Self-Taught Millennial Turns School Bus into a Award Winning Off-grid Tiny Home for a Family of 4

[Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] hi my name is Caleb Nelson and in 2018 my wife Emily and I decided to sell our Toyota FJ Cruiser that we lived out of for 10 months and travels 45 000 miles across 44 States and sell that and use that money to buy a school bus to convert into a tiny home so we could also travel out of with our son Milo who is one at the time and create content for people and also document our story you know do the whole like bus life YouTuber thing and while some of that did happen life had a different path for us as we continue to document our build and put all that stuff on YouTube and share that story people started reaching out because they're like what we were doing and I'm not going to say no to any kind of job so I was like yeah a little help let's do this and then it went from run project to another project to slowly but surely turn it into a full builds which now has been folded into us having a school bus conversion shop in Wilmington North Carolina [Music] that's it so I kind of want to take you guys to the beginning of where it all started and give you an actual tour of our school bus so that's what we're doing hello [Music] ready [Music] so our bus is 35 foot long bumper to bumper It's a 2005 International Fe 300 it's got a dt466e in it with an Allison standard transmission it's got 198 000 miles on it right now it goes 65 miles an hour and we get about seven is pretty average miles per gallon um we've gotten up to 10 once but I don't really know how that happened so when we got our school bus it was just a regular plain giant School Bus it came out of Newark New Jersey is where I picked it up at you can actually see that video in the listing the videos that I made but it was a regular school bus and as much as I love this scenario I think we should go somewhere a little more the bus life oriented let's go [Music] [Music] [Applause] is [Music] so much [Music] [Music] I think this is a lot more like bus life all right let's get into it so we'll start with the outside um I've got lights on every single corner and all and on the backs in the fronts I think I have four six on the front two on the back three on this side two on the other side so at night time this whole thing is illuminated I wanted to be able to see every bit around me at night time right here we just have a six foot toolbox I mounted up underneath is where we typically put a lot of our like cliche camping stuff so lawn chairs leveling blocks firewood ax lighters I did say it was 35 foot but I did decide to do a one foot overhang in conjunction with the ladder as well so technically speaking from here to the front bumper we're at 36 feet the cool part about 35 foot is you can actually fit in two parking spots front to back ready to put a Jerry can on the backside because we do have a generator underneath so this little black box is actually our propane water heater we've got a 20 pound paintballs directly for it so it also doubles as our outdoor shower we do have a spigot on the outside as well so we hook up a garden hose always off the kids clean the cars whatever we possibly need to do so back here we have our garage and this is where we put and you know like your garage stuff we've got all of our water pump filters seven gallon water tank we've also got all of our solar electrical stuff and we also have our laundry shoots and then that gives us extra room to be able to store either our kids stroller is the wagon you can actually fit a full-size bicycle up in here as well and even at one point I had my kids 12 volt little RC car right standing vertical we took it to a car show it was a great thing so I'm going to do a more detailed walk through later as far as like the technical details behind the bus but the gist of it right now is we have 2040 watts of solar we have 600 amp hours of lithium ion phosphate we have a 3000 watt inverter we have Shore power and yeah everything we need to be fully comfortable off grid for a long period of time we did decide to add the attic but from the floor to that we're only at 11.3 so we're well beneath your typical RV camper height yeah I did thanks dude you guys want to see that happens all the time if you ever want to feel like a rock star convert a school bus and drive around and people just love it every single time but anyway so like I said we used to live in a Toyota FJ Cruiser which is about 22 square feet so within going from a house to an FJ you have to utilize every possible score wrench so that being said we ended up adding a five foot by 30 inch storage container which allows us to put our generator underneath and a 17 gallon tote in conjunction with another 20 pound propane bottle so then eight foot which holds another 17 gallon storage box our 60 gallon gray water tank another 20 pound propane bottle and another 17 gallon storage box so we have 40 pounds of propane on board and then we also have three 17 gallon storage boxes and then a little bit extra space [Music] across Facebook and this time I found this bumper it came up a semi I figured why not put it on a school bus because it looks really cool gotta add four seven inch LED lights one collaboration with