Musicians Build then Renovate Tiny Home Skoolie for Family - it wows!

[Music] hi my name is Shane and this is Sawyer I'm Emily and this is Juno and we are a traveling band called Arbor season and this is our self-con converted home/ tour bus and this is our second schoolie that's for our [Music] nannies currently we're parked in Gold Canyon Arizona which is some BLM land where a lot of buses and people can park for [Music] free we've been living in our bus now for 3 and 1 half years it's a 1991 Bluebird and it's 40 ft long we travel full-time because we're musicians and we play house concerts pretty much fulltime all over North America and Canada and our band name is Arbor season we are an indie folk Duo on we go down the end this road how can we know what we also have a Chase car that we take with us to our shows so that we can be parked in one spot and not have to take our buses to every single show saves a lot of money on gas that way starting on the outside of the bus we have a few cool features that we're excited to show you my favorite feature I would think is our drop- down table and so this is where we can do like outdoor meals and sometimes I sit at my laptop out here and book our shows cut wood cut wood oh my gosh we've done that on this table more than anything else I think so on the back we have like a three foot deck that we added on a couple years back because we had a generator that we used all the time before we had a really good solar setup and we wanted a place to mount it so we weren't having to like move it in and out cuz it was like it was really really big but now it has so many other purposes like it makes it way easier to get into our back storage and take things out and I mean sometimes we just sit on it our kids like to run back and forth I don't know why they're so fascinated by it but they love it so this is my favorite part of the bus it's our roof deck that we access by climbing up this little ladder that's over here and also on our roof we got 1,680 WS of solar uh that power our 1,000 amp hour battery Bank in our bus that's pretty much it for the outside so let's go inside and check it [Music] out well Welcome to our home everybody hello so we really wanted to go with a cozy cabin Vibe little bit Bohemian a little bit retro we really had no idea what we were doing and so we had very limited building experience so this turned out the way that it did because we didn't know what else to do like this wood right here we got at Home Depot it's like $2.30 or something for an 8ft board and so when I found out how cheap and easy it is to work with I used it everywhere so you're going to see that all the way through this whole entire build I'd say 90% of the building is from that that was like what inspired the Third rebuild because we didn't even know about this wood until then and then we were like oh my gosh we could just redo everything in here without breaking the bank and do it the way we really have always wanted it to be yep so I would say there's probably approximately 200 sare ft of living space yeah the first build was like really really rough and ready like and we of three cuz this is the third one we were like really trying to get back on the road and we had a deadline and so it was like once it was livable and not a dangerous place to be we were like okay hey we're moving in but it was it was ugly it was ugly so bad it was like not functional not functional but so then what and then we kind of like upgraded it and added things as we went but it was still just kind of ugly and then it was way cuter though like the second round was so much cuter that was when we realized though that we could like really do it the way we wanted to yeah and then we went to schooly paloa not this year but last year and we saw so many buses that were amazing and then uh we were debating on getting a third bus and like starting all new with all this new stuff and but we didn't want to have to redo a lot of what was in the walls again and like taking out seats it just made more redoing Plumbing but I think it made a lot more sense just to rip out what we did and then do it again which has its own challenges but that's what we did we also we had just got a new engine and so we were like we just put $110,000 into this if we don't want to like get another bus and then potentially have to like do a bunch of other bus repairs it was just it was crazy all right so we're going to start from the very front of the bus and it's so simple but the just this being here and this wall being here over here just kind of separates it like okay here's the front here's our living space uh over here we got like a key holder some basket apparently right now just rocks from our kids hikes and stuff but I love our dashboard and our plants it just brings life it's like the first thing you see when you walk in is just plants and I I think it's just really cozy and then on our steering wheel we have this work desk that Jessica from the paint of Buffalo made for us and you can get that on her website so I do my Bible reading up here sometimes I book our shows up here I answer emails cuz this little thing right here holds the laptop in place which is super cool this is the dogghouse where our engine is so we can change our oil and do all that kind of stuff from the inside of our bus and then just putting wood all over the floors we're going to stain all this wood in this bus we just haven't gotten