Shuttle Bus Tiny Home Conversion - Full Tour - Better Platform Than Sprinter Van?

I'm Robin hi I'm Eric all right well so this is our 2005 ford e350 Super Duty van it's actually a Starcraft star light was a shuttle bus and we have completely gutted it and converted it into our tiny house on wheels we've like so many people were looking at tiny houses and container homes and you know all kinds of different options and doing all the videos and watching everything we kind of came across so many of the bus conversions and you know different things like that and so we thought well heck if we're gonna have a tiny house why not have one we can take with us wherever we and bring it all over the world they're all over the North America anyway well and we thought we were gonna do this we were looking to do the Sprinter thing like a lot of people because we thought the size the stealth aspect but when we started looking into that they're so expensive and they're just you know they're good mechanically but they're really expensive if something goes wrong and size wise as well we we are both fairly tall and over 6 foot 2 Robins almost 6 feet tall so the shuttle bus is wider so it gives us more room to have the bed going across the back and gives us a lot more flexibility with the space and it had basically from the backseat all the way to the back almost 13 feet of space and six and a half feet wide so also just the very upright exterior walls makes it easier for doing the cabinetry and you know just the whole construction process was a lot easier than having any curved walls and you know they make it I mean it's doable but it just means a lot more time and effort to create it so I had these beautiful walnut slabs of wood that I had gotten at and also again like the cedar at an auction years and years ago that we had dragged around with us forever and was finally able to utilize it so we the two-part epoxy resin on it so it gives it this really nice beautiful deep glowing look to it and I decided again leave it live edge you know and you know if you if I would have had to cut this off to make it a you know a normal size I would have lost all of this beautiful wood that's all along the edges on this and I think it just looks so much nicer having all that that nice natural feel to it and then again the this the cedar is all again clear select cedar solid boards so this is I mean you know it's not a cabinet with you know of wood on the face and wood on the back everything this is actual solid wood so one thing people have mentioned to asked a lot about is the weight-wise cedars extremely light and actually kind of soft but so that's not an issue with that and then the walnut is really only on the to countertops so it's not a crazy amount of weight that's being added to the whole thing but I used the same board for each of these things this is one continuous board here each drawer this is one continuous board that runs across here and so I kind of kept it all in the together and then I made the the door latches or the handles are all made out of the same walnut scraps that I had from the walnut here and this side here actually has a pull out pantry cabinet so we can put our oils and vinegars and all that kind of fun stuff in there and Robin can talk about that a little more in depth but we also really crucial to have a bur key we really wanted to have that good pure water and 99.9% of purification on that so we love that and it's the sort of the smallest one that they make so it's I think a gallon and a half I believe and so that works out really nice again with the height factor I didn't want to you know super insulate and lose height and with with being in here but so the being a nice shuttle bus it's got steel you know supports basically running through the ceiling so I insulated in between those and then I put a piece of thin piece of insulation on each of those pieces of metal just a quarter inch of the luan back underlayment material is screwed in to those points and then we got this grass cloth wallpaper that we attach to the ceiling with a spray adhesive just sprayed both pieces you'll leave it for you know a couple minutes until it kind of gets dry to the touch stick it on there and so far it's holding up really well and then where the joints were for that it worked out real nice I assumed I had more of the cedar left over as we were doing what we did so I just made some nice thin slats and those so those cover the joints of the wallpaper and create a real nice finished touch for the ceiling so we like the wall the grass cloth it has again we've had a bit of an Asian kind of a inspiration for a lot of this and so we really felt like that add a nice nice look to it and simple rather than so many people using the cedar you know different wood it kind of helps brighten it up and it also actually helps a little bit with the sound we've noticed as well that kind of helps dampen the sound in here a little bit more as well we wanted to have some you know both privacy as well as control the heat some more within the space here so I had some a bunch of different ideas but ended up settling on these slide up shades that are can set at different positions I can go to there go up to there sort of I just wanted it to line up with the bottom of the that point so we could still open the windows or if we want to we can basically take it all the way up and get some nice privacy but we're finding out a few issues with the wallpaper we've been having some trouble with that but but basically it's a simple simple design device to make sure that we can get some privacy and also keep a little bit of a control of our temperatures in the band we also decided to go with cork flooring a lot of people use vinyl and different issue different types of flooring we like the the cork because it's kind of softened underfoot it was also fairly thin so it wasn't again taking up additional space for our - here and another thing as a lot of people I see do is they'll completely do their flooring before they do their