Raised Roof School Bus Built Like A Residential Home - Full Detailed Tour

[Music] good morning good morning good morning yeah we are jim and debbie gad barry and we've been that for 48 years yes and we decided a couple years ago to downsize well we did not know how much work that was gonna be so we're going to show you our bus today and it's our privilege to be working together on this whole project building this bus and now we're ready to go travel the country and meet you wonderful people and visit a lot of friends and family so we are very excited and we are happy to introduce our bus well we have a but I'm going to show you my driving area up here and tell you what's going to happen here in the near future one thing is I'm getting a sheepskin cover for my driver's seat which I'm really excited about and we also have some storage right up here you can see it says Nana and Papa splays and up here we have storage for our cameras I had to insulate that all real good because in the wintertime it sweats because it's so warm in here and it's so cold and it's just a metal skin inside there if you don't insulate it so yeah that's that's a really great storage area I custom do this I cut it out of the metal face there's a when you look at the school bus it's just empty space up there and wasted space so I just made a cabinet to face put it on there with the door and I put a couple of magnetic catches so that way it holds on on my metal roof there it's a very handy storage area we also have another storage area that came with the bus and we use that for batteries all of our little batteries put my bass speaker because we do have a sound system with our TV and I put that under this empty area so it's worked out real well there now we love this Bluebird bus it's surprisingly quiet when we go down the road as a matter of fact we were driving yesterday and Debbie said I people say these buses are noisy and this is so quiet and it really is quiet we do have the rear engine when we're going down the road we can just talk normal conversation and never have to holler at each other or anything it's just quiet going down the road occasionally I get on a road that is really rough and I'll hear a little tire noise a little road noise but other than that I've been very very pleased with it and we have a 5-speed push-button it has an Allison transmission we have a 3.8 a diesel it's a Cummins diesel engine and then most of my my controls over here are no longer in use they're all for the school bus I looked up to a couple of things but most of them just are no longer in use we did put a radio decent and a disc player up here just in case we want to Entertainment and I left all the original speakers in and they sound really super so I'm satisfied with it for now I really love the control panel and the fact we have cruise control now I don't know about you but I have had a few tickets in my life and usually it was because I got busy thinking about something else my foot got heavy not intentional I just was speeding so the cruise control helps me a lot it keeps my speed down to where it's supposed to be this bus will travel fast so it'll go faster than the speed limit in most areas so I have to be careful with that now we're ready for 36,000 pounds and we took it in yesterday for a certified weight and it was thirty three thousand six hundred pounds so we're we still have about 2,500 so I'll try to get all that on there before we leave our Cummins diesel is a 8.3 liter engine which they say is one of the best engines so another thing that I really really like about this bus is it has a retarder now if you've never driven with a retarder it just gives you peace of mind you know when you get on a steep hill or something with a lot of weight you can really travel down that hill but the retarder is like putting on the brakes without putting on the brakes it has ten settings on this one and you just pull it down and each little click and just start slowing your bus down and I use it every time I come to a stop sign every time and I start quite a ways before I get there and give it time to slow the bus down and then I hardly have to have to use my brakes it's pretty amazing so I'm really sold on a retarder I don't know exactly what else you might be interested in but everything works the heaters work great the windshield wipers everything worked great and we chose a bus that was an activity bus the reason we chose an activity bus one of the reasons is we didn't want all the stop-and-go miles the other thing is it already had all the under storage the under bays were already there to haul band equipment and football equipment and so I didn't have to worry about trying to build those or any of that so instead what I spent my time on is trying to make the inside who look and feel like a home and we did that number one by raising the roof and I have to give credit Wes of transcend existence is his YouTube site I'd already decided to lift the roof I just didn't know how it was going to do it so I had drawn up all these elaborate plans with tuba sixes and stiff backs and I was going to cut it and then raise it with farm jacks and then I went get on his channel about the time I was cutting my roof and he used 7/8 all thread and a couple of nuts and raised it it was the most stable thing you ever saw it was so easy Thank You Wes that was really a blessing to me not to have to try to think about that because I just could adjust it within 1/16 of an inch so the transition was very easy the raising the roof was but the transition in the front again I have to give Wes credit I stole my ideas from Wes although I didn't do it exactly like he did it in the process the outcome was very similar so what I did is I bought a rear door from a junkyard of a 1995 Jeep Cherokee and that's the window that I use now I turned it upside down because I wanted it shaped this way and