Self Converted 30ft. Skoolie w/ Woodsy Retro Vibes

the schooling Community is so great about giving advice and recommendations I didn't think there'd be enough room but it's like amazing it can be a wine bar can be a coffee bar or a little bit of everything but it was fun doing the adjusting and evolving hi my name is aw this is my wife Shirley and this is our beautiful home Miss Daisy welcome to Miss Daisy this is our living room slash kitchen and we've tried to leave as much open space in here as we could we have a 30-foot bus a Thomas Freightliner and we have actually a couch that turns into a twin size bed so and we have tons of storage underneath here and we have a small refrigerator a classic it's retro but I love the color that was one of my first purchases built the kitchen around it and kind of went with that color scheme this holds a ton we have a freezer down on the bottom and there's just the two of us so we've packed for a whole week and we are good to go and we can pick up a few things here and there if we need to but I did didn't plan on doing a lot of cooking I don't have a stove or an oven just the microwave we do instapot we do air fryer of course I have to have a coffee maker plus we cook outside so we are pretty much set we don't have a generator so every everything had to be run by our solar we have 1600 watts of solar panels and um and so far so good we have a mini split that Services the whole bus and you'll see our solar panels here we have four lithium batteries battleborn batteries that have been awesome food pantry up here and batteries trash can storage everything down here we also have a microwave in here everything in here is basically repurposed we used Habitat for Humanity yard sales estate sales to find a lot of our items a lot of the old wood that we used in the bus um and I just I don't like things going away so I like to repurpose give it a new life and [Music] um and it just kind of went with our theme and how we were decorating everything I used a lot of copper with accents um to give it a homey feel we are in the kitchen we went with it's basically a 80 inch piece of pine that we went with for the countertop and these are basically stock cabinets that we purchased and kind of lined them and everything we wanted to keep as much storage down here so we I can put my instapot my air fryer and everything and the coffee maker out of the way when we're traveling but this length of cabinet or countertop has come in really handy I mean we use it for everything it can be a desk when I need it if I'm doing any work with my computer or we use the Berkey filter which is turned out really great and that we even use that at home when we're not traveling to give us a little bit more space and storage we went with a nice shelf up above and the the rail for coffee cups and little knickknacks to hang in signs and everything and plus we can also use that at night time if we want to block off this window we can put up uh something to block the the light and everything to give us a little bit more privacy so so that's worked out really well well the tiles and you'll see I have these same tiles in the entrance way coming up the steps to the bus but I fell in love with those tiles and I'm like I have to figure out a way to use those so I researched it and the schooly community is so great about giving advice and recommendations and um so I found out that if we there's a more flexible mortar mix you can use and flexible grout so that's what I've used and it's on a three and a quarter inch piece of plywood with concrete backer board and then I use them the flexible mortar and grout and it's it's been there for a year and a half and haven't had any issues with it either tile and we've also tiled the bathroom floor so it it turned out great um this was a find somewhere a long time ago and it just kind of works out great I can when we're traveling I just throw this under the cabinet here but it's got the dish soap in here my little cooking utensils tongs a pen my Cool Copper little spoons for salads so it's just kind of a catch-all but it that kind of goes with the whole theme and It just fits right in well long story short I've wanted to do this for a long time and I looked for two years for a bus and we couldn't really find one we we liked or agreed upon he looked for an hour and found this one and so guess what we got this one and but this is the perfect size we were looking for we got really lucky it's a Mercedes diesel engine no rust it was in really good condition an hour from our home and the guy delivered it for us so that was even a plus so and I really like the length of this because I've driven it but I don't think I'd be comfortable driving anything much bigger than this and also getting uh getting the bus we got it from Alabama or the guy had got it from Alabama so it wasn't exposed to salt and all the harshness of any of the buzzes that you would get up north that had to do with snow and everything so we thought that was the plus by getting a southern bus I mean I'm a huge HTV TV Junkie and I just love design and traveling and honestly the my biggest regret about is not doing this sooner yes I wish we would have done this when we were younger when my kids were younger and I love this lifestyle just so we can get out and see this country and travel and enjoy life we're both retired now so um that was the plan to just sell our house and travel but we have new grandbabies Now new grandchildren so we're staying close to home a little bit but we are taking many long trips and um we just love it and so we had looked at RVs for a long time and just really didn't like the style they're very expensive so we wanted we said we can do this we started looking for a bus found it and just got to work and by building it ourself that something goes wrong hey we can fix it we don't have to take it to somewhere and have them fix it like if you would have an RV and supply chain issues and everything else that well we can fix it ourselves we build it so and that's great and we were up north at Niagara Falls and we stayed up there for a month and that was absolutely wonderful living off grid just enjoying life [Music] right now I'm staying in our shower very spacious shower I love it I do have to say that I can't take good credit for a lot of this because my wife she was the designer she just said this is what I want let's figure out how we can do it so we did it she found this really nice I guess it's a sink but I don't know what she found at a yard sale and she said hey we can make that into a sink so just drill a hole in there and so we made it into a sink