This Family Lives with NO BILLS and NO DEBT in a Beautiful Self-Built Tiny House

hi welcome to our bus scully [Music] so i'm jen my husband is jake he's outside with the kids we met in 2012. we dated for a couple years before we had our first son jacob in 2016 and then we got married in 2019 and shortly after had our second son justin [Music] it really came from just struggling like living paycheck to paycheck jake was working full time while i was with the kids and it just seemed like we never had enough time together as a family we originally were looking at like earthships and like other forms of tiny living that all requires buying land before you can even begin to build a home so that's when we found schoolies for a while it was just you know like something we saw on the internet on facebook like oh that's awesome i wish i could do that but just never thinking it would be reality for us because you're just so stuck in that get up go to work come home pay rent you know make the bills and it was really after our second was born that i came across a bus in new jersey that was only like 20 minutes from where we lived it was only 2 000 and it was just too good to pass up definitely at first i was like motivated because i felt like good you know i'm like i'm getting all this done i'm working so much but it definitely starts to take a toll i mean i would get off of work at six and work here until dark on the bus and then the weekend i would show up here in the morning and work all day long and i mean it gets tiring but in the end it's all well worth it it's definitely you know different realizing the things that used to buy all the time and all the unnecessary things we would have to then doing this and be able to save money and spoil the kids a lot more it's amazing to be honest it's pretty nice there was really a learning curve with this lifestyle it definitely took us a few weeks to you know really get the hang of what our solar system could handle and how long until our water ran out and when we had to like change the toilet bag but now that it's kind of settled down and we have a hang of it it's just really nice to have somewhere to call home that we made and we don't owe anybody for so i'm currently in new hope pa i work here at this farm it's pretty much as a landscaper caretaker of the farm the gardens the plants the trees a 2000 gmc bluebird six-cylinder caterpillar motor runs great got it for about 2000 drove it here and had it here ever since and just started building pretty much painted it within a day we got six solar panels that power the entire bus this is the shore power if anything was to go wrong with the solar or we didn't want to use it real simple to put in back here is actually the water hookup to where we either fill our tank or can just be straight hooked up to water we pretty much just turned the back of the underneath the bust into just storage we have a 100 gallon water tank and then yeah just our bed a little a little open area for a breezy day hang out relax this is a wall we built out of vintage soda crates we like put the back on this way so that we could put hooks and hang keys masks jackets and then the bottom has like the bottle holes so that's where we stuff all the kids shoes really like plants so we just kind of have plants everywhere these are like air plants and moss and a lot of these come from the farm here because they have a really nice greenhouse this is kind of like the little kitty corner they have a bed their litter box food water plants they love it too um this is where we keep like our electronics here we have the boyz is like tablets and games we have dvds this is like the playstation this is our internet it's like wireless it just needs to be charged so with this we can have internet anywhere we go it's really great we've had this cabinet for like ever i painted it green it was blue we've had it in like all of our past houses i just love it and it was such a perfect size for a bus so slim this is where we keep all the kids toys they don't have as much as they used to but they still don't even play with them they'd rather play with sticks our couch it's from home reserve and you can get like all different sizes i knew i wanted this couch so we built everything else first with the dimensions in mind but the nicest part about it is so in the storage you have all all of their tracks and more tracks than anybody could ever want it really helps having that extra space very simple to go back together this is our wood stove probably one of my favorite parts about the living room just because it's a wood stove and i can cook anything on it whenever i want another favorite part is the plants i do like plants that's pretty much what i focus on all the time the cabinets we actually got from ikea it was actually a better idea than trying to build them themselves as well as the sink and the faucet this is pretty much more ikea stuff i mean the shelves i built as well as the trim i made and put together and then actually my wife stained and polyurethaned for us this cutting block was actually from a thrift store that we got for a few bucks i believe limited dishes limited space really don't need much if we just rinse it and wash it right away it's great to have less dishes tiling it's just i think vinyl tiling very easy simple put on cat food calendar trash can and then this is our storage for all the kids snacks miscellaneous wipes diapers stuff like that the chips gotta have the chips the lights actually my wife found i forget where but i think they were actually meant for technically outside but they work great in here keep this place very bright at night the fridge i believe was about 300 3 something not a bad fridge it stores a lot of food it does the job and does not use too much power to be honest so this is our our hot water heater touch screen it pretty much is runs whenever you use the water we use the pump it'll automatically kick in and you can set it to whatever you want and then the washer and dryer it's a washer and dryer in one two hours three hours i believe to do a full load but it's great because you can just throw it in and leave and come back and it's done this is like the homeschool corner um it has like books again more of these baskets and just like shelves on the wall everything like being stacked is what keeps me sane we painted this with magnetic paint first so it's magnetic also and it's a chalkboard of course we have to have the school bus toy you have to have a school bus toy