there yet I also think it's really cool that we put our uh coat hangers over here so we can hang our coats up when we come in from like winter win weather or rainy weather we just hang our coats up there so moving a little further back this is our living space and this is Moses one of our kitty cats just lounging um this used to be the only couch that we had and this is where we keep our water tank we used to have 48 gallons of fresh water but we upgraded to 100 gallons which is why our couch is so big cuz it's a really big water tank and it's on top of the wheel well but we knew that like when we had just one couch it was really hard to hang out with people cuz you're all just sitting next to each other and it's kind of awkward you're like hey how's life oh it's really great how about yours you know that was one of the first things we wanted to do when we remodeled was build another couch so this one over here is mostly storage underneath we have like these little cabinets down here where we put our shoes uh most of them go under there like the ones that we wear the most often so that we have like a quick and easy place to store them when we come inside we're actually getting ready to move our litter box under this couch so that it like opens out on that side so that the cat litter stays outside of the living room because that drives me totally crazy so this is one of our air conditioner units we went with the window unit because it was really cost- effective and this one is made by a mini split company so it's also very energy efficient which is really sweet so we have one up here and we'll show you the other one that's in the back and we also have a diesel heater up front here so we have to split things up because it's a really big bus so we have like two heaters two air conditioners to try and like temperature control the whole Space whenever we need to and now just like magic we're in the kitchen so we have a really small sink that pushes us to do our dishes all the time we cannot leave dirty dishes except I did today we were busy okay so we got like our drying mat and then we have like a drying rack here so we wash them in there and then put them on the drying rack we've got like our little stove oven combo and I literally use this every day like I cook three meals a day on this this is from Rec Pro and we did this was another upgrade that we recently got and it's been amazing we had a really janky stove before it was fine but this is just a major Improvement like I mean come on so cool so all of our dishes are like up here so we've got some glasses and bowls and plates and I have like measuring utensils spices I keep my knives up here very safely secured and then we have like our coffee corner and we usually hang up our coffee cups here but they're all dirty we've got this it's like a fullsize fridge Magic Chef it's it runs on like 1.5 amps which is crazy it's very very energy efficient pots and pans are down there we've got silverware in here and like hot pads and Ziploc bags and underneath the countertop here all in this area is where all of our batteries are so 1,000 amp hour hours of battleborne lithium batteries just under the countertop right there so the last part of the kitchen is my pantry I I love this I wish I could show you where we used to store all of our food it was like total chaos it's got to be one of our old tours but it's so much more organized even if it doesn't look like it I promise this is way better thatan since we're Christians we just believe in like just a higher purpose in everything that we do but like I want the songs we play and the energy that we give off when we play our shows to be just lifegiving for other people like we want you to come to our show come to our bus come whatever and we want you to leave inspired and just like feel better than you did when you show up yeah yeah well I can but as tight you so the thing I love about being a traveling musician is just seeing see see the world and living on the road there's something about it that's just so freeing and so so wonderful but we used to play 4-Hour cover gigs in Florida all the time and it was exhausting every day like Christmas Thanksgiving you name it always always gigging when we were having our first son um we didn't like the idea of being gone from him for like 4 hours a day five six hours eight hours a day which is like Norm normal people do that I know but we'd never had to do anything like that before we were like no but then we found out about house concerts and those it's 1 hour original music telling stories to a listening audience my favorite part is like the people that you meet you get to really make these like very personal connections with them like if you're just playing at bars and restaurants and things there's not as much of that opportunity to meet so many people we have so many stories that we're excited to share with you all especially the one about how we even ended up here playing at this house because we do house concerts we're like going to people's homes and we like share meals together we camp out in their driveway we use their showers and stuff like that and you really just get to connect and build these like very strong relationships and you go back and see them every year and they get to like watch your kids grow and it's so special like that's my favorite part about [Music] it all right so here in the middle of the best we have a lot going on so one of