it's worked out really really well so the sunlight you see on me right now is because of my transition and the transition was actually very simple to do I thought it was going to be difficult it was not you can always go back and look at how I did it and it turned out to be to be just exactly what we wanted so one thing we found when we put the skylight in which we really wanted the skylight is that it would get very hot in here and it was a little too much light it would just absolutely wash out the TV so we saw somewhere somebody talking about perforated vinyl so I just ordered some perforated vinyl and we put that on the window is very easy to do you have to be careful it does tear easy but it's not a difficult process and it turned out really good and the birds like it the birds will end up there and drink water in the mornings I guess there's a little condensation so we get up close and personal views of birds in the mornings we also have a captain's chair well if you've ever watched off-grid Schooley our friend Chris built a bus and I helped a little on that so he actually gave us this captain's chair it's a Flexsteel we love it it's very very comfortable and it turns around so that we can actually use it in conversation and visiting with friends so I wanted to build something that would make it comfortable for her so if you look I built a little I built this little deal here and I just put a gate latch for when we're not traveling and when we are traveling put that down and that now she has something to put her feet on there's not a big hole right in front of her and we put this down with grade 8 bolts through the frame so it's not going to go anywhere it's it's really in place well I first put a chair in here out of a Dodge Caravan and it worked well it just wasn't real comfortable so yesterday I decided to change it out Chris had already donated seek to us so I just toward the other one out put this one in everything worked out great except I did drill through my radiant floor so I encourage you to take lots of pictures if you put a radiant floor in take lots of pictures and take pictures with your tape measure on top of it so you can see exact measurements as to where it's located because you will at some point you will need to drill into your floor and I have only hit my radiant floor three times that's true so let's move on let's see Debbie made these beautiful little curtains right here if you can see though she'll talk about those I'm sure we also had used to do a lot of remodeling so I had some cabinets around so I cut some of those up this was the oak cabinet and I made a little table for me it has a little pullout shelf for my drinks and it also has a drawer that I can keep a lot of my equipment in there camera equipment etc I made the couch it's a well I didn't make this part but this is a slat bed basically it's slight just slides out and makes a full-sized bed and this mattress is an innerspring mattress individually wrapped Springs and it's really really comfortable as a chair or as a bed and next we have this over here I had some some extra flooring so I went ahead and put that on the side just to dress it up a little bit I have two different areas to lift and you can see that we have our DVD player built in and Debbie has all of her gaming equipment because she loves to play video games and it's all under there we're gonna cut in the Wii right here so that she doesn't have to unplug it and all that it'll just be hooked up directly this is a smart TV it's a Samsung and what we do is we mirror almost everything from our telephones so we can take our telephone and simply go in and mirror it and one thing really cool about it is we get to do it a really cheap way if we mirror like YouTube are these things it doesn't count against our time it makes it a little cheaper for us to operate and we do watch a lot of YouTube so this is I would recommend a Smart TV this is just the TV who had we had in our living room in our home and we really liked it it's a great TV and I just bought a really good mounting system you can see it does move and swivel whoops there's the gaming cord so it does move but it rides really wonderful and really comfortable and we've never had any trouble with it at all we also have a weboost I don't know if you can see that yeah but you can we have a Wilson R now it's called weboost it used to be Wilson but we have that right there's our booster and then on the back of the bus I'll show you later we have an antenna to raise up our booster when we got ready for air conditioning we had looked at all these units on the roof and everything and I just wanted to do something a little different and this right here is they called a mini split it's very energy efficient it's a seer 21 I believe 21 seer is that's the efficiency rating and also it has a soft start which means it doesn't pull a lot of electricity we've been very pleased with it it's just kind of sips energy it doesn't just jerk your batteries down so we've been really pleased with it okay we are on solar we are off grid we probably will be changing our batteries when somebody offers us a good deal at some point but right now we have AGM 12 batteries there are a hundred and 30 amp hours each now if you know anything about solar that means that less than half of that is actually usable so it sounds really big when you say 130 amp hours each but when you divide everything by 1/2 it shrinks that down but you can see we have good lighting in here these are all we just have a little over a hundred watts when we have every light in the house on so you can see these are LED lights I did order these off of Amazon and we've been extremely pleased with them they're very shallow so they're easy to install and they're good I like them so the AC off-grid it's we just actually use it when the sun is shining we probably have enough energy to use it