our two more spotlights so at night time this thing sees every bit of what you want to see last but not least for the outside or Dutch door I think we might be the only school bus that has a Dutch door it's double panes it's got an inlay it's got white oak trim it also has a residential latch [Music] in the back door with the same key just like you would a regular house so like every nice house great house you have a catch-all entry table and you've got a place to put your shoes next up we have Hollywood is my favorite feature if not one of my favorite features and this is just this light one thing you don't think about is ambient lighting or nighttime lighting when you're in your house you don't have all the lights and all the time you have that like night light on or the side table light on so you want to add one of those that way when the kids are in the back sleeping we don't have to have this bright light in the living room so this really helps with that nighttime get the kids in in a system let's watch a show get ready for bed [Music] next up we have our couch and it was probably one of the more difficult parts of the process and building and just trying to figure out the engineering behind it we wanted something that if we're gonna be in here and it's a cold rainy day we don't want to be outside then I want to be comfortable I want to be able to sit and chill and have a slow Saturday morning and relax and do the things we decided to do a lazy boy sectional foreign so now you can come in here watch TV and check up the views and really chill out like you would in a regular house because if you're sitting on this side with the additional cushions it's just a little more like proper a little more formal and that's not Who We Are [Music] so our couch stays in this sectional format 90 of the time but we still wanted to utilize this space as a multi-functional space that being said we can now turn this into a full-size bed so we do slide up this slide lift this up bring up the other cushion and then in the back bedroom we have an additional section piece that we can lay here and then this turns into a full-size guest bed so our bus was originally supposed to take three months to build out but thanks to my wife's attention to detail love of interior design and perfectionist it took two years but thankfully she did because we ended up winning best bus at the United tiny house festival and when everybody came in they just loved how homey our bus felt that's the word that everybody used and it was a very humbling experience for me because I thought they were excited about the craftsmanship that I was able to execute on but no they loved the knobs these little inlays and all those little details but for me it was problematic because how do I utilize all this space and still make it a functional and then a very formal and pretty environment and uh we kind of nailed it so this is the wheel well we ended up adding storage in this diesel heaters right here and more storage here so yeah it took a while but we figured it out [Music] so this undoubtedly is my decision and it is the least eye appealing part of the bus but where this is a family's house this is our house this is our home this is where we live life watch movies Saturday morning cartoons late nights just chilling with a wife and I wanted to come out of TV so we're I would have fit a 32 inch TV behind this wall so every bit of what you see I built I built these cabinets I ripped down the trim I did the Butcher Block countertop I did the Shelf everything you see I made except for this island my wife bought it at Hobby Lobby it's great it's very functional we want to be one of the only school buses that also has a kitchen island when we don't need it we just run it over to the side and now we have all this open floor space for our kids to run about and do the things and it's it's great I love that my wife decided to do that so this kitchen is an upgrade for us after living in the FJ we kind of realize how much we cook and how we cook and when we did that we only use two burners so we decided to just go with your conventional two burner propane stove top I like cookies and we like pizza so we have this ninja toaster oven that we use it runs off the solar it's worked out very very well all these little nooks and crannies were built specifically for plates and bowls these are all deep so we can put a full-size plate in there and our cups all of this open shelving is great when we're parked because we have everything to our disposal we can just grab it really utilizing the cubic footage of a space especially in a tiny space it's not just about the square feet so one thing we learned is living tiny doesn't mean you have to sacrifice all the things you just have to be a bit more thoughtful on how and what you're utilizing and the purpose of each thing so right here is our bathroom we have a door that we wanted to close off to close off our bathroom because of the bathroom sake but it's twofold because then it opens up our vertical Pantry we have so much storage in here I mean we can we I don't think we've really utilized this space we can put like 15 cans up here we can put like seven boxes of cereal because I love cereal all these extra things that my wife puts in her smoothies that