by summit and some other miscellaneous items we spent about a thousand dollars on appliances i think this is where we kind of save some money because some people buy three-way rv fridges those are like 700 bucks or more some people buy dc refrigerators those are expensive too thousand bucks that's what we spent okay lighting the strips up top task lighting got some really pretty light fixtures by urban electric co those are actually remarkably expensive we got them for free from a friend who worked there but if you were going to outfit your boss with similar lighting it would cost 300 your rough plumbing your finished plumbing we did the sharkbite fittings they were a little bit more expensive but i'm very happy with them we spent about a thousand bucks on plumbing i think plumbing your house for a thousand bucks that's pretty good yes dear oh we bought these 200 gallon fresh water tanks which were a pretty good price tanks and fittings together cost 600 okay next up we have the kurdish schluter shower system which we use to make our cute little shower the system the mortar the tile the shower head the mixer all that all that plumbing pretty much came out to about fifteen hundred dollars pretty happy with the price of that shower you could of course go a lot cheaper if you didn't wanna do tile composting toilet i think these retail for a thousand we got ours open box for seven hundred dollars would i spend a thousand dollars on a composting toilet if i were to do it again i don't know i think i'd probably build my own it's really not complicated what the composting to it does we're happy with it but i would save some money if i could do it again painting the floor that was cheap that was easy really happy we did that yeah it scuffs it's like impossible to really keep clean but the general visual impression is really pretty we only spent 100 on some no voc floor paint and materials and primer we kind of splurged on the blinds we wanted a specific aesthetic and we paid for it we spent between all these blinds and the blackout ones and the ones at the front of the bus and the ones in the very back of the bus we spent a thousand dollars on blinds you could definitely go cheaper there this is the most expensive item on the whole bus buy a long shot and that is our lithium battery bank we got these lion energy 105 amp hour 12 volt batteries i'm extremely happy with them they're a perfect size they're perfectly lightweight they cost 850 each when they are on sale for black friday so we bought six of them which comes out to five thousand one hundred dollars luckily for us it's tax free and no shipping i think it's tax free in a lot of states i'm coming out soon with a video about these batteries i'm gonna do an unboxing and a full review but i'm really really delighted with how they've turned out we have had power almost whenever we needed it with our solar and battery combo i think we've plugged in maybe five times in four and a half months which i think is super cool so the cool thing is i've got an affiliate relationship with lion energy now you can get them in my link right down below anytime you want for the same price as their black friday price eight hundred fifty dollars which is a hundred and fifty dollars off of the thousand dollar retail and then they even send me a commission so buying them from my link helps support this channel and i really appreciate it if that's something that you choose to do all right so there's a lot more things in my electrical cabinet there's the inverter there's the fuse blocks there's the charge controller i also outsourced some of this decision making to a bus builder named charlie kearns instagram at look at that bus he was really helpful and i do think that paying for a little bit of expert help is worth it i didn't do it a lot but when i did it it really got me unstuck and so the price of that is built into this estimate also we've got the cabling we've got the fuses for the batteries everything else in the electrical closet adds up to another four thousand five hundred dollars it's really expensive i know but it's money well spent it really is okay so from there we have miscellaneous items that we bought for the bus that you'll probably end up buying too so they're still part of the expenses for you we've got a bunch of pillows we've got blankets we've got mattresses things that are purpose that are purposefully designed specifically for this bus that all adds up to approximately a thousand dollars oh yeah fans it's a lot of stuff in there thousand bucks now we have miscellaneous materials that i just haven't thought of or haven't mentioned you're gonna have basically a bucket of like things that you didn't really ever consider so we have 500 in there i also paid for some labor i paid for jeff to help me do the ceilings that cost me another 500 bucks it was worth it because i really needed him for a day and he's a carpenter so he's kind of expensive now you're going to have stupid mistakes we made mistakes you're going to make mistakes we bought some extra wire that we never used or needed we bought some water tanks that ended up being not right at all for us too much of this material not enough but then too much of that material you're gonna make mistakes you're gonna have surplus it happens in every build it happens in construction happens all the time a thousand bucks for stupid mistakes then we got the bus ready to get on the road we did like a thorough safety inspection we did a coolant flush we did an oil change you need 16 gallons of coolant you need six gallons of oil these are all expensive things we did filters we did belts we could have done more but i said let's do the bare minimum let's see if we can get around the country with what we did and i'm