all day long but typically if the sun is shining we have plenty of electricity coming in so it doesn't kill our batteries the only time we would not use this including the heat because it is a heat pump also is if we have overcast for a few days because we will run out of energy with the current batteries that we have I wanted since Jim had his little cabinet down on that end of the bus I felt like I needed a cabinet on my end of the bus so he built me a little cabinet here the wonderful thing is that I had a whole bunch of music that I wanted to bring with me because we brought my keyboard but I hadn't figured out where I was going to put it so it all fit all the extra music fit right there in that little storage and my crossword puzzle book and my little prayer journal and all that stuff fits in there so it's just fabulous having that over here on this side is the desk area where we can work on our computers if we're needing to do something on the computer also this is Maisy's special area where she has her food and water Standard Poodles are really easy to have in a bus one thing number-one thing is they don't shed we raise Standard Poodles for 15 years so I have to say we're probably kind of partial to them there are very intelligent dogs and they're easy to train because they have a higher high desire to please so she really is no treble at all these Standard Poodles will adjust kind of whatever lifestyle you do if you're really active and you go out running every day they love to do that she's been going running with Chris a lot and she loves that Chris and kopaka stock but if she just if we just want to sit in and be kept potatoes she'll do that too so she's a she's a very versatile dog and we like her she's about two and a half years old and I couldn't bring all the pictures I wanted to bring with me so when I left the last place I worked they gave me a gift certificate and what I bought with that gift certificate was one of these digital frames so it has some old pictures we have a bunch of different little sticks and we just plug one in with different pictures every once in a while to look at the family and see they're all their pictures that were missing when we decided to build the bus which was about two years ago now I was working as an optician and Jim was not working and but he was still raising Standard Poodles we also had chickens we had goats we had an aquaponics system he said also raised his father for his chickens and his goats so we were very busy and very tied down we could never go anywhere and spend the night so when we got down to just a few dogs left I said he really wanted me to quit work and come home so I could help him get everything done on the bus and just so we could be together I said if you'll sell these last three dogs when you sell the last three dogs here the puppies well then I'll go ahead and quit work and he sold them within the week so I went ahead and gave my two weeks notice and I've been home for over a year now and he likes it better having me home to help him with whatever needs to be done and I like being here with him too so it's good and one of the hardest decisions for me in building the bus was colors and we just you just have so many decisions on building the bus and you don't realize how many decisions we must have changed our floorplan 20 times at least every day it felt like we would change our floorplan and I couldn't decide what to do for curtains so I ended up going with just a real lightweight little curtain embiez just come out because they're on these extension deals here expansion rods and we put this net on here with Velcro so we can open the window and flies won't get in so we did that and we can take this down anytime we want to and the ones up by the front we can take down whom we're driving so we can see out the windows better I don't know why we decided to keep the school bus windows I think because we had the school bus windows and we were having to hunt down so many other things we just thought hey we've already got these windows would just use them so we did change the configuration some and we didn't leave all of them in like some people did because we didn't want to deal with that much heat and cold getting in and trying to control that with the single pane windows and I guess they're single pane I think so anyway we didn't leave a lot of men but I think the decision for keeping them was just because that's what we had we have a full-size double sink and that's one thing that I really wanted for food prep and for washing dishes and everything so I am going to get one of those over the sink dish drainers I saw that recently and I think that'll work really well for us I have a little expandable dish pen that I put in one side and fill it up with hot water and soap and then I can put the dishes in the district or the sink and then use the sprayer spray over all of them and it won't take a whole lot of water so we're all about conserving water we have a hundred gallons of fresh water but if we're being docking we want it to be able to last at least a week and I think it will it usually takes me about four gallons or so to do a full sink of dishes the double sink does take up a lot of room and I think it just depends on what is important to you everybody has things that are important to them not important to other people for me I really like having that double sink the food prep area I have plenty because when I'm preparing food typically I bring my cutting board up here and you do all my veggie prep right here and then I have all this area here too so if I'm having a bigger amount of food to prepare I have places where I can set dishes sometimes I make like those seed crackers and I'll make a bunch of them at one time so I'll just line up all the different kinds of seeds right here I have plenty of room to do it never miss a beat it's great the sink storage