cabinets before they do all of their other things and what people don't a lot of people don't understand is that things need to expand and contract and if you put your cabinetry and everything right directly on these things it locks them in place and they can't expand and contract again and we've seen issues a lot of people where things start to pucker and buckle and you have a lot of issues with that so something that people need to realize is that best to actually do the flooring as one of the last things and give yourself some space on the side so that you can everything can expand and contract and that way you know you can do cork or vinyl or whatever you want and you can have a lot less potential issues and the fact that it's not locked in if for some reason we do need to take it out and redo it it's a it's accessible I can pop it right up without a lot of trouble pull a few little pieces of trim off here and and I can take the whole floor out without any of difficulty at all so but so far it's been working out real nice and it's again nice and soft to the touch and and you know again kind of helps with sound as well it seems like it's a definite dampens the sound a little bit in here as well so hey so now we're in the kitchen this is my space I love to cook and one of the things when we were planning this kitchen was to make sure that we had enough storage for all of the tools that I needed which are a lot of utensils big deep drawers so we could fit all of the utensils we can fit things like my big all-clad kettle here dutch oven can fit in this drawer with a whole bunch of other stuff so the planning for storage was big because I had a lot of pans that I wanted to keep this is our cooking area right now you caught me in the middle of cooking I'm actually making some chili verde for dinner tonight for all the guys a lot of times when I see like RVs and stuff I see that they don't have counter space and so one thing when we planned this I wanted to make sure we had plenty of counter space for cooking so we have these two big counters here Eric explained the the walnut slabs that are beautiful and incredibly functional if you'll notice this counter is lower than this counter because we needed to have room to fit this painting which was one of the things we were not going to leave behind in our sticks and bricks house so we kind of designed around that and so this this counter is a lot lower but it works out perfectly because it's a perfect height for that stove to work so it all worked out good our Everest stove just fits right in this little drawer we just put it right away when we're done and so it's kind of nice and gets out of the way we have this nice five pounder propane it lasts forever we just got it filled we've been using it for about a month and we've only used a pound so and I cook every day so and we do coffee every day so I thought that was a really great when Eric found that it was kind of expensive to find the tanks are expensive but then once you get on they're so cheap to fill and those little 1 pounder ones just don't last I don't know what it is they just they don't have a pound of propane in there so when we did this we wanted it to look really clean and lines and so Eric used like he explained this is all one board this is all one board they all match so when we put the fridge and we had to figure since its chest style how are we going to fit it in how is it going to work so Eric devised this great way to just kind of bring that down and pull it out he put it on 500-pound slides so it's got lots of structure under there to hold it up and so we have the big 64 cubic foot I'm surprised at how much I can get in there so we you know this is you can have a designated freezer fridge whichever side right now we both have both sides fridge because that's what's working best for us right now and because we had you have a battery issue when we have it on freezer it's using more energy so but we have them kind of low and so right now it's working out great I haven't had any issues with spewed food spoiling or anything like that oh yeah I'm surprised how much stuff I can actually I mean I can I fit so much stuff in here I mean it's just packed with all kinds of yummy stuff I mean I've got two dozen eggs under here tons of cheese cilantro my lard that I take with me everywhere yeah this is a winter fridge and usually this in the Dometic are the two main ones that people buy we decided this one because it has a at the time I don't know if the net exchange but it has its own designated compressor for the freezer so each of these have their own is a dual compressor fridge uses a little bit more energy but you're able to make ice cubes and really free stuff so that's what we liked about it so and this was a little this was kind of a glitch of trying to figure out because these are weird handles you know a lot of the other ones they just kind of come up but since we had to do this little clip thing Eric had to kind of I love like our oils and vinegars and the small little spices fit down good I actually think this is a really easy to kitchen to cook with it's like it's not a triangle it's a to do angle you know I mean you just have the sink the fridge and the stove it's just galley kitchen style but I like small kitchens as long as there's enough space to work so Eric made me this awesome this is my cutting board this is actually made from the cutting board that we had in our apartment so and it just you know I just everything fits on here I have plenty of space to work here and then I have the stove over here it's actually a really great working situation so I've been really surprised at how I've been able to adapt really easily so this was funny because I originally was trying to talk Erik out of having a sink at all because I was thinking oh we'll just have like our water thing like so minimalist let's have our water thing up high and then we'll have buckets that we can bring out and do that and and I was like I almost had him convinced I was pretty pretty getting pretty