and she we needed a compartment to put our toothbrush and everything so she made this little compartment and that holds it in there to keep it from moving and she actually did the tile work on here the name of the bus is Miss Daisy so she wanted to incorporate daisies into our tile so she did each one of those you know a little bit by a little bit and she really had outside she said now I want to put that in here so we did that and so it worked out great there's no leaks or anything she did use all copper around and we didn't want to actually enclose the copper because we go up North and it freezes and you have any water in there and if there's a water leak you know a bus then I don't have to go and rip out the walls to get to to find the leak so this is absolutely perfect uh we love the shower head it's just enough if this is a retractable door which I do recommend because we were going to have a barn door but this would be tactical door actually sir it goes all the way across and it serves a great purpose and takes up a very small amount of space only thing I would change about this if we could is I would like to make this shower into an indoor outdoor so this was somehow another take off and go outside so I got to figure out how to use the screens to actually make it an outdoor shower then we'll come from the beach to wash off the sand that would be absolutely wonderful it's not really a composting toilet it's called a separate so that your urine goes down into a gray water tank and the other is bagged up in a biodegradable bag and then we returned onto that because they said that your waist and a biodegradable bag is more environmentally friendly than you at your house if you have a baby and you're changing diapers all day long those diapers are not biodegradable everything else is not biodegradable you throw into a plastic bag and then you sew it into your trash can so that's not very very good but this has been a separate it's biodegradable you throw it out in your trash and it is good to go so when we do we open this up and we close off our other part of our we have an entrance way to go to our sink to our bathroom and it closes off our bedroom so that we have privacy plus the fact that when we have our mini split going if it's if we need air or we need heat it just Heats or cools this area here without having to waste all the energy to go up front we are now in our bedroom and this is my favorite part of the of our build because one well it took us forever to get it designed or my wife get designed by love the L shape that way I can lay down this way we do have a handicapped door that we can open up and it's like you're outside so you're here you can sit if you have company they can sit but at night time like I said when we close off this area this part comes out and it and it comes over and it makes a queen size bed I keep my clothes as a little area right down there but believe it or not if you take your clothes and you like roll them up like roll your pants you can get a lot of stuff in when I first saw it I said that's not going to be enough room for my clothes hun she said well let's just see I have room for that and more I can put my shoes in there I can I'm it's it's great I didn't I didn't think there'd be enough room but it's like amazing but this is our mini split which I totally totally totally say You must have it's uh air and heat takes up very little electrical and um if you do need heat at night since we have solar we use an electric blanket that way it doesn't draw all of it but an electric blanket takes up very very little electricity and it keeps my wife warm it makes me too warm I have to get out from under the covers and even when it's like 30 degrees out I have to get out from underneath it because it that electric blanket but then we turn this on and actually just flip it on it comes on it will now cool it down to 63 or 64 65 whatever we want to keep the temperature at and it worked great another one of my wife's fabulous ideas she came up here and these are just coffee bean bags that we just coffee bean bags and she put a little bit of insulation inside you roll it up and this is just actually a belt so we have a belt comes up here Clips on and it it surface but it gives us um privacy at night and if it does get a little warm you just put that down and that keeps the Sun from coming in here it's one of her ingenious ideas again even this part right here A friend of ours is throwing away a baby crib and she said oh I can use that for the wood so she took the wood made this for our cat didn't cost anything so just the savings that she did in here so that we could do this live out our dream is is amazing that was one of the hardest things we had to do the ceiling because uh the curvature of a bus to get that curve and get the wood to bend we had to use the like two inch tongue and groove board that we could slip in and I do say if you want to do something like this do not skimp on insulation that's where you will lose all your heat or your your cooling or whatever but don't skip on the insulation because if you skip on the insulation all this cool air if you can if you could sit here and feel it this is super cold all this would just be going out the window so don't skip on anything now the bottom is fine you don't lose a lot of heat or cooling on the bottom it's the roof and the sides so there we have Havoc wool that we used and we have shoved it in there and it works perfectly and like I said this two inch tongue it followed the the curvature of the bus really great so that way we have a beautiful ceiling I'm a banker and she is a hotel general manager so we had really very little knowledge on how to build things but YouTube is your best friend man you can find anything you watch on there how to build anything or do anything and it took us around 14 months to from start to finish and we didn't want to we didn't work on it every day because we didn't want to get burnt out and then it just sit there and nothing nothing happened with it so we just did a little bit at a time so we don't feel like working on it today it might be too cold or something so we said well this is what we're going to do in the future so let's go and let's research it so nine percent of it is research and then just getting out and and have fun doing it don't make it into a job it's like because our plans changed how many times your design a million times that we're gonna do it this way well now let's do it this way now let's do it this way so and then but it was fun doing the adjusting and evolving and watching it involved and now enjoying uh the fruits of our