underneath is really great it's just like you have in your house where I put my cleaning products and everything extra paper towels Rosie's dog food the part that we have in the house I have over here on this side we store all the rolls of papers like aluminum foil and parchment paper and baggies and that kind of stuff because behind that is where our inverters are for our solar system and here is where we have this on here which is a Dollar Tree hack we just to protect it from getting any water on the computer so we just took one of these baskets from Dollar Tree and cut it up so it would fit over it this tells me how our batteries are doing where we are as far as how much juice were pulling and all that kind of stuff I don't know nearly as much as I should know about it so I'm not going to try to explain it but it's really great working out perfectly I have a full-size stove it's propane I have a microwave which I have used maybe two times because I really don't use a microwave but it we bought it at restore for 10 or 20 dollars and it has the hood in it which has a light and also the fan which events outside so we use it more for that than anything else but occasionally maybe the grandkids might want to cook microwave popcorn in it or something so yeah I personally would not want a smaller stove because I still want to be a to cook a turkey in here if I want to or something else so and I like having four burners because you know I tend to cook a lot of things at one time sometimes so I like having a full-size stove in the summertime I don't use the oven much because it can get pretty hot that's something I hadn't really thought about too much but it does get warm and in the morning if it's cold in here I can just come in here and cook some bread or something and it'll warm it right up so that's a good thing I have this little bitty toaster which my daughter gave me and that's a good thing have storage on all sides that just just like in your home really basically all kinds of stuff go in there I really love the drawer storage I've never had drawers for pans or for stuff like food things but I really like it a lot it's much more convenient to me than having shelves and having to try to find the stuff behind it so one thing that we did we found out our doors don't come open because they have strong magnets on them we were driving down the road but our drawers would slide open so one thing that Jim did is he devised this little system where he put a tea nut into the wood on the back and then he put this little thumb screw on here with the washer and a little felt deal so it wouldn't mess up the face of the cabinet and you just stick this in there right now of course it can come open but you stick this in here and tighten this before we travel and that keeps them from totally secure keeps them from coming out another thing he built me was a pantry to keep my canned things peanut butter stuff like that so this is a pantry and it's really great it holds way more than it looks like it holds and we built put a little latch here for when we're traveling to keep that done when we were on the road the first time when we went to Branson our refrigerator came open and everything came spilling out of the refrigerator and we had called Camping World in several places and said do you have anything to hold the door shut and they said oh no we have stuff to keep it open for when you're you know leaving it so but we went into Walmart on the trip and we found these child child's safety latches for the refrigerator and freezer so they look like they have a button on the front that you push but actually you push the top and the bottom well I can't get that one open so there you go anyway they come open like that and then just latch so it's really easy and we just keep those on whom we're on a trip the storage up here this fridge is working very well for us the size is really good it's not nearly as big as the one I had in my house plus I had two freezers so but it is adequate I've had to learn you have trade-offs when you downsize and I had to learn to instead of buying enough stuff that go in the freezer to last for six months I try to buy like one or two weeks at a time it's definitely adequate for that I would definitely go for sure with the full-size fridge again I need that refrigerator storage I have all kinds of stuff I always have it full and that's just the way I roll so full size refrigerator full size stove will sigh sink I am so blessed to have that and I don't feel like I have a lack of counter space so that's a really good thing up here I have storage these all open up and these are things mostly that I don't use as as the things over here there's also satellites there when I originally decided we were going to be in the bus I wanted some really cute way to put my spices in here and first I was going to put them in mason jars and hang them and then I decided this was a I decided I don't want to do that for some reason so I bought these little metal tin things with the magnets on the back and I really liked them there are a couple of things I don't like about them one is that they seem to kind of rust so then it's really hard to get them open and I my plan was to put them on the side of the refrigerator they just slide down so easily however I have this little magnetic bar that I bought from Ikea and when they're on there they're really good and unstable I love that little magnetic bar from Ikea it's really great it's the same thing I used over here for my measuring cups and measuring spoons and it works great this is our remote control for our claim air mini-split air-conditioner heater our counter tops we were of course saving money on our deal so we decided just to go with plain pine I guess it is wood on here and we've whitewashed it so we put white paint on it wiped it off and being the girl that i am i wanted glitter on it