Off Grid Tiny House On Wheels! (School Bus Conversion Tour)

we just basically had a bed and refrigerator in here and i moved in i just started whacking it away just building it and uh a lot of fabrication to get it to what i wanted you know i just i took a long time because you know i wanted to make sure i did it right and did it to my liking what's going on guys welcome back to the channel so as you guys know we do live full time in a sprinter van we live in the smaller sprinter van the 144 and we've been looking at new vans new rvs maybe even school buses and we were on a ride just the other day and we saw this parked on the street and there was an instagram handle on the back so we contacted them for a tour and it's just too sick not to show you guys so today we're going to give you a little bit of a tour of this awesome school bus hey my name is kyle i'm 25 this is my pup soap and we live in this school bus with my girlfriend she's currently doing school work and this is a 1998 detroit international i bought it in texas from uh public school district higgins texas um and i drove it back to michigan it was a fully functional school bus at the time and i retrofitted it into a rv full-time rv the first thing i did i ripped off all the seats and i raised the roof eight inches so i completely cut the roof off and i added this paneling 16 gauge galvanized steel paneling all the rivets and everything was hand done by me the only thing that we subcontracted out was spray foam and uh the hardest part of the lift was the cone um that's all steel as well and then uh the next thing we did was we painted the bus and that took about two weeks of prepping hand sanding i did a epoxy primer and then the two-tone we ended up swapping out the tires to levinar because they were they discontinued the size there were 9rs so we went up to a bf goodrich cross control which is basically this this tire is like the largest tire on the market so it's for locking trucks so we're we attended when we started building the bus we intended for mountain use i did a year of ski instructing out in beaver creek colorado so i wanted something i could live in a parking lot during the winter without any hookups and uh being able to go through all that arthur passes and and uh snow and um so the back here we've got this is our logo or big betty i named it after my great grandma so bumming with big betty we're ski surf bums and uh right in here this is kind of a mess but this is our light garage so we've got um two 100 gallon water tanks that are right here we've got our battle-borne batteries they're all kind of smushed back in there just you know tools a lot of a lot of stuff we probably don't need gallons are hidden in here yeah so these are two tanks right here wow yeah this is a i built it myself it's just a 1 by 2 steel tubing all hand weld my grandfather who was a huge help in a lot of this he had a welder on hand and he helped me this was one of the probably the trickiest parts after i built the whole deck up here so one of the trickiest parts was kind of getting this level i wanted to make sure that it had enough space you know to get up and you're not going to bump the bus so up top we've got so we've got this is a 7 by 10 foot deck uh it's it's all steel construction and then this is cedar i just have to refinish it we you know we kind of experimented here and there with some stuff we really should have stained it but and then we have a thousand watts of solar up top just amazon buy i think they're like 120 dollars a panel and i couldn't find anything that was to my liking as far as hardware to fasten it to the bus because i i just heard all these bad stories of people losing their panels when they're driving down the freeway so i ended up using a construction of gas line so i i used gas piping and i i drilled it to the frame of the bus the hat channels of the bus and i gave it that kind of you you could walk i mean we could have made the deck out of that material it's very robust we've got a little chimney here for a wood stove that's um those guys out in idaho uh tinywoodstove.com they're uh they make an awesome product a dwarf stove we've got the 4k um cranks out some crazy heat i just kind of hand fabricated this just out of uh stainless steel piping just kind of bent it all up it's actually from like uh hydraulic piping for like big rigs and stuff so that's kind of our surfboard rack just a little lock system here and then we've got actually high volt um up here just in case you wanted to like chill up here you know bring your laptop you know have a cup of coffee so these are all these these lights are from costco just kind of threw them up here it's makes a nice ambiance and then we could i could show you down below yeah so i'll just i'll get halfway and then i'll pass it maybe our 30 amp inlet there that's for if we want to charge up the batteries we haven't used it i want to say we use it you know a few times in michigan when you know it's really overcast cloudy you know for like a week on end but generally we can be off-grid full-time right now with our setup mud flaps everything was just hand cut uh hand done we've got 100 gallon gray water tank and that's just for you know our shower and our kitchen use we've got two sinks in inside and then all these windows right here um are just off ebay uh this is um double pane uh it's it's a insulated window so basically the same kind of window you would have on your house so that really helps with uh climate control on the inside um we replaced all the windows even even the driver window with these rv style windows um yeah it's a it's a 7.3 liter turbo um diesel uh allison trans super reliable you're not going to go any faster than 5560 uh you know taking it slow through the mountains for sure once we get into here we really kind of cleaned this up this was a big mess because we actually have about five inches of subflooring radiant tubing in the floor uh four inches of insulation rigid foam underneath and we just cleaned it up with this hardwood uh yeah this is a tobacco akasha hardwood floor it's it's pretty good pretty durable you know weather resistant tropical wood and then this is all cedar from i've got