School Bus Conversion Tour with Shower | @bibia_bus

[Music] so my name is stefan and this is the bb of us it's a 2000 ford e350 with a 7.3 liter diesel power stroke engine inside it's about 25 feet long with 17 feet of living space inside let me show you around let's start with what we've done to the outside here on this side of the bus i riveted a couple windows shut that way i didn't have to deal with glass behind my installed pieces inside so i have the shower and bathroom behind that window and then i have the headboard for the bed behind this window also on this side we have my little propane hatch down here i have about 12 gallons of propane hanging up underneath the bus i don't know how many pounds that is but that's gonna last me for months this vent right here is a vent for my hot water heater that lives underneath my counter and then going a little further back i have a 30 amp shore power hatch to charge my battery bank and then i have a water gravity feed inlet for an accessory diesel tank hidden under here that runs my diesel heater for the inside i'm going to take you inside my garage and we'll show you some of the specs behind what makes this bus run so starting with the batteries i bought a whole bunch of 3.2 volt cells at 100 amp hours and i strung them together in a combination of series in parallel to make one big 300 amp hour lithium battery for much cheaper than it would have cost to buy three big 100 amp hour batteries from the you know battery manufacturing brands um this is my solar charge controller my solar wires come in here through my breaker and then hit here to my master switch i can turn everything off just with a flip of that switch um down here is my inverter charger i wanted to build in some redundancy so if i'm not charging with solar i can charge with shore power uh i wanted one more layer of redundancy so i added a dc to dc battery charger that's farther in there that way when i'm running the bus i can charge my batteries from my alternator right here is my distribution panel this has my breakers and my fuses all in one place so over here on the on the fuse side this takes care of all of my 12-volt circuits and then here in the breaker panel these are my three 110 volt um outlet circuits and then the master breaker coming in from my inverter now that we've covered some of the nitty-gritty details let's go take a look inside my front door i replaced the original bus doors because one they were super heavy i had them connected together and it had destroyed a couple door handles and two being metal and glass there was no thermal regulation at all so if it was cold outside it was cold inside this solid core wood door is much lighter and it's also has much better insulation value so i lose less heat and slash coolness in the summer through the door this way these are just normal household handles you know open close little deadbolt action right there key key regulated at some point once i get a wi-fi setup in here i'll probably look to getting one of those wi-fi based home locks that you can control anywhere from your phone and you know we'll see once we're down the road and get wi-fi in here i built this front console last it was the last part of the build that i did it was real tough because there's nothing straight up here but i wanted some storage for my shoes and that lives in this cabinet i got about six pair of shoes in there and there's some open shelving here for things that you need while you're driving whether it's masks air pods wallet my water lives down there i put back the original bus fan and hooked it up to a switch here in my dash which i redid this little little control panel so that i could control my fan because there's no ac in here i have a backup camera that's also on one of these switches this switch controls my light bar that's on the front and then this one right here is my little dome light for your maps or whatever you do as a driver with your little lights as with any build like this you got to maximize every inch of storage space so i tried to use as much of these cubby areas as the bus naturally had with its basic construction so i have my baskets up here storing all sorts of stuff i built this little spot to house a sound bar at some point if i want to power my house speakers in some zone here we'll still figure that out once we get down the road and then i got a little medicine style cabinet thing up here above the driver just additional storage right there moving backwards from the driver's area is the shower i built this in and took up as little space as possible because i wanted to maximize everything else at the end of the day what am i going to do spend two minutes in here just to clean myself and then i come back out into my living space but this is a nautilus shower door made by stoi industries and it's super space saving super easy to install and came custom cut to the exact height that i needed i bought a pre-made shower pan it was the only 24 by 24 inch shower pan i could find because again i didn't want to take up more space this way or more space that way and lose room in the kitchen so in here i have a pretty basic little shower wand as my shower head and a matching little water mixer down here and then my floor towel and my shower towel hang in there with a tiny little cubby for a couple bottles of shop soap hidden back in the corner welcome to the kitchen starting up at the top we just have some basic storage these doors are on little gas struts though so you can keep it open and you know search for whatever you need without holding it up with your head and then coming down here i kept the shower interior walls wrapping all the way around through the kitchen and used that as my backsplash which i think turned out pretty nice so my faucet is a basic household faucet there's three different pieces on it there's a little you know hand controlled wand and then this one is just another same water source as that but what i wanted was this which is a filtered water but without having a separate hole