because i like bling so we put a little glitter on it and then we did it with epoxy over the top of that just acquir epoxies shine so i've been pleased with it so far yeah over here in this closet is where we have our water heater it is a propane water heater and very efficient and also our water filter system in our bathroom we wanted a full sized shower that we wouldn't have to scrunch down in I don't have that trouble that Jim does and so he wanted it hi and also we wanted a lot of water so somebody told us about this is oxygen X it's an oxygen x1 and it does a great job it really is a nice shower we used a horse trough for our bathtub our base here so that if we're hooked up to water and we have lots of water we can't even take a nice hot bath in there a soap bath and we did one a little bit of color in here so we added some accent tile in here we have just a tiny little sink which we really don't need a lot of sink because mostly what we do is either wash our hands are here or brush our teeth and so we just put a bowl we had a stainless steel bowl that we just put in here and drill the hole in it and that's all set so that it's just a tiny little bathroom area Jim built the toilet for our our restroom I was really not sure how that was going to turn out because I've never been around a composting toilet didn't know how they work I was sure it was going to smell like an outhouse in here all the time and so I was very pleasantly surprised and he'll share with you how he built it and what he came up with which is really genius another thing that we have in here is this washer/dryer combination when we have lots of energy and when it's not hot outside I wash and dry in this it does both or if it's a beautiful pleasant day outside and my clothes will dry quickly I wash them and hang them out on the line outside to dry and I like that we like the smell of that so that's the washer dryer this is an LG we looked at a lot of them before we decided what we wanted and I really do love it it has very good ratings and when I have used it I been surprised at how the clothes came out you can wash more clothes than you can dry in it so if you wash a fairly large load in here then you only need to dry like half of them but it does totally meet my expectations I didn't think it would be as good it was expensive was about $1,700 that's a probably about what you'd pay for a brand new washer and dryer if you were buying a quality washer and dryer so I love it I think it it doesn't vibrate a lot it doesn't it has an anti vibration system in it so it doesn't shake everything as much as you think it might do when it's spinning but it that's where we store our dirty clothes too because you know you have to have a dirty clothes hamper or something so I just store them in there and then when we get ready to wash it I take it out it doesn't use a lot of electricity if I wash and dry in it it uses about 31 gallons of water which is a lot however if you just wash them and you do this turbo wash up here it doesn't take nearly as much water maybe 15 to 17 gallons of water so that's it's not bad has a steam cycle on it it's just a really it's a really great one I love it I'm very very happy with it up here we have storage towels medicines extra toiletries all that kind of stuff down here cleaning products instant pot which no no RV can do without I guess an instant pot they are great to have and then this is our closet gym designed or our liked for the bathroom I didn't say that he made the light artistic man that he is but this is our closet that we just have all our clothes in we have winter and summer in there right now so it's pretty full I do with the other storage that we have in the bedroom I find that that's enough the only thing that we need a little bit more space for is our shoes and so we're gonna we've been thinking about what kind of shoe rack we're going to put up front or something because or we need to get rid of some shoes one or the other Jim has very big feet so his shoes take up all the room I tell him it's not me tissues so yeah so when we shut the door to the bathroom and the door to the bedroom right here we basically have a full-size bathroom alike full size in a lot of homes and all my clothes are right here to put on so it it works really well we love the bathroom setup and the floor plan on that part that was lots of hard decisions to be made on that okay so now Jim's gonna tell you a lot more of the technical stuff because that's the stuff I don't know but I do know what color the paint is if you need to know that well when we started looking for hot water heaters I wanted one that was compatible with doing a radiant floor and so it was recommended that Takagi was recommended for me well I ordered a Takagi but we discovered after I ordered it that they have an altitude limit so I had to send it back in and get another one that would work up to 10,000 feet the first one that I got would only work to 5,000 feet so since we spend a lot of time in the mountains we had to change units but I have been so pleased with this unit it does heat all of our floors which is a wonderful thing to have and also we have a million gallon water filter which we figure probably we won't use more than that in the next 30 years so I have been very pleased it was complicated figuring out how to how to use a live system because our water travels to winter and summer travels through this pipe before it gets to our sinks so interesting I got it all figured out but it did take me a while and a whole lot of drawing it out on paper I love this system I also love the the system that I used in the back I forgot what it's called now but it has all the little places where you hook up it's just to attach all of our water lines to and I really I actually saw it on a guy's youtube channel there I saw a meta Spencer he put one in his house I believe and I really