some friends in michigan that are finished and they remodel you know saunas so this is all old sauna wood i want to say like it was like from a sauna from like 30 years ago so we hand planed every piece down took me probably 10 hours to do honestly and then um so we've got the kitchen right here um we've got my full size refrigerator this is just samsung from home depot you know like it's a 400 refrigerator we got in and out shakes in there chilling in there so i kind of you know i built the bus um so that's an actual fridge this is a fridge this is a 120 no this is a full this is a full fridge bro yeah that's awesome i mean we love our smoothies we love you know we wanted to have like frozen fruit that was kind of it was not so much about the fridge it was about you know having all that fresh fruit we used uh these safety child lock devices to lock your fridge in place um when we're driving down the road this is our just dometic rv uh stove oven yep and three burner nine btu uh so we've got these two that was one of the very hardest things i have to save about this build was we've got this hundred pound propane tank that we put mounted fixed permanently underneath the the bottom of the bus and uh we ran this gas line iron gas line that goes underneath the bus um and then there one shoots up right here one shoots up right here we've got two valves so we've got actually uh you know hot water heater this is kind of messy but we've got a hot water heater that was like a temporary situation because once we get our radiant fluorine all set up our hot water is actually going to come from diesel um and uh all yeah all the construction of our uh kitchen is ply um everything was just a hand just built i got these accuride drawer slides for everything uh they're they're used in like fire trucks and ambulances and stuff like that so they're rated like for 150 pounds and you got it's just it's kind of gets messy after you go down there tech drawer we got pots and pans over there and then we've got you know recycling bin garbage bin right there butcher block teak countertop this is the wood stove i mentioned before this is dwarf these guys are sweet you get like a little fan that spins normally when it's hot and uh so how hard was installing the woodstove uh it wasn't too bad you know there's there's a few things you really do want to pay attention to all your guidelines because you i've just seen some nasty installs and it can be super dangerous you know so that was our key element was safety right like we wanted to be safe in this space um took all the precautions just make sure you got your distancing this is a a heat guard um or some would say uh you know just uh yeah a heat guard i guess and um that's just you know we picked a lot of this stuff is actually reclaimed like i said like the the ceiling this is all pallet wood um this is from a barn and i just kind of made a design into it and you did it all to yourself yeah all myself uh you know everything like this this is all just uh this is pine that i burned it's a shoe shy band method an old japanese method same with this as a cedar door opens up and you got your your shower um it's still wet from this morning from washing off we got our wetsuit in there and composting toilet that's airhead the shower is huge dude yeah you didn't see this oh no oh what are we doing hannah come check out the shower this thing is so yeah dude yeah this is i mean you could do this on a van uh this is airhead dude these are the best toilets do not get nature's head i'm telling you i shouldn't say that no haters uh this is a knit airhead all the way this is what they use in yachts um so uh for two people it'll last a month you know for the compost side and then you're inside there's divided uh you know about two days you gotta you know just take it out and you can walk it straight into like a starbucks and empty in a restroom like no one knows and how'd you do the sink the sink was just out of uh just a slab of wood and i cut it and this is actually my girlfriend's mom's taco bowl and i just drilled a hole through and i'm like alright we're gonna make because it's all about space right concerned space we couldn't find a small enough sink that we wanted so everything is pecks in the bus um up until this point right here because we couldn't figure out a way to run the cot the lines in the wall through here for the shower so i just wanted it to be exposed not so much just for the looks so we ended up just doing copper because it's not going to freeze that's one thing you got to worry about is like lines freezing in the winter so for here we wanted to try to find a place for everything um so i've got a speaker just in-house speaker marshall and then we've got our vitamix that just kind of stays right here this is on we don't even really need to use that it just pretty much stays put when we're driving we just kind of just flick it on take it over the kitchen and put your ingredients in and boom you got a smoothie you got soup you got bread this is all closet space it's kind of messy i don't know if you want to show it this is kind of you want to show it i don't care we kind of just packed it in um and then we've got so for sophie we've got a little dog right so we've got a little feeding trough right here that we just leave full time it never has spilled once even like filling it all the way up it's just it's one of those things it's just we never have issues with and um we built this little she loves like her safe spots she's a very adventurous dog but when we have company over and stuff she likes to escape and this is where she sleeps most of the time and we've got this um couch that's we just kind of have this cover on it but all the vinyl work i did a re-vinyl reupholstered the front seat so this actually folds out into a queen pulls out i can show you underneath and it's also access storage um really love this you know we've got usb ports everywhere you know 120 so if you're sitting by the the couch and you want to charge your phone or laptop you can do that and so you said storage how do you put stuff in there so you just oh you just uh i mean it's kind of funky to do it but we gotta we gotta lift we gotta like