good but then when we decided well maybe we do want to get hot water tank maybe we do want to do all that you know I think what we what we ended up doing was going from kind of minimal to well if I'm gonna have a sink that I'm gonna have us a really good sink and so this actually is I think the same sink we had in our apartment that we lived in before this and I loved the size and I love the sink and so we just got the same sink and I have to say it's very dirty right now but as you can see it you can fit a lot of stuff in there so you know if you need to kind of cover things up but people are coming it's nice and deep and for being out here I use big pans I use big bowls and so it actually it's really functional for me I really like it a lot and then we just got this really easy we just have the little pump pump action it's got the dual thing so we don't have a shower right now but I've ridden but eventually we're gonna get a hot water heater and we would be able to take this and just stick it outside and if we wanted to wash our hair or what or do any kind of like quick shower out there so that's kind of why we got that style of faucet so we'd be able to use that so we have no black tank since we have a composting toilet we have 115 gallon which isn't very much but we have found with a few extra gallons we found that we can boondock for like five days on that so we I guess we conserve water pretty well 15 gallon tank it kind of goes from the closet into the bottom of the side of the cabinet under there we have a great tank that runs on this side of the bus and it's about a 12 gallon grey tank the only thing I use it for is for Washington so you don't really have anything that we pour down there that's and I use a non-toxic environmentally friendly soap and stuff so we don't really we don't we try and keep it as minimal as possible these are a little hinky so we have to keep these tightened but because the cedar such a soft wood we had to have a hinge that wasn't too much stress on the wood itself because it is pretty soft but some but my solution for these kinds of things are bins these things work great so I just put everything in bins so I kind of have our clothes are kind of appear as you can see it's kind of stuffed in here but it helps organize you know all of the stuff and Eric's got kind of his basket camera stuff extra stuff and so these stay closed really well when we're traveling and to me the bin thing just works really well so that's just how we organize stuff all of our coffee glasses ice stuff cocktail stuff condiments snacks you know so we kind of have a then we got these hanging baskets at the thrift store with this weird little lock on it that we just kept on there because it was weird we love our max air fan it's awesome it's basically our stove fan so it's our vent hood which works really well I accidentally set off our smoke alarm today because I was toasting some chilies and that kind of gets smoky but the fan took it right away and it works really well I love this it's like a ten-speed so we can just kind of mean--you it to be higher 74 degrees in here you can program it to whatever temperature you want Eric's just putting up some rope lights we're just he's gonna install them but we finally found the kinds that we want that are fitting up here so this is kind of like we've got wires kind of going right here but eventually those will be behind and hidden an old friend of mine found this pair in the thrift store like the Goodwill store in Santa Cruz California when we first moved in together we found out later from an antique dealer that they're like from 17th century so they're worth like a ton of money but the night of the earthquake the quake of 89 somebody stole the other one of our we had two of these candle holders and it was gone forever someone took it because we had no power so everyone had candles and someone took off with our candle but anyway that's why we kept that it's kind of like a an old reminder mm-hmm so kitchen here and then we have our lounge area here we wanted something that we could fit several people I think we can maybe fit about six people kind of comfortably sitting the table makes it a little bit harder maybe four or five we have this awesome table that Eric made for us it's made out of reclaimed redwood and then he edged it with some of the walnut that he used for the countertops and then we have this lagoon table leg that we put it on that's really I love this thing because you can kind of just put it out of the way if you need to or just bring it in for eating or working it's great I play eat sleep area our bed is super easy to make all we do is take off the table take off this little leg which is a couple of little things and you just pull it right off it's super easy and Eric made these slats that basically just go right across and then a couple of these pillows fit perfectly in there and we have our queen-size bed we keep all of our bedding very easily down here he has this so that it can open up just grab it from out here boom and a lot of people go you have to make your bed every night and I you know it can be a little bit of a pain after you've had way too me drinks but usually we're pretty good so it takes us maybe five minutes so we looked on YouTube I don't so and so we use fabric glue we found the material that we liked we got a king-sized five-inch memory foam gel mattress we got a king-size because we wanted to cut some extra off to make second extra cushions for the back Eric actually took one of those turkey knives like electric knives cut it into the pieces that we needed it to be and then we found this green velvet fabric and then I had I just we figured out how to cut it and glue it and staple it onto the back Eric put like a little really thin piece of plywood onto the back and so that's how we secured our cushions very very minimalist and simple and since neither of us sewed it was kind of like the way to go for us and they're holding up really good I'm amazed at this fabric I've spilled red wine on