liked it so I went ahead and put one in the bus and I've been pleased with it well the driving factor for the radiant floor was to cut down on cost it's very efficient the other thing is if you've ever stayed in a motor home and it was 15 degrees outside like it was the other day when you jump off on the floor it is cold so it's really amazing because we have our thermostat right here and we can just set it if what we want and it will keep that temperature if we want the floor at 70 it will keep that floor temperature at 70 and of course heat rises so you're getting heat all around you that you don't even realize so you don't feel the heat but it absolutely changes the temperature in here and I have really really loved it another thing that I love is our sea levels so we have sea levels and I think they come from Garnett I have been very pleased with them many motorhomes use a system where it shows you when you're full two-thirds full one-third full and that's it this actually shows you gap by the gallons like right now I'm completely full so if you see that it shows a hundred percent it's showing percentage but since I have a hundred gallon tank that means I have a hundred gallons of water in my tank on the gray water it shows that I have 17 gallons so I've still got a lot of room in my gray water tank yes the gray water is also a hundred gallons and then my galley tank this is where my shower goes it shows that it's 19% full it's just great to look at these and just be able to tell exactly where you're at on your water system we have these lights again I'll mention so please with these with these LED lights and Debbie showed you the shower how it works and I'll just tell you that I like the fact that I can set the temperature on my hot water heater Debbie likes it a hundred and five I like it at a hundred and fifteen but I can set it on 115 and I can just turn the water on I don't have to add any cold water or anything it's going to be the temperature I like which is really a fine feature and it also saves water because I don't stand and wait and wait and wait for it to get the water temperature right I know when I step in the shower it's going to be the right temperature pretty nice feature I think I'm supposed to talk about the technical side so let me tell you about the composting toilet we've never really had experience with composting toilet although I've always been into alternative energy so I love having the solar panels up there I use for my composting toilet what we use is we use horse pellets and you can look right in there and see them and you can see how they're agitated right there the pellets that you put in a horse stall that helps it makes it easier to keep clean they expand when moisture hits them so we have a separator this is called a urine separator our urine goes into a couple of tanks underneath the bus but our solids go into this and you can it smells like sawdust is our all it ever sells like or the earth but the solids will just sink in that immediately which is what you want it helps them dry out quickly well we also have a little computer fan over here on this side now if you wonder what that how that agitation works I had an old refrigerator so I just tore out the ice dispenser out of the refrigerator and use those parts and pieces and devised a little system to work and so that I don't have to reach down and crank or anything like that I just flip a switch and there she goes any great and so when I'm cleaning and stuff I do have a little gate latch there that holds everything up so I don't have to hold it up while I'm while I'm changing out when the solids need to be changed on a nature's head they say when it gets hard to turn that's when it's time to change well it's kind of the same thing here you can hear that the motor is starting to drag down when when it starts getting full so this is the bedroom and we had a lot of TVs in our house we had extra TVs so we just decided to go ahead and put this TV here in the bed room just in case we ever were in here and wanted to watch something on our TV here so we did have an extensive DVD collection so all of our DVDs are right here this holes like I don't know I think 300 and some DVDs and it's completely full if we're going to watch TV we will usually get some other pillows to put behind us or we have even sometimes put a board across there and then put pillows in front of it so we don't slink back we don't watch very much TV in here actually one thing I really do love in here is that that back window right there opens up the emergency exit window and so we get a nice breeze in here at night it's you know I remember as a kid sleeping with the window open and then everybody got refrigerated air and nobody slept with their windows open but this is lovely just get such sometimes even when it's cold outside I wake up in the middle of the night and open that window because it's great and Jim left me a little bit of room over there on that side so there are some things like a fire extinguisher and some other things that we put along right there so we'd have them handy and our all of our books like I said are right there so Jim's guitar a couple of Jim's guitars are there and my keyboard we just bought a little dresser from the thrift store painted it white put a new top on it and just set it there for keeping stuff like underwear and socks and all that kind of stuff and then back on this side Jim built some shelves in here for me this one has more music our robes are here and then folded clothes here jackets and stuff like that we have one we have a printer we had about five of them when we got ready to get rid of the house so we sold gave away did all kinds of stuff with printers but we decided to keep the smallest one that had the best rating and kept this one and just grabbed it out whenever you need it because you can't you're right you never know