really happy that we did that because so far we're doing great knock on wood getting the bus ready to go fifteen hundred dollars all right now unfortunately we bought this bus with tires with great tread but they were from 2008 and d.o.t says you can only use tires safely for 10 years when we drove the bus home in 2017 they were still safe but when we hit the road in 2020 they were now two years old and they'd been sitting in the same spot more or less for two to three years we replaced all of our tires we went with a really high-end firestone tire you can do a bit cheaper i would recommend that you buy cheaper tires get yourself some cheap tiny chinese tires get somebody to install them safely and save a bit of money we spend a bit too much but we spent three thousand six hundred dollars on tires tools we had some of the tools i don't know what tools you have we had to buy some tools total cost for purchasing tools to do a bus build for us with what we used was two thousand dollars in retrospect i could have probably done it with a little bit less at the same time having like a five thousand dollar table saw would have been amazing too so what are you gonna do tools there's more here you've got holding costs maybe you have to pay to park it maybe you have to pay for insurance to keep it legal registration all of that for us we have to keep our vehicles insured in charleston south carolina the cool thing is you get to have whatever vehicle you want on your land so that's really cool but we kept it insured for most of the time that it was parked there which means that we spent 1500 on insurance over two years that's kind of silly but it's something that we sort of had to do you're gonna have to do other things don't forget about that okay so the total amount of money just added it up out of our bank accounts and into this bus was 54 500 but that's really not it it's not the whole picture guys what about the impact on your life it's going to have and what about your time which is worth something really is it's worth something so i spent approximately probably way more than a thousand hours on this bus some of that was actually physical labor some of that was research actually if you added in the research it's probably it's probably 2 000 hours some of that was like putting around trying to figure out what i was doing a thousand hours of good hard labor went into this bus and because i'm inexperienced for the most part unlicensed uninsured i don't have a storage facility i don't have expensive tools i think that i'm worth at a maximum so that's what i'm putting here 25 dollars an hour when you add that into the cost that's twenty five thousand dollars worth of labor now we are at seventy nine thousand five hundred dollars but wait there's one more person we need to consider nate gave me some of his time to help me with the bus and even though he was 13 14 i think that his time is worth some money and if you have to pay a helper to get you some help as well let's give nate 50 hours 10 dollars an hour for nate like he was a good helper that's another 500 bucks that brings us to a grand total of eighty thousand dollars for the bus wow that's a lot of money eighty thousand bucks okay remember how i told you that i'm gonna go surf in the pacific that's what i'm going to do in a minute and it was super duper worth it and i would do it again in a heartbeat but let me tell you before i go some things that you can do cheaper if you don't have 55 grand 35 grand or even 25 grand and a bunch of time don't take on a school bus conversion don't do it because it's going to have a negative impact in your life especially if you don't finish i was for the most part financially equipped to handle this we had some issues that came up during the build and we also had some windfalls and there's some hustles that i was working on that paid off at the right time but it's not going to be everybody so if you are not in a position like i was go buy yourself a 10 to 15 year old class a rv with a nice diesel engine and a nice layout well let me see what you can get okay so look if you have a family and you need to sleep a bunch of people on your bus or like even just more than two people like us and you want this kind of a lifestyle get this 34 foot class arv for 22 grand from a dealer figure out if you like this lifestyle or not and then from there decide if building a schooly is right for you or buy a school bus build it out however you can with what you have and then upgrade it later you can definitely kind of take stepping stones into this lifestyle instead of going all in like we did i just want to tell you that because it's a lot of money not everybody has it i'm all suited up gonna go sarah all right just got back from an awesome surf man the pacific is so amazing and i'm gonna jump in a hot shower this is the life guys this is a life recording thank you guys so much for watching if you want to see more videos about living in or building mobile dwellings hit that subscribe button hit that like button and we will see you next time all right i'm out peace you

Channel: Mobile Dwellings / Gilligan Phantom

Views: 358,929

Rating: 4.8718743 out of 5

Keywords: skoolie, skoolie conversion, bus conversion, bus conversion cost, skoolie cost, tiny house cost, skoolie cost breakdown, coach conversion, coach bus, diy rv, van build cost, buslife, buslife adventure, living big in a tiny house, skoolie family, rv family, full time rv family, skoolie conversion cost, how much did our bus cost, gilligan phantom cost, gilligan phantom price, how much does it cost to build a skoolie, school bus tiny house, bus house cost, bus house, bus tiny

Id: rDblVecqorc

Length: 21min 30sec (1290 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 24 2020