my favorite features is this door that closes and it locks everything out just like that and that door keeps the cats from bothering us at night so they stay up here if there's people hanging out we're having game night it's it blocks off this whole area which is back here where our kids sleep uh this is my desk this is probably my favorite part of the whole entire build uh I say that a lot I I like everything apparently okay so this is where I answer my emails most of the time I know I can do do that at the front but this is really my favorite place I like to drink coffee in the morning and I can open up these windows and just look outside at what's going on and then uh I have my guitar holder here because usually our guitar is hanging up here and if inspiration strikes at any moment we can just rip it up play songs and be like wow that was a great idea and then we record it and then they turn into real songs so normally there's a guitar hanging up here I would say 90% of our songs have been written right here or on that couch or on our bed which we'll get to in a second and this right here behind this uh the door is where our solar compartment is so this is where all of our like mppt controllers our inverters our water pump our um tankless water heater and this is our washroom or bathroom if you're American right in here we also went with the whole woodsy kind of vibe I mean it's on the ceilings it's on the walls it's everywhere so we went with a Nature's head composting toilet the basic one that everybody uses uh it's been super easy super great 3 and 1/2 years we've been using it some storage in here where we keep our extra toilet paper and things like that so a lot of people when they get to this part of the bus they say well where's your shower we do have a shower it's just in the back so we'll get there in a second so this is kind of our bedroom starting with the ful length mirror um I can like open this door and it like connects here and then I can check out my outfit from over here when you move back this way we've got our bed a lot of times people ask us they're like where do you guys sleep and this pulls out into like a queen-sized bed this is a memory foam futon mattress which I didn't even know existed but it's really cool because it doesn't even have like a crease or a line in it or anything I mean it pulls out and it's just a normal flat mattress and then it folds up really easily into kind of like a day bed which is used much more by our cats than it is even by us oh sorry I woke you up from your nap this is Rebecca by the way this is Moses's sister and yes our 5-year-old named our cats there's so much storage under our bed this is like kind of random odds and ends like on this side we have Shane sweaters I like resell clothing online and stuff so I keep that there everything just goes under our bed inside these cabinets this Nook is kind of like our closet I guess you could say so we have some things these baskets I hang out my sweaters and hats and things over here I don't know what the state is in here so we're about to find out together this is not very bad so we have our clothes split up this is like all of my jewelry I just keep in this thing my belts and accessories so just like that and then we have extra shoes like winter boots and things that are really bulky we just keep in this shoe cabinet here lots of storage and eventually if our family like grows and and expands this will also be a great place to like take a lot of this stuff off of the walls and like at night time we could put like a bassinet over here so I'm always thinking ahead when we did this build I was like we should be prepared like you just never know I love to be prepared it's so much fun I would say from here back is where our bus has changed the most dramatically because this used to be our bunk beds so the top bunk was Sawyer's bed where he slept and the bottom bunk was where our nannies used to sleep and then Juno slept in our bed with us cuz we had like a huge king-size bed so yeah this is transformed very dramatically one of the weirdest decisions that we made in our build and we did this in the very beginning was having our shower separate from our bathroom and my original thought and purpose of that was just that I don't like the idea of like the bathroom being totally consumed by one activity and then you can't do something else in there activity is probably not the right word but like if someone's showering no one can go to the bathroom especially with kids because when they got to go they got to go so like if someone's in the shower it's just way easier to be like it's totally separate it's its own thing and we have a bathtub that's made from just a $30 galvanized steel tub from tractor supply company and we like made it so that it would drain out in the bottom and surrounded it with like sort of a shelf I guess you could say so we do use it a lot our kids take bats in there all the time all right we are now in the back of our bus and this was probably one of the biggest differences of all because back here starting from here all the way to the back of the bus was our KingSize bed that we decided to rip out because we wanted our kids to have a lot more room so we built their own bedroom back here which is really cool and then all their clothes under here we got books Sawyer does his homeschooling over here if we're not at a coffee shop or outside or something like that we keep