this stuff and I can't even tell where so we lucked out with that fabric calm and it was just a green velvet we just bought it cuz we like the color and we like the texture so but it seems like it has some really good stain resistance to it to which we're really happy about because in a situation like this I'm cooking right here we're sleeping right here stuff is just flying everywhere it just is that's how it is you know that's one of the things about bus life especially short bus life Eric did amazing trim detail I loved all of his trim so he used like these little pieces of walnut to kind of so we could put stuff on our shelves so they don't fall out when we're when we're traveling that's one thing that people find out quick if you're in bus life now they're kept with a piece of artwork from our friend Mitchell and this is just another we picked up at an art Art Show I think in Madison a long time ago when we you know we felt really lucky to find a bus that had we have a back door so this door opens and these oars open we park we design the whole design so that these doors we would be able to have this would be our view so whenever we park somewhere this is this is how we usually situate ourselves we've had some incredible views already just in the three months that we've been at this but yeah these doors are just awesome I just love them they're they make the whole it's like it brings that the outside in so you can be sitting in your bus and you feel like you're kind of outside which I just love sitting in here because sometimes if it's windy or something I'd rather be inside than outside so yeah well maybe this is kind of funny okay so an eric designed this he was really he really wanted to make sure that I had a cubby so that I could put stuff you know next to me when I'm in bed or in the couch the funny thing is though since Eric sleeps on this side he has nothing and they'll be there will be a balancing glass of wine like literally you team the door that think of it he managed not to spill while he slept all night long in fact we found one this morning didn't we it was pretty amazing so he's talented that way but I keep telling him he needs to make himself a cubby or something to put you know I don't care put a shelf here do something this was happenstance it didn't really happen just had worked out this way but I love how the countertop is the same height as the couch we did not plan that but somehow it just worked out that way and I just love how that makes for me makes a really clean line I just like how that worked yeah when we were going for the design we were going for a really simple clean lines comfortable space warm inviting no we wanted it to be a place where people could come like you said play cards play a game hang out eat have fun live be free all right so as you enter the bus the driver seat is right here obviously this bus did not have a passenger seat or anything it was all just the you know all of the seats from the back so we bought a jump seat to add to the so that whoever's not driving can be up front and closer to the action it also did not have a window here it was all enclosed there was one kind of storage container sort of thing right about here with some safety gear in it and I was able to find this window on eBay for $40 and was able to do a install on that and then a big part of all of this as well was the cedar wood that I had I got all of this solid clear cedar wood at an auction 15 18 years earlier and was taking him around with us forever and so finally had a nice place to put it and so I've been able to trim everything out in this really beautiful wood I've also repurposed a fair amount of material is some material there's the doors of this is actually the old electrical panel from the original bus and so we actually utilize some of that power on the old system and then also have new stuff but had this beautiful redwood from an old little tiny bookcase infinite tore that apart and I was able to reutilize some of that yeah the other thing that we've found we typically like to face South our solar panels are on the roof right above here so it maximizes our solar that way but we found that this is warms up quite a bit in this area here so if it's a particularly warm outside we can just open the windows let that air just blow right through but right now when the nights are getting down into the 40's and even in the high 30s this area warms up really fast in the morning and so we've been using this handy little simple USB fan and we'll clip it either here or up on the top this way and just aim it right back and we can just blow that nice warm air that's generating in this area into the back and helps warm up the back of the van a little faster and and kind of even out the temperatures throughout everything one of our big focuses was our art we didn't want to give up a lot of the art that we had collected over the years and so all of our walls space was perfect for some of our art and we had this nice old piece that we don't know who the who the artist was I got that from an uncle way back years and years ago and we always loved it so we found a spot for that and you'll see shortly a few of our other pieces in the back there we had a lot of magnets from different national parks and different places that was one of those easy simple things to collect you know and you're out hitting all those great locations and so one of the weird things about this most buses and schoolies are steel and there's steel everywhere so magnets work but this is a being a shuttle bus it's mostly fiberglass so there wasn't as much steel so I actually put a piece of steel on both sides by the entrance here so that we could stick these some of our older magnets that we had already collected and then we'll have room for more as we go to keep adding to the collection as we travel the rest of the country and and again we'd like a lot of people we do have a plan to try to hit every National Park and in the country at some point in time so I think we've hit 15 or 16 of them so