in my countertop so this tap here controls my filtered water comes out of the same central location in the countertop without having to drill extra holes then of course a little cutting board that covers up my sink use that there and then a deep sink i think they call these bar sinks when they're the small shape but still deep anyway fit perfectly in my space right there the guts of the sink and how that works are way deep under here way in the back there you see the water filter and then all that braided mess there is because there are the three braided hose inlets for the faucet hot cold and the filtered water coming in right there moving on down we have my light switches here this dimmer switch controls my kitchen uh under cabinet light and then this side controls the bathroom light that we just went over below there you'll see these little black buttons in my counter edge and these are some of my favorite parts electronically in this bus this one here controls a solenoid that's on my propane tank outside that way i'm not pushing pressurized propane into the bus at all times i'm only putting propane in here when i want it so if i hit that now i have propane coming into my stove and my water heater this button here controls my water pump because equally i don't want to have pressurized water lines when i'm bouncing around down the road that way i'm just keeping my water in my tank and my lines low pressure so hit that button my water tank come on and it'll push pressure to my faucet and my shower below those is my pantry big vertical pull out with my dry food storage olive oil salt pepper couple other things i'm still filling out my pantry right now so that's why these are empty for now the one thing i would tell somebody who's thinking of building a bus is to have a very open mind and be ready to learn things that you never thought you'd ever have to learn that's honestly like a daily thing in the conversion process it's like oh now i need to do this i don't know how to do that let me learn how to do it [Music] over on this end of my kitchen i have my furion 17 inch propane powered range it's got the cooktop on top with my three burners and then the little oven feature down below that way you can bake flat stuff casseroles cookies baguettes whatever you want to make in there then this stack is just a bunch of drawers i got silverware up top i got some more silverware and spice drawers in here got my plates bowls cups some more food storage if i need it in there and then down here is a bunch of food storage as well got my cans and my extra flour and oats underneath the oven is my biggest drawer in the house and that holds all my cookware a couple pots a couple mixing bowls a big pan and my knives the wheel well is actually underneath the oven here so this drawer had to be a little bit uh skimpy so all it is is a little 10 inch deep because as soon as it gets back there it hits the wheel well underneath but holds a little bit of extra stuff in there at the end of my counter we got a couple more buttons just like on the other side this one controls my fridge lock now my fridge drawers lives right here and as you can imagine if i would brake super hard that would go flying out but instead of having to lock here on the face i wanted to have a lock hidden somewhere else so i got a powered 12 volt electric lock when you hit that button that releases a little deadbolt and then my fridge comes sliding on open [Music] put that lock back in and then this fridge isn't going to go anywhere this other button controls the solenoid that's on my grey water tank so if i wanted to drain my 20 gallon gray water tank you hit that button that solenoid will open up and then beneath those buttons is my diesel heater interface and that's just where you turn on your diesel heater turn the temp up adjust your timers and what not right there why a bus instead of a van honestly the outright cost at the beginning you know initially i wanted to do a pretty simple conversion and i didn't want to do a simple conversion in a van that cost me fifteen twenty thousand dollars to buy empty so cheap cost of the bus that's what got me into the bus instead of a van up here in the back is a full-size mattress it's a standard size which means i could swap it out if i ever needed to and this upper cabinet is where i keep all my clothes a couple different bins for different types of clothes i try to roll them real tight so it takes up less space but i can still access it pretty easily and my top lights carry through the closet so that actually puts a little bit of light on the stuff that's in there when i'm digging around in there trying to find things this vertical closet is where i keep a couple hanging items whether it's jackets or other more specific pieces and then down here is where i store my laundry and a couple other things that are just kind of shoved way back in there and this is my dinette where you would sit and eat hang out with a friend i have another little light underneath this shelf we'll get to that in a second and we'll also cover these curtains in a second too but this dinette table is on a lagoon rv table mount arm which means that i can take this table off and it's actually just the right size to fit down here so i can turn this dinette into a bench seat or another bed if i needed to sleep someone here instead of on the floor or in a tent outside underneath these chairs i have quite a bit of storage you just lift this open and you can fit all sorts of stuff in there right now i got backpacks sporting equipment some charging stuff under this one i have my camera bag camera gear but this storage area can also be accessed from this tall cabinet here for tripods camping chairs extra shoes that kind of stuff let's talk about these curtains for a minute first off they're just magneted up there so if i wanted to wash these if they got dirty over time or something i could just take them off throw them through the wash put them back together and then they'd snap right back i have these couple straps