our flooring is the life proof vinyl planks but i really love the way it turned out i was scared it wasn't going to hold up because here there's lots of dirt and we have the door just open all the time kids are in and out but it's held up really well and i just love the way it looks this is one of our skylights this one does not open the back one is a hatch this is like my propagation station so i just like stick plants in water and wait for them to grow and i can't wait for them to grow longer and hang down i'm really happy we did them because i love the light especially for jake it gives him a place to stand where he doesn't feel like cramped they definitely leaked a bunch at first and it just kept taking like waiting for a rain and then going up and fixing where it leaked like a bunch of times but now we're good they don't leak anymore this is the bunk beds um for the boys the top is jacob's he requested rainbow walls he really likes it has glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling stickers he's collecting underneath here we have their pajamas these are just baskets that i zip tied together so that they would like give us the depth without having to make our own so the bathroom is where we spend the least amount of our time went to the thrift store we found this little cabinet a little wall shelf cabinet that we just put into the wall in here for all the miscellaneous things deodorant whatever we would need in here and then pretty much use cedar siding to wrap the entire bathroom with bamboo ledges just nailed right in they worked perfectly it's a composting toilet very simple we made it ourself versus buying one just wanted to give it a shot see if we could do it ourself obviously some artwork from a friend of ours and then actually this mirror was the rear view mirror to the bus itself it actually works perfect up and down you don't really need one too wide and then the shower was a great project pretty much feather finish concrete i believe it was i can't remember the exact name to it but it fits pretty good i mean we have a bench to sit everybody come in the kids can get in here together hang out one on the bench want a seat we did decide to save the emergency window so that we can open this and access the shower from outside or inside and just have a nice breeze while you're hanging out in the shower these are just tiles wood wood tiles that click together they were a different color but we cleaned them up and restained them to the darker color that we wanted and they're just over top of the concrete floor where the drain is and they just help keep us elevated off allow the water to run easier i actually like it a lot better than just having a concrete floor built a cubby hole in here for the soap the sponge everything like that we also had to seal it with a concrete sealer to protect it i think we did about two coats of that so that no water can penetrate you know soak into the walls it cause mildew or anything like that and then the plants just give it that touch this is our food pantry with more of the same kind of baskets where canned food rice beans packages kids snacks and then also the kids laundry their clothes and we just built the doors just took some siding and then this uh i can't remember what it's called it's like a weave type of material but it works perfect for it so this is the electrical closet we have four lithium ion batteries charge up and power the whole entire bus it was pretty simple to put together once i researched it enough and figured it out and then for safety reasons or anything if anything was to happen we have this fireball in here it'll explode pretty much extinguishing any any issue in here now the batteries are excellent they're probably one of the best batteries i thought we could get these are just drawers that we took out of an old vintage dresser we found on craigslist i think and so we actually like built the thing to put the drawers in because the dresser was too high itself but i really wanted these drawers these just house me and jake's like shirts and pants for the most part and then in this little cubby we have again the sliding um baskets with shirts this is our bedroom this is like a woven curtain so it closes and then it opens and i love it we have more storage over here for um our clothes it's a queen sized bed and this bedding i'm so in love with i've had it for years it's a king but i turned it sideways because i was determined it's so comfortable these curtains i actually made from blackout curtains from walmart and fleece that i cut up and hot glued to each other and then the straps are just placemats that i cut up and put velcro on the bottom to hold them up i um made these side panels i just glued preserved moss to them and i was thinking of trying to um like put air plants that'll like root into them at some point this big empty space is where our mini split is set to go it'll be a backup heat source in the winter and like a fan and air conditioner in the summertime have a mirror and some pressed flowers on the wall one piece of advice for anybody thinking of building a bus into a house would be to a lot way more time for it than you originally thought because pretty much every project definitely took more time than we were planning on and that's still true like i'm sure when we try to put our mini split on we think it'll take a day i'm sure it'll take us a week or something like that just take your time have fun don't stress yourself out about the small things you know everything can be fixed and just don't make yourself go crazy thinking it has to be a hundred percent perfect you know taking time designing it and just picture what you would want and go for it you know thanks for touring our bus the scully bus we're happy to show it off and uh just show you guys our lifestyle and the way we're to be living for a while and you can follow us at skully.bus on instagram i hope you guys enjoyed

Channel: Mobile Dwellings

Views: 3,192,331

Keywords: skoolie, bus conversion, school bus tiny house, school bus house, school bus conversion, skoolie conversion, skoolie family, house hacking, school bus, diy tiny house, diy rv, rv family, buslife, life in a school bus, family lives in a school bus, mobile dwellings, skoolie tour, bus conversion tour, inside a skoolie, skoolie walkthrough, house tour, architecture, diy building, diy carpenter, vanlife, alternative home, alternative dwellings

Id: C3DCzsJV168

Length: 13min 34sec (814 seconds)

Published: Wed May 05 2021