far in our lives so we've planning to definitely get to all of those but so we decided to separate the front from the back somewhat I mean a lot of people like a totally open plan some people have things really enclosed I'm a big Frank Lloyd Wright fan so one of his things was to have a sort of a tight enclosed entry area and then opening up to a bigger space and that way it makes that space feel even more open and larger self being a fairly small space overall it was a good way to deal with that so and then we also needed a closet and we have our little dry bathroom that we have here so I the bathroom on this side closet on this side the closet has also has the solar controls and all they've everything in the back of the closet and so one of the big things that I seeing all the builds that people do out there a lot of people use a two by two for their wall construction they put something on both sides of the wall so you end up with you know three three and a half inches of thickness lost we wanted to maximize the space so I created these walls with just the three quarter inch tongue and groove pine and then I used the 3/4 aluminum channels and that worked out perfectly that the 3/4 material is not actually 3/4 thick anymore these days so it just fit perfectly right in the slot of the U between for the metal so basically I was able to create these wall channels or the walls with only taking up less than an inch of space on each side so it maximizes the space and also eliminated a good chunk of weight from all that additional framing that we could have been stuck with so we created a bathroom on this side we have our own composting toilet that I actually also created based on the C head kind of design and basically before the cost of ordering the diverter between for the solids and the liquids it's basically only cost us about one hundred and fifty dollars to create a really great functional composting toilet that does the trick there and we've got just a simple curtain right now to separate the space out from the rest of it but it's got I used some more of the walnut for the toilet seat and we've got a privacy shade that'll helps to keep things you know a little more private in that area when you needed to love the privacy but so far it's been working really well and then I had additionally some more of the cedar and the walnut for some of the details as well as some of the paracord for helping keep things in place and from shifting and flying around on us when we're moving around we actually did the the no shower route and we actually got the Planet Fitness membership for you know the $25 a month deal for the two of us and so you know we just keep an eye out for where they're located and then we also use the you know County works and truck stops and you know things like that as well as you know a lot of the time we'll just do the the wipes you know the different kinds of cleaning wipes that are out there and you know again one of the we were the type of people that only took a shower typically once a week before we started all this so now it's it really wasn't that big of a transition to to still do it now as long as I don't get too terribly dusty and dirty or if we're out hiking and we get really dirty you know but typically we take about a week at a time the week and a half sometimes before between showers but we could always find one nearby somewhere so yeah yeah that was another thing again this area was all just you know solid roof so having the the closets here and enclosed we decided to get the simple opaque a little skylight it's just a curved top I mean it was only like $35 on Amazon and that way it gives us a really nice natural light right here and as we're transitioning into the space well oh and one nice little perk that we discovered was we bought this handy little little mirror that's kind of people a lot of people have but it works out really well that with natural light right here it's great for shaving and taking care of that sort of thing and Robin can do her hair and makeup and whatever and have good natural light so it worked out as a nice little a nice little perk that I'd like to say I planned but it just happened to work out that way but but yeah so the closet again it's a little over packed we're discovering like many people that we've got way more stuff than we need we've we brought a lot more and we got rid of a 90 plus percent of what we had and you know we're finding that we're still only we're you know wearing barely 10% of it you know we've got a couple of nicer things for if we happen to be wanting to go out to dinner somewhere and then when we're in a nicer town and but we'll be purging a few more things here in the near future to make more room and also just have plenty of airflow and have things good for the solar system that's all in there so but but yeah the inverter is back in here and the charge controller all the different solar controls are all back the way that I built the the seat we have a jog in the wall and so that creates a nice little space in the back area there that all that stuff fits in and doesn't take up as much space into where the clothing and stuff is we have to 100 watt panels up on the roof right above here they're the thin flexible panels and they're actually adhered to the roof with Eterna bond tape so we didn't have to put additional screws into the roof and create more places that could leak down the road and everything then you know we also have a hundred and thirty-six watt flexible panel that we're able to move around and get the maximum amount of Sun dangles and say Matt between the two on the roof and that one we are generating a you know good well we did a whole kilowatt of power one day recently so we're pretty happy with the production especially down here in the southwest right now where you get a good hot nice sunny days and plenty of sunlight so right now we just have a 100 amp power AGM battery that we're working on another system that I'll be revealing hopefully in the near future that is with a lithium