his crafts up here and then we got some more clothes and storage up here and and back here again you can see the wood I use it to frame out everything I mean this wood is awesome so back here this is Sawyer's bed right here it's all space themed because he loves space and we got Juno down here who's all about weather and like rainbows and clouds so we made her bunk specifically for that and this is our last diesel heater that we put in the back we wanted our kids to be super warm but also nice and cold and cool when they need to be so we have the air conditioner back here for them and diesel heater and back here is super fun because it is our garage I've always wanted a garage this is one of the top three reasons we actually remounted the whole bus so I wanted to be able to store a bunch of stuff in here without having to climb underneath our bed and grab some stuff which is what it used to be we got hooks all over we got shelves over here um that hold a lot of our stuff and then I even keep my guitar in here our ebike is in here we wanted our kids to feel like they had their own space for two reasons in the back of the bus once uh one we felt it was way more safe so if anything was to happen we would be in the middle like if they woke up in the middle of the night the only place they could go is through our bed so we were able to kind of monitor them with us having our big bed in the back it just took up all that space we only used it when we slept that kind of felt like a huge waste of space and so we knew that if we wanted to hang out with our friends in there or the kids just wanted to come hang out with their friends inside of our bus you know having their own space which is theirs we wanted them to feel like this is their bus too I saw one of the questions we get a lot is like how do your kids like it on the road we were on the road for about 3 to 4 years before our kids were even born so they were born in this lifestyle so this is all they know this is all we know uh even as a married couple we've never lived in a house together we've always lived on the road we've only had kids on the road but we think it's super beneficial because we get out we do things we explore and we know as they get older they may want to join sports teams and different things like that which is why we did buy property in Arkansas so that we're going to be there at least 6 months a year while we're touring 6 months a year yeah this lifestyle for us makes more sense too cuz this is how we make a living I mean this is our job we've been on the road for 8 years full-time so we lived in an RV for 4 years and then a converted School Bus for 4 we were living in the RV and we had been in California and had like all these repairs that needed to be made on the RV we got stuck at my sister's house during covid and we're sitting there and we're like we still have to spend like several thousand more dollars to get this RV like back on the road so do we want to take money to do that or do we want to invest it in something else and we were talking about like getting another RV and then Shane was talking about the schoolie thing he was like I just think they're so cool and we'd like low-key argued about it for a couple years cuz I was like we've never used a hammer before like we could never build a schoolie how would we do that how would we do the electric the pluming all of that stuff and he was like I could figure it out and we were stuck in one place we had nothing else to do and we were just like man if there was ever going to be a time to do this crazy dream like it would be right now so we just we just decided to wing it just go for we W it we W it yeah the first build we talked about it it was roughly around like $20,000 and then from there like there was so many improvements and changes made we also have some sponsorships that provided a lot of stuff so like we could include how much those components would normally cost but we didn't pay for them but I would say if you had $40,000 you can do exactly what we did and even better without Partnerships I think you could get all that definitely which is crazy cuz when you think about the kind of an RV that you would get for $440,000 it would have like a 100,000 miles on it like the components wouldn't be very good it would probably be kind of rickety cuz we had a $40,000 RV and this was like eight years ago so imagine how much more it would cost now like crazy no solar no off- grid capabilities we actually just put out a YouTube video explaining why we love living in a converted School Bus more than an RV um and that's one of them yeah like the insulation in an RV is not as good as the bus because you can insulate the bus as much as you want um and so if you know you do the right thing then it's going to be good for all temperatures which is why we built the bus the way we did all of our plumbing is on the inside because we wanted to be in freezing temperatures often we wanted to be in hot temperatures often and we don't we want to have the flexibility to just like go wherever in any season and not be stuck being like Oh we can't go up there cuz it's cold right now cuz we have a lot of friends like that where they're like our pipes are going to freeze and we're like we've had our gray tank freeze but our pipes have never Frozen and we were in Flag Staff for winter and it was like 10° for several days and we didn't have any issues with that so this is our Nanny bus