I don't know what they are this is a huge Pantry for a bus and a family of four and I love it oh and this door came out of an old house in Nashville from like 1920. that was pretty cool so our bus is 35 foot long so we're five feet shorter than most traditional buses this is our bathroom we have a wet bath full tile ceramic tile custom shower pan that is our second composting toilets we used to have a semar GTG and and this thing is a separate Villa and that is the Taj Mahal of composting toilets I mean that thing is hassle-free worry-free no smells no dumping The Urinator thing like it's just go don't even think about it and like every two weeks three weeks you just take out the bag and it's great so we have a Delta shower head it flows at like 1.3 gallons per minute we have 100 gallons of fresh water on board that runs to our seven gallon electric hot water heater so technically we have 107 gallons so technically we can take up to about 10 10 minute long showers and be good to go our water supply usually lasts us as far as like a family of four about a week and a half people say two weeks I feel like that's just a stretch I think if you can Bank off a week or a week and a half then that's a safe number so when we built our bus we knew that we were going to be in it for three to five years that was the goal that was the max that we wanted to be in a school bus when we did that we were like all right the kids are gonna only be so big so we decided to opt in for toddler beds we have Milo's bed and other roses toddler bed and it's worked out great Milo's four years old right now he has no issues sleeping up here that allowed us with kids to have a lot of clothes because when you have kids you need twice as many teachers through the day because kids are kids so we got a very large closet For Milo and Ella Rose they actually have collectively 60 inches of closet space because each one of these is 30 inches we also have places for Ella Rose's bows and shoes and socks we also have another diesel heater up here storage on the top side measuring board for our kit so we haven't done well enough and the Cozy space for them my wife is a girly girl so she has girly girl things so she has a lot of shoes and things so we have a decent sized closet it's not as big as the kids but it does the jobs you can hang your dresses I think we had up to 18 pairs of shoes for her compared to my six pairs of shoes which is a lot I think six is a lot for a guy but we had 18 pairs of shoes for her in the bus stored the places she was able to utilize them so yeah not bad for a bus [Music] so my wife and I are married and we have kids so with that being said we wanted doors for our master bedroom because you want doors sometimes so we headed doors so our bedroom is pretty much like what you see on everybody else's school bus it's a queen size bed goes side to side so it took a little bit longer we also extended it a little bit so we have enough room to be able to stand up and put things underneath the bed and storage if we wanted to add some nightstands so yeah I mean it does the job for us we'll be able to close off these doors and on the really hot days we can make this thing ice cold so one thing that makes our bedroom different than most School Bus builds is we actually have a laundry chute there's your basket back here we can put this down throw all our clothes if they're out of sight out of mind then when we need to go to the laundromat we just open up the back door grab the basket and it makes life so much easier so yeah we got laundry shooting our bus additionally is we have a 12 000 BTU Mini Split unit that we can run off the solar we're bringing in enough power to run this we're also bringing enough power to charge our batteries but on your average day we have no issues running this we typically keep it around like 70. we have 600 amp hours of lithium ion that gets us pretty well throughout the night so it is in the back bedroom so getting to the front is kind of a trick but usually between the front and the back if we're running a fan it's about a 5 to 10 degree difference between the front and the back so that's our school bus tour so thank you guys so much for watching if you have any questions or comments leave them below or shoot me an email link is in the description for now I'm just going to hang out here and enjoy some bus life we're not going to be living this thing any longer we have a lot of other things that are happening we're going to continue to do some bus conversions for people so if you guys are interested shoot me an email and yeah but for now I'm gonna enjoy this uh View [Music] [Music]

Channel: Backroad Purpose

Views: 113,833

Keywords: School Bus Conversion, Skoolie, build, camper, overland, van life, bus life, adventure, bus build, tiny house, tiny home, minimalism, caleb nelson, skoolie conversion, skoolie build, skoolie tour, Bus Conversion tour, Bus Tour, Bus, tiny home tours, Backroad Purpose, Caleb Nelson, Wilmington, Off-grid, solar power, offgrid, Bus Conversion Company, Small Business, Mobile Dwellings, Custom camper, Custom RV, Home made motor home, motorhome, Earthroamer, United tiny home, skooly, Skooley

Id: I6EggQ7_fUs

Length: 17min 14sec (1034 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 14 2023