iron phosphate battery that I'll that'll have almost 400 amp hours or close to 400 amp hours of power power storage so so in the meantime we're just kind of limping by a little bit with a hundred amps of AGM power which is just getting us enough for a refrigerator and for everything but we've we're dialing it in pretty well knowing you know finding out exactly how much we need for the fridge and just the few other things it's most of the time it's just charging our our you know phones laptops and all that and a few LED lights so it's we're trying to keep it as simple and as low-tech as we can so all right so the exterior of the van is still very much a work in progress we've been slowly moving along as we mainly focusing everything on the inside we did get this awning back a couple months back now and it's a eight foot by eight foot awning that works out really nicely it's been real windy so we haven't been putting it up the last few nights or the last few days but been really great and as he covered from the interior we've got these where the the handicapped access door was and we just love to open it up and have you know nice nice access for the we have again we always try to aim this angle towards the west typically for the nice sunsets you know and so we've had some pretty awesome ones we ended up once in one of the nights one place in Colorado where literally the edge of the hill was right here and it dropped down about 20 feet to a creek right here so if we would have fell out you would have been real wet real fast so that was kind of probably the most sketchy spot we were sip our with it but we just love taking advantage of it and having the you know the Instagram ready you know view from out our windows here are our doors a lot of people ask about the our little rack on top that actually were those were the stainless steel tubes that were the dividers inside the shuttle that separated the handicap door here from the seats and up at the front behind the driver's seat and as I was demoing everything I was thinking these are beautiful stainless steel tubes and all these nice parts so I just threw everything in a bucket and held onto it and as we were finishing up the construction and I'm thinking what a you know I think I could find a use for those so literally every part that the parts that used to stick into the under the floor were the ones I used on the roof and all the things that connected everything the other it worked out literally I used every single piece that that came out went right back up on the roof so yeah and I love this the stainless steel and and right now we don't have anything up there but it is nice to have that elver flow of storage up on the roof we've had a few mishaps so as we mentioned earlier most of the were mechanically the engines been great we had an issue with blowing a couple of tires near Moab and this did have a big plastic you know fender flare over it that when the tires blew that delaminated and busted most of that out there was a little tiny piece left about right here and it bent up our back part here and so Phase two of the process will be to actually eliminate most of this lower stuff and we're gonna act add some storage boxes underneath here and you know get it additional storage and make it look a lot better right now we added the kitchen area the sink is right here and the closet with the electrical and stuff is here the 15 gallon freshwater tanks it's kind of straddles between the closet and under this cabinet so we added the water fill here and it's one of those that you know can do the can hook up to water at a RV park or campground and we've done that a few times we typically boondock but we like to you know every once in a while you kind of need to to if you can utilize some showers or some other things in a park no we don't have any kind of direct your power connection we basically again everything is so simple are the inverter is right inside the closet right here and but the few times when we have I've got an extension cord and we've been in a parking just to run to the if we want to hook the fridge up to that for a little bit to kind of take give the give the battery a break we can do that but otherwise you know exterior wise we haven't done anything we're looking at some different colors and different things this had those the big mirrors that used to mount that kind of set up here on the front of a lot of buses and those are essentially to keep kids safe out in front of the bus so we got rid of those so I've got some grinding and some things to get rid of on all of these parts we actually also we do have cameras that we put in that we still have to complete the connections for all of that as well but we've got both cameras on the front and both sides and the backup one in the back so just need a little more a little more connections to get all that finished up but again the skylight we are the window we added up front there again on the roof there's the two 100 watt flexible panels up on the roof up on top and you again I like the flexible ones because of that real low profile you really don't even hardly know they're up there unless you're up up looking at them right and again no drilling to turn a bomb tape gonna love that stuff and this is the the you know the compressor for the air conditioning and heating which we did still have connected up inside so you know a lot of people like to rip all that out and you know start from scratch it was all still working really well so we figured why why ruin it there was one additional of the little heaters that sort of sat underneath one of the seats about here on the other side we did get rid of that one just because that was where the the bathroom wall was going so but again this was what the other side looked like and these are just plastic and you know this one's I as you can see is also damaged so we'll be replacing that putting some boxes underneath and finishing that all out making it look a little little nicer for the for the long-term we're still deciding on a