when you're gonna need a printer and I had Jim put these little lights under here because I like them yeah we decided wanted a good mattress so the mattress that we had heard recommended was called Tufton needle it's made in the US and Dave Ramsey I think advertises it quite a lot really love it it's I would say leans to the semi hard side and has a really good guarantee on it and so it's it's been perfect for us so the technical part well a few things I did I left six inches behind the bed I like to hang my leg over my arm off so there's a six inch gap behind the bed also this is my air breather cut it down as much as I could we still have full volume of air but it was really high in a school bus so I took it down as far as I could and then I put a little bookcase over the top of it so that's actually my air intake for my big diesel motor next I have a little hidey-hole right here that little hidey-hole is to put things in that I don't use often and doesn't have a lock or anything on this very visible I just needed a spot to put stuff in that I just use occasionally all my pumping system is over here on this side we can take a look at that I have a little cover that just fits right in there covers everything up we have you can see the bag there that's a little deal that absorbs moisture we haven't had any problem with moisture but it's just in case also we have an on and off switch right there we can easily turn our pump off now our pump is a centrifugal pump I didn't like to hear the little vibrating and the noise that the regular little RV pumps do so I put a regular scientifical pump in now if you look back here I also have this is a pre-filter I have two pre filters and then right here you can see my pump and you can also see the system I have a check valve or a one-way valve on my pressure side because you can hook up a hose to this I have a one-way valve on both lines one of them comes from the pump and one of them comes from the pressure in the water hose that way I don't push pressure back into my tank and that way when it's pumping water my pump is pumping water it doesn't try to push it out the other line so those are important and like I say I have a pre-filter here before it gets to the pump and that's my system it's really simple and I did have to do one thing after the fact you have to have an air vent to your tanks I hadn't thought about that too much but I will tell you that you will have there's enough room somewhere for a little bit of air and smell to come through if you don't have an air vent so the little clear hose right here and the one that goes out right there it goes out the roof that actually is a vent you can see where it's hooked in but it's actually a vent to my gray water tank now my freshwater tank has a vent and the little door where you add your water there's a vent to the freshwater tank but there wasn't event to the grey water tank so I did add this later and it worked out great eliminated the problem completely there is a problem sometimes when you start building a bus with a rear-engine because trying to figure out where you want to put your water tanks where you want to put your bed can be a little confusing at times so what I did is there is a step up if you want to go back and see any of my videos you will see the build of how I had to come up with this idea the gray water tank sits on the floor the freshwater tank is on the first step but I did have the cast a cantilever I had to build a little can believer platform out so that I had a place to set my tank now both of my tanks I wrapped all the way around with inch and a half purple foam just for padding to make sure and I put it under them also to make sure that nothing would puncture them or have any problems like that my gray water tank would sit right here and then right behind on top of that and behind it on top of the step is where the freshwater tank is so hundred gallon freshwater hundred gallon gray water now one thing we haven't talked about is the ceiling I built the bus by myself I didn't have a helper putting everything was pretty easy pretty simple building came to putting four by eight sheets on the ceiling it just really wasn't possible for me to do that even though I built props and all that kind of stuff it wasn't really feasible so I cut all my quarter inch plywood down to 11 inch pieces and if you look at the ceiling from the other direction you'll be able to see I overlapped it about an inch and a half on everyone and I glued it everything in this bus has been glued with construction xtreme construction glue and so i know it's going to be taking a lot of shaking and bouncing going down the road so everything's glued nailed stapled whatever so I'm very pleased with the outcome of the bus we do really enjoy this this whole setup is just very very comfortable but I do have a lot of things outside some of you might like to see some of the things we did outside so now we're outside but I'll show you we do have four cameras we have one on the front two on the sides one in the back we also have a lot of storage now right now I don't have them all in there but I can handle six of the 20-pound not 20-pound whatever they are these small propane tanks I have one extra setting there but I've got three three more that go in there and I have this little thing right here that really works it automatically switches it from one tank to the other as it empties so really pleased with it three days ago I painted that on the side of the bus I think it to do both sides it took about four hours we have almost everything not everything but almost everything in these crates and it's really handy Debbie knows exactly we actually have a little chart that tells us what's in each crate in case we forget but it's really handy and you can see that's my sound system but we have a little extra stuff that I haven't stored back in a bucket yet we