oh yeah no no take this off i figured you'd enter that part um yeah so that pulls out and uh you know once we we've got these uh curtains and once we put those curtains up you know just put them on it's like you can step outside and you can't see inside so it's like kind of our own oasis even like being in the city it's just even with the windows we've got a pull out table we're ready to eat this is just the butcher block i got it lumber liquidators as part of the uh kitchen so i just chopped it in half it was an eight-footer is it yeah yeah black black friday deals man i'm telling you you gotta act fast so we just accuride it's rated for 600 pounds you could sit on it if you wanted to and then um this is my girl this is my side or this is my side my girlfriend's side and then we share the bottom drawer so they just pull out just show you that real quick they're deep drawers 36 inches uh back in um and again they're just they're just hefty way too hefty way too over engineered this is our bed area it's kind of funky we got tv right there my girlfriend loves her pillows so we've got like probably six or seven different pillows and then uh you know i had this window back here so we opened that want some fresh air you know but uh so i wanted to have something i could lean against without laying on the window so i just um i made this kind of like copper like you know uh bed backing and uh so we've got fire hydrant um a smoke alarm carbon monoxide detector a combo right by our heads just to be safe with the fire and wood stove and then all the light switches and you know all your plugs tap to go lighting reading and then we also have right here this is all barn wood just reclaimed wood from barns that were salvaged around michigan uh we've got this hook system right here so there's one here and then they go back there and we actually put up you could probably get a shot of that in a minute but we've got these uh hammocks we put up two hammocks so we actually can sleep we've slept eight people and our dog in here which is pretty gnarly eight people eight people yeah um apparently well i mean i would say like you know two adults down there two adults up here but we had like kids you know so you know kids sleep in the hammocks um what else yeah we so we did the three inch insulation spray foam closed cell and then we did the wool batting from new zealand and that's kind of just you know it doesn't ignite it's uh it wicks moisture so it's kind of like one of those must have things if you're in a small space you get condensation or you're worried about electrical fires and that kind of stuff got pantry storage up here that's you could see the spray foam probably even see the wool maybe so there's the wool right there yeah in terms of driving this thing pretty straightforward there's a lot of yeah uh yeah we got i kind of hardwired in some stuff so this is lighting for up here when we're stopping a gas station um just your you know windshield wipers a lot of this stuff doesn't really mean anything we got fans and stuff like that up here but it's basically just like a car you know you've got your reverse drive first second third and then you've got your e-brake and instead of putting it in park you put it in neutral and you just put the e-brake on um pretty straightforward just uh you know it's pretty much pedal the metal with this thing and um backup camera uh we put in a stereo system you know you got your like in a plane jump seat it folds down oh wow yeah so that folds down and then we've got we're trying to figure out spaces to put it but i just kind of shoved our backpacks in there yeah so this is uh you know your uh shotgun seat i wanted to you know be able to have someone sit up with me you know when i'm driving across country so yeah just fabricated that bad boy in how long have you guys been living in this thing i've been in this for eight months now um you know i moved in it wasn't quite done we didn't have the cupboards made we didn't have our uh bathroom and our um all of our storage and our we just basically had a bed and refrigerator in here and i moved in i just started whacking it away just building it and uh a lot of fabrication to get it to what i wanted you know i just i took a long time because you know i wanted to make sure i did it right and did it to my liking you know satisfied with what i you know accomplished now that it's all done is there anything you regret like what would you do differently uh uh yeah i would you know i had different intentions coming into building this like i wanted just something like a home i just wanted a space i could live in and take up to the mountains and ski and truck now i really do want to just travel and kind of get more involved with recreating this you know get more involved with uh doing conversions or maybe you know house projects so i think i would downsize to a van or even like a micro van sprinter micro van japanese van um just too much home for me like you know this is perfect for you know a family or a couple that you know are just starting a family yeah just too much space for me i just i want to downsize yeah and so if you don't mind us asking what do you think you have into this that's a tough one ah if someone wanted to build up a school bus themselves well this is just such a different i just with everything that we've got invested in this not including labor obviously um is priceless 60 grand that's pretty reasonable 60. yeah i wouldn't say like most people go into building these buses out thinking they're just going to spend 20 30. and how many hours do you think you have oh gosh uh 500 plus that's insane yeah if people want to follow your guys's adventures along where can they find you guys um you can find us at either kyle extreme or bummy with big betty all right we'll put all that stuff right here and in the description see you thanks so much for showing us your band yeah man

Channel: Mo and Hannah

Views: 338,555

Rating: 4.9233398 out of 5

Keywords: tiny home, school bus, conversion, skoolie, van life, travel, tiny house, school bus conversion, diy, digital nomad

Id: ONmLUMVKUcQ

Length: 22min 2sec (1322 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 07 2021