color for everything as well we're kind of leaning towards maybe a silver or a grey kind of a looker for our things when we get there so well the buses name is wu wo o and it came out of a lot of different things most because we're dead wood fans and who was our favorite character and so we can say woo Swearengen but no and we was just it was kind of short for woo de because it's made out of wood and then we have a lot of Buddha references with our with our bus so it kind of like came from there and then we just decided to call it woo because it's fun to say well I was just gonna say when we kind of decided when the Sprinter thing was becoming we started to look at them and we had gone to see a few and they were just in really bad shape for really expensive prices and and we when we had decided to kind of shift our paradigm of what was possible this thing was just came up on Craigslist and so it was almost like the vehicle kind of came to us was almost like oh well we could do that instead kind of thing it wasn't like oh I'm gonna go look for a shuttle bus or I'm gonna go look for it just kind of cute it was literally like two days two or three days you know we were thinking Sprinter Sprinter Sprinter and then all of a sudden we like well what about something like this and then it was like okay there's one in right outside of Chicago let's go take a look it was like so we paid $3,000 for this it's only 118 thousand miles on a good diesel engine so the six liter diesel I know some people have issues with the six liter but long as you keep the coolant you know flushed and clean it they they're fantastic and we've had I guess we'll find out if we have issues with the six liter yeah I mean we've been up and down up and down the mountains all over the West year for the last three months and it's got great power and it just handles perfectly we've had no issues with mechanically we've have haven't had any issues we've had a few other things with tires and a couple other things but but otherwise it's been it's been great I loved it I mean and it is coming from the Midwest so it had a little bit more rust probably than some units that people can find but but nothing too horrible and was able to I mean I admit we were impulsive when we bought it were like 3,000 I mean he was asking 3,500 Erik's like will you take 3,000 the guys like yeah we're like okay well then I guess we have our bus now I mean so I mean we jumped in and maybe you know we could have done more research and you know had it checked out more but that's kind of how we are we just kind of jumped and jump into stuff for a little impulsive and sometimes it works out great sometimes we have to you know adjust but that's okay yeah and that was a little over a year ago in November and so we were kind of planning to do this over the course of the winter and get rolling into it and then I ended up getting laid off in December of last year so worked out almost kind of good because I was able to spend some a few months just totally prepping and watching YouTube videos and learning all about all the different configurations and all the different things that I needed to know and and then you know then jumped right into it the spring and we didn't have a place to build so Eric literally build it at the storage unit and used the house batteries on the van to power the the powers table saw yeah and all of this stuff different and we thought he killed the batteries but they're still working great so that was kind of a surprise to us yeah yeah they held up pretty well you know it's kind of done on the fly in all kinds of respects we had all the wood and stuff which was cool which we'll get to later but yeah all right well that's been our van I hope everyone it got something out of this and enjoyed the CNR our workmanship and the things that we've created and again our whole idea was to have a really comfortable warm space to for us to hang around in and you know there are times when the filled with the things that we loved that we weren't willing to give up some yeah to come with us if it is uh if we are stuck with 3-4 days of rain or anything we have a beautiful comfortable space that we can relax and hang out in and still feel comfortable you know and not be feeling like we're trapped in some tight little space you know yeah yeah we really love the fact that the shuttle bus having a windows all the way around gives us you know beautiful views and all these places that we love to visit so yeah I'm really happy we went with the shuttle bus I mean I really we would have had I think I I think it just worked out perfectly for us in terms of our materials and how we wanted to live and how we wanted to exist in the space so I think it just worked out the best that it could have so happy happy - more happy nomadz well we have a YouTube channel it's wander boom waa and de our space be oom my name is van der boom so we just changed the V to a W and now that's where it worked out perfect we we love to wander and the wander boom is on wander filming with whoo wand and yes and I Instagram is wander booming just add an ING to it and that's where we are there and I'm also doing a van building and bus building as a side business it's Bill's called Eric and his tools gave that a great deal of thought to figure out that it really it's really tricky name but you if you need to contact us or would like to contact us about any work that you'd like to have done with beautiful countertops or nice wood trim work or our whole bus build you can meet reach us at Eric and his tools at gmail.com you can contact us that way and you can see what we can do everything is linked linked down below down below you

Channel: Tiny Home Tours

Views: 539,186

Keywords: tiny home, tiny house, tiny home on wheels, van life, camper van, shipping container, design, tiny houses, tiny homes, tiny house tour, sprinter van, sprinter conversion, shuttle bus, shuttle bus conversion

Id: 5du70xfa_HE

Length: 41min 18sec (2478 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 04 2019