these are also held together with magnets just little purse magnet kind of things and that's that holds them up there right i can roll it out put it in and my curtain will block out a ton of light but here's the cool part there are two there's two layers to these curtains i can roll up this one layer and then i have like a visual block in front of my window but it'll still let in a lot of light if i leave just that white layer hanging there like that i have a couple other little magnet strips hanging in between so i can just snap this together and now i have nice diffused light that can come through those windows but without letting people see in my windows i forgot to mention earlier but the material i used here for the shower is called dumaball you can get it on amazon buy the box you can get the trim pieces separately as well but this is a vinyl tile alternative and it's the only one that i could find that advertises itself as fully waterproof usable in shower and bath environments so i know a lot of people out there even myself are looking at real tile and thinking like is that going to work in a moving vehicle like is that going to hold up in bouncing and jiggling and squeaking over time i think duma wall is a really great alternative it is waterproof you just put a little bead of caulk in between the two tiles when you lock them together and it should flex to the movement of your vehicle really well whereas hard stone tile that's just going to be viable to crack over time in my opinion now i haven't been using this for a super long time so far i've been really happy with it if that changes we'll let you know this bus conversion cost me roughly twenty six thousand dollars the initial investment in the bus was four grand my electrical system itself was about the same and shop costs between the start date and now are almost about four thousand dollars too so those are the three biggest categorical breakdowns and then the rest of the materials and the tools added up to the rest the last part of this build which i'm sure you guys are all wondering about is how did i do these lights now i saw one camper by no rush campers they're in the netherlands and they did lights similar to this and i was just blown away so i hit them up i said how'd you do it and they gave me a few tips and these actually turned out to be much easier than i thought and in my opinion probably easier than doing a whole bunch of puck lights now it's really just a really thin aluminum track that i screwed to my fairing strips and then i took adhesive 3m led strip lights and stuck them into the track and then it comes with these little milky white diffusers that you snap in on top of that that's how easy it is and since it's a strip light all you gotta wire is a positive and negative at one end that's why i think it's easier than puck lights each place you have a puck light you got to do a positive and negative right there positive and negative right there these ones positive negative right at the end and those come right down to my one dimmer switch right here and then i can control the light just like that we're gonna put a couple links in the bottom of this video as far as like what the pieces are for this for this material it's it's honestly as easy as you can think and you know but we'll link it down below so you can get those tracks get the leds and throw those in your van i have a couple of other ones underneath my sink works the same exact way and i have one more underneath my dinette shelf also works the same way these put out so much light it's absolutely unbelievable at night time i can't even use this because it's just so much light right now it's broad daylight and we get more light in here than we have coming through the windows it's it's absolutely fantastic this build-out took me i want i i usually say about a year i've had the bus for a year and a half but those first six months i was still a full-time student so i did some demo during that time i did some work on the problems that the bus had but it was maybe four five six hours a week at that time but for the last year it's taken me full time bus converting to finish this the last special little gold nugget that i want to share with you in this build is a way that i found to optimize my storage as best as i could a lot of people do straight back chairs in their builds but i found a way to hide a little bit more storage in another tiny space welcome to my top secret laptop and ipad storage drawer i lined this all with felt because i knew i wanted to store my laptop and ipad in here and i didn't want it to get all dusty and gross i have a usbc charging cable that comes from an outlet inside this closet so that i can plug this in turn on my inverter and my equipment will charge while it's sitting in this drawer i have this other little shelf that i meant for a keyboard and trackpad but i don't have that right now so i have a whole bunch of playing cards that live in here for the time being that is it for the tour of the bibia bus again my name is stefan thank you so much for watching if you got questions or if you're interested in following my journey or if you just want to see more details about the build you can follow me on instagram at bb underscore bus and you can follow me on youtube as well at stefan conrad and he will link the those links in the description down below thank you again for coming along i appreciate it and we'll see you out there [Music] you

Channel: A Bus Life Story

Views: 202,286

Keywords: luxury skoolie conversion tour, mini school bus conversion with shower, school bus conversion tour with shower, skoolie tour with shower, short bus with shower, short bus conversion build, tiny house, school bus conversion, bus tour, bus life, tiny home, skoolie tour, bus conversion, skoolie conversion, mini skoolie, mini school bus conversion, skoolie shower, short bus, school bus conversion tour, bus conversion build, skoolie conversion short bus

Id: iF8GfBuBmxc

Length: 19min 50sec (1190 seconds)

Published: Sat May 15 2021