labor we love it and I have to say because I was still working for six months when we first bought the bus and my husband was in here doing the demo and taking out mountains of wiring and just and I just have to give him props for doing that because I don't know that I could have done that but I when he was doing it I kept saying I'm on the decorating commitment but and I couldn't have did the decorating part there was no way I had this Vision I just had a vision of a school bus and you know I just didn't have a vision of it and now it's like OMG did a great job hun I mean I can't foresee us ever getting rid of Miss Daisy even if we we are not traveling anymore we'll keep it and use it for extra space at our home and maybe Airbnb it who knows but I'm sure our when our grand granddaughters get a little bit bigger they're going to say oh we got some cool grandparents man and they're gonna they're gonna love traveling with us and just enjoying life and not just exactly you know we can't wait to bring him to a schooly swarm yes [Music] foreign purchased the bus of course it looked it was a school bus it was bright yellow had been sitting around I guess for a long time and we live in a subdivision with pretty close neighbors so instead of tackling the inside on the very beginning of our build we decided to make the outside pretty so we got busy and sanded sanded sanded for weeks it seems like and then then it was time to decide on the color scheme so my husband's favorite color is purple and mine is pink so we kind of went with a mixture and and and I have a thing about color so I probably got six samples of paint and put it all on on the sides of the bus and all of our friends came over and they picked their favorite and then we ended up actually mixing all the colors together to get the color it is now it's Miss Daisy it's a Home Depot product outside enamel and they have it saved in their computers for us if we ever need to to get a a new supply of it and then I wanted to do something else a little bit different so I got I did stencils with the same kind of paint but just various different color colors to go with the theme of the bus and it just kind of evolved and it's very unique and I'm very happy with how it turned out we love being outside and the fresh air and nature and everything so we knew we'd be doing a lot of things outside and wanted a little extra space so this was pretty easy build we kind of researched it and just came up with a size of what we wanted and this folds up when we travel these come off and then we just wire tie it and now I can use it for my my plants can be a wine bar can be a coffee bar or a little bit of everything so it's just another extension of Miss Daisy one of the most important things I think you do need to do on the bus is you need to have screens because of bugs I hate taking a nap or sleeping at night and you hear the buzz of the mosquito so I said Gotta Have screens and a lot of people they do have their screens on the inside so they have to take their screens out just to lower the windows up and down so these screens you can buy at Home Depot cut them to size and we use the same screws that are in the bus for these little clips that hold our screens in and it works perfectly one thing I do recommend is when you do the screens make sure you do the short side first when you attach the screen because if you do the long side first when you attach the short side it ends up being like an hourglass well this is our day this is a must-have because we see a lot of people with their outside unit of their mini split like hooked on the side or underneath well we wanted it right here on the deck plus it gives us room for our electric bikes which fold up and they fit neatly right here with some of my wife's shows that she does we do have tubs and the tubs fit nicely on here just bungee them down or strap them down so it works out great it doesn't cover up our lights or anything so that's absolutely wonderful so we do have a thing called living our Dash you've never saw living in our Dash you do need to see that poem on Google just Google it it's a great poem up on top we do have our solar I have 1600 Watts four panels four a hundred watts each and it will run everything like I said or hot water our mini split everything we want everything we want [Music] well another reason that we wanted to do the bus one first I was in the hotel business and for 40 years and now I don't want to stay in a hotel I want to travel in my own little bedroom and house when we travel but I do antique shows craft shows art shows and I repurpose things and some bird feeders succulents and cute little vintage dishes I do a lot of things with cork small pieces of furniture you name it if I can find a purpose for it or repurpose for it I will make it we do have an Instagram for Miss Daisy it's Driving Miss Daisy but it's spelled it's kind of funny um d-r-i-v-i-n-m-i-s-d-a-i-z-y on Instagram and I am in the process of reviewing a lot of the products that we've used on the bus to help other people out saying what worked what didn't work so please follow us on Instagram well like I said before there's a poem called the dash so the dash is basically we're living our Dash like you on a tombstone there's a year that you were born and it's here you died those are just one day in history your life is that Dash in the middle so we are living our Dash and if anybody ever says You Only Live Once tell them no you only die once you live every day so live every day to the fullest like we are and getting ready to get in tears because I love my wife so much and this has been a great experience we love people we love socializing come and have wine with us if you see us anywhere if you're following us anywhere if we're anywhere around your area stop in and see us we would love that we are very friendly and we love meeting people and the world is our adventure and come enjoy the adventure with us you know we've been through the build we've been through this we love helping and giving advice so you know we'll we'll be glad to do that glad to do that and we hope to see you down the road see you down the road [Music]

Channel: Tiny Home Tours

Views: 32,542

Keywords: tiny house, tiny house on wheels, living big in a tiny house, tiny house england, tiny house uk, tiny house movement, tiny home, small house, small spaces, small house design, alternative living, architecture, affordable home, off the grid, small space living, tiny house life, tiny home uk, diy tiny house, diy home

Id: RFkRSgkK1g8

Length: 22min 6sec (1326 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 09 2023