keep our our pellets for our composting toilet in one of these will keep dog food in one of these now this might be something some of you would be interested in we have we have 10 gallons storage and right here if you can see in between these are all put together with you know seals and right here you can see that there's a piece of PVC between the two so that they keep the same level and then to empty these it's really simple I just pull this over the edge I either hook a hose on it or I can just put it right into a five-gallon bucket and I can empty those it's really simple really clean easy thing to do I also have if you notice a sea level on the side of that tank and so that tells me exactly where my black level is at all times I have four of these those are plugin so I can just hook up electricity because again I have almost 3000 watts of solar right here you can see that I have a it's actually a 30-foot pole but this is for my antenna it's not for Flag it's for my antenna and it really really helps the weboost to get that up high like that as far as the motor like I said earlier it's at 8.3 Cummins diesel with a Allison transmission and from all the reports I hear they say that they're pretty trouble-free and that I can expect to get up to 3 million miles on this engine which is pretty amazing on the other side the picture is a little different sorry I didn't do them the same but we have our water this is to add our water of course that's just a standard RV water hookup then we have our electricity and that's just to hook up to shore power and here's one of my hundred and ten plugs again and another hundred and ten plug up there on this side this is a 50 gallon tank for we call it our galley tank but actually it's for our shower water so our shower water goes in a completely different tank it's a very easy system and I I like it a lot it does have an overflow I put an overflow through if it ever does get too full it'll run out on the ground right up here okay so this is just odds and ends but I'm glad I don't have all the deals in there because that this you can see the battery the batteries I hung them from the frame itself with bolts it's held up a half-inch off of the bottom of our storage base so all the weight is on the the frame there's 12 batteries and they weigh 130 pounds apiece so it the weight starts adding up I also have a 15 kilowatt Honda propane generator I know that's really big so you know if I'm ever out in the boondocks I could not only run my bus but I can run a couple other people's buses too and then we also this is our mini split and then you'll see our my brand-new feature right here this feature is because I pulled up on two by twelves when I went forward they kicked up and caught this and tore it up this morning isn't that amazing luckily I know how to fix it we have a absolutely fabulous leveling system it's a push one button and it levels it and it came from Bigfoot actually I don't know Bigfoot is what they're called Bigfoot Levellers so I don't know the name of the company exactly but they are really fantastic and they've been great to work with actually I had a little problem with one and they just replaced it it wasn't that it didn't work it's that something had happened and the threads stripped off they said in 30 years it's only the second time they've had this happen so they happily replaced it no problem and I have been extremely pleased with them because they have a really good customer service continued customer service when we first put our solar panels up there they looked wonderful they were kind of sticking out flat and we made a trip to Branson and we got hit by a little microburst a mini storm and it literally bowed two of my solar panels up destroyed them so when I came back I had this material up here it's the transition in a school bus that goes from the ceiling down to the wall and I had kept it all it was laying out there so when I came back I needed to figure out something so I just took that material and put it you can see there's about five or six stainless steel screws in the end of every solar panel all the way down and then I left a weep hole every 16 inches a 3 inch weep hole so I think I've got a really good system up there to hold everything in place and it also made it look better and then right down here these pipes coming out you see they're PVC that's for my hot water heater my hot water heater is so efficient that you use thin walled PVC for the exhaust that's pretty efficient I have twenty six hundred and fifty watts of solar it's been a joy and that's why we named it joy the truth is life is a joy and if yours is not then you need to talk to me let's see here you go that's the front of my bus it's still a school II a couple little things I still have to do I have to put a little wind deflector up at the very top to make sure the wind shoots up over but other than that I think she's pretty much done well thank you so much for watching this video and thanks to tiny home tours for taking the time to shoot this video with us we want you to know that we appreciate everyone and if you want to follow us I will tell you that on YouTube you could follow us at life is a joy and Debby can tell you about the rest of our social media Facebook pages life is a joy bus and Instagram is life is a joy bus and they will all be linked below the description [Music]

Channel: Tiny Home Tours

Views: 2,635,531

Keywords: tiny home, tiny house, tiny home on wheels, van life, camper van, shipping container, design, tiny houses, tiny homes, tiny house tour, school bus conversion, small house design, off the grid, tiny house on wheels, tiny house movement, tiny house life, tiny house living, diy skoolie, off the grid living, family travel, skoolie tour, living big in a tiny house

Id: -w6pwCpubH8

Length: 56min 24sec (3384 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 23 2018