we've had it for about 6 months and it was already a partial conversion so we rebuilt upon what they did so we ripped out things and redid it but we did it specifically for our nannies who travel with us so our nannies don't have to live in our bus anymore they get to have their own bus so this bus is a 98 uh GMC Thomas bus and I would say it's probably about 20 ft so on the roof we have, 1400 WS of solar and a 600 amp hour battery bank so we're going to go show you and take a look on the [Music] inside hey everybody Welcome to The Nanny bus uh this is Amy our current Nanny and so we try to have a nanny for at least 7 to8 months at a time uh but we've had nine nannies throughout the course of 5 years so a lot of people think it's really bougie to have a nanny like why would you have a nanny what is can't you watch your own kids we get comments like that a lot on our YouTube channel since we play about one to an hour and a half shows all the time all over the country we don't want random people watching our kids that we don't know that we don't trust and so we want some kind of consistency in their life especially in this lifestyle hi I'm Amy I've been traveling with Sheen and Emily for about 5 months now of just this year I really enjoy having my own space I don't have to wake up as early as the kids I can take my time I met them a couple years ago Emily's from my hometown so I've always known her family for a good while when Emily asked me I was kind of curious about it and I've always loved traveling but I never wanted to go by myself so this was a good way to see a lot of things but still get to spend time with other [Music] people the cost if I had to again this is just another guess because of Partnerships and stuff like that like if somebody were to buy all of the stuff that we have in there and didn't have the Partnerships say $115,000 would do that bus now we're going to throw another 10 for the solar 10 to 15 for the solar and that's what you get yeah 25 to 30 yep yeah I would say so that's probably that's pretty a good estimate but the building part itself is the cheapest part like it's really and a bus build it's the solar that's the most pricey it's always the components it's not the structures but it's worth it yeah I mean you want the best because you'll figure out really quickly that you don't want you don't want to like save money on like your batteries cuz we did that and we had like two AGM batteries or lead acid or whatever when we first built the bus and they like melted and caught on fire and that was like a whole thing so we perform a lot at a theme park in Branson Missouri called Silver Dollar City and since we're there so much of the year now it just felt like this is the place to buy we love the Ozarks it's so pretty you got mountains and trees and lakes and all that kind of stuff and it's like if we were ever to decide that we wanted to settle down somewhere that would be the place cuz we have a steady job there that's like the best job we've ever had so then to already have something in place that's there that's our own that at any point we can be like we just need to go take a break from traveling or we just want to take a break in general like it's right there it's so pretty it's so pretty and it's so inexpensive like just get way more bang for your buck in Arkansas so and so we're going to put like little camping spots around and hopefully Airbnb rent a host events um yeah we wanted to be really flexible so that we can like travel as much as we want but have a place to go back to also we have so many other friends we meet up with throughout the year that have kids so like they're like the most social kids that I know someone was telling me last night that their parents were sending them these articles about like you know these are some of the issues that RV kids have like they can get bullied or not be very social but I'm like that has so much more to do I think with how the parents are actually raising the kids than the environment that they're surrounded by as far as like their living space but I love traveling the way we do because our kids get to see so many different cultures and different like uh climates even and like how people live in different situations like okay this is how people live in the city this is how people live in small towns this is how people live in the desert in their rigs this is how you know so they see a lot of different they see [Music] everything thank you for watching our video and for stopping by tiny house Expedition I'm Alexis and I'm Christian don't forget to like comment and subscribe and for more tiny home tours and stories click the videos below and join us on Instagram for bonus content including face to-face conversations with us we hope to see you there all right thanks guys have a good one

Channel: Tiny House Expedition

Views: 57,582

Keywords: tiny home, tiny house, bus conversion, skoolie, tiny house tour, tiny home tour, diy skoolie, bus to tiny house conversion, arbour season, tiny house expedition, tiny homes, tiny house giant journey, living big in a tiny house, tiny home tours, skoolie conversion, skoolie bus life, tiny house big living, $40k tiny house, solar powered tiny home, off grid skoolie, tiny home reno, musician van life, tiny home build, tiny home family of 4, tiny living, christian music

Id: nTRZUd_ax_4

Length: 27min 5sec (1625 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 23 2024