Skoolie Work of Art w/ Pulley Bed - Gorgeous Cabinets, Floors, and Ceilings

hi welcome to the twozie crew i'm liesel i'm stu and this is our school bus twozie we're here at schoolypalooza 2022 and we're excited to show you guys our bus my husband and i we love to cook so building a big kitchen was really important to us we wanted to have it be really functional to feel like you're not trapped inside of a small area because people in schooly life they think oh why would you want to live inside of a school bus you know you feel so enclosed so we wanted to make sure we had a big galley kitchen area we built a lot of cupboards and have a lot of fun drawers for lots of storage snack drawers my favorite drawer of the whole house definitely we found this awesome stove we repurposed it was all white and really covered in rust and really old and we sanded it down and got it looking pretty it's a gas stove which is awesome we love cooking on gas this was an awesome find being a mini mini version we got these countertops at our local home depot they're butcher block and they are fantastic we decided to cut this radius here we didn't want it to have to be a square because when you walk into the bus we kind of wanted to have this feeling we wanted a lot of people to come in and touch the wood to give it that nice oiled surface and it just you're not going to hit your hip when you walk into the bus so this this addition i really really like that we did for our kitchen here on our overhead countertops we had a lot of fun learning how to do these awesome glue ups they take a lot of time but they're definitely worth the effort they give a beautiful look of all these different types of hardwoods that we just bought at our local home depot our cupboards when they open up they're on hydraulics which i think is a nice touch it stays open we also added in motion sensor lights which are just on magnets which are great we added in a nice touch of maps on the inside as well which i really like so in these here we mostly keep stored our bulk tea because we're big tea drinkers and all of our bulk foods in these large containers here we had some issues at the very beginning with our cupboards flying open with bouncy roads and they would swing open and everything would fall out and it was kind of disastrous so we found these ball latches that you can tighten and screw down so it gives a tighter click which is awesome but we definitely want to upgrade to some type of magnet system that we have for our lower cabinets they're actually just child locks and so we lock it here from the inside and it stays locked the entire time we drive and then when we're ready to be parked somewhere we just unlock there so definitely want to find a way to integrate that for the upper cabinets i think that would be a great addition this sink here i can't talk enough about how great it is to have a large sink inside of a school bus it's multifunctional i do my laundry in it i you know hang up a clothesline wash my laundry in there washing big pots and pans i see in a lot of rigs they have those small sinks which are awesome for the space but i don't feel like they're as functional for washing bigger things i will say though when we first purchased this and it came in i was terrified of the size it felt so big i didn't i thought it was going to overpower the area but now i absolutely love having this deep sink our refrigerator is down here i love that it comes out on a glide and it just goes back in i think it's really convenient for the heavy heavy box itself it's a chest here and we've never felt limited by this space it definitely have to dig around and pull out different things but i love love we've been very happy with this i definitely would suggest a chest style fridge i had fears for the tall vertical standing ones that i wouldn't be able to secure the swing out so this it's not only tucked away but it also has a latch here and as far as power consumption goes our fridge has a setting where it switches to eco mode if we're low on battery or it's a cloudier day and we've never personally had any issues with it getting too hot and you know food is spoiling it stays pretty cold which i really like about it and behind here we have our tankless hot water heater and all of our plumbing system all on schooly and online and all on youtube we read that you can't put in a tankless hot water heater inside your bus because they have to vent and we didn't know where we were going to store it or where what we were going to do so we actually have it venting here through a vent on our top here and we included a simple thermal switch from a computer and so when it gets hot enough and the heat turns on the thermal switch kicks on which turns on a fan so it vents out here and if we're ever you know taking a longer hot shower or washing a lot of pots and pans we just open up our window and it vents that way and we haven't had any issues we have a carbon monoxide detector and a propane detector so i haven't had any issues having it in house this cupboard here is one of my favorites because it has hanging all of our lids and then here on the other side our pots and pans hang because i don't know if you guys get frustrated like i do trying to store in a bunch and you open up the cupboard and everything falls out so they stay tucked away here and also this is our countertop extension we call it when we're cooking and we have a lot going on we also use this as an extension for our countertop and over here we have our dishes we really like to use glass when you're in a school bus you're bouncing down the road how are you not going to have your glass break so we built this divider here for each plate to slide in nicely so there's less rattling and we kind of built it around what we have and again they're on those nice safety child locks which are fantastic i highly recommend having those and another overhead compartment which we store you know empty water bottles in our tea maker and this here is a really fun thing it's a surprise drop down mirror we didn't have a mirror anywhere in the house so we figured we'd add one it's nice for you know haircuts and whatnot this is our awesome little desk area here fun glue up with some cherry wood we also did this glue up here down the drawers which i really love keeps all of our papers organized and it also hides our awesome homemade composting toilet this was a cajon which is a box drum that we had built over a year ago and it was the seat to our desk and we were in need of a composting toilet so we just built on and added in a toilet there we have a sawdust on the side here in that drawer which is great tucks in and hides away so this is our little shower area over here there's not a shower curtain that goes with it because we were really adamant on not building any walls in our bus it was really important to have all of our windows open for that 360 panoramic view we definitely are abused junkies so we like to have that natural light come in in that natural space but with that we needed still some way to clean our bodies so we have a multifunctional shower here this is a trapdoor in the floor that lifts up and we inlaid in a sink that we bought and so you can wash your hair wash off your feet from your sandy from the beach do a little bird bath or for park somewhere where we don't have any neighbors we just drop down the window here and we have a hook that goes to the outside so we take outdoor showers most of the time which is awesome has an awesome hot water and cold water which is great and this here is our sneaky little medicine cabinet behind a picture frame it's hidden away which is really great so this area of the bus had a large transformation it used to be boxed in and that's where all of the first aid kit and emergency stuff was so we tore it all out turned it into an open shelf area which i'm very happy we did back here hosts what we call the brain of the bus all the fuses everything and we used to lie here but we painstakingly rewired and moved everything over here so it's more out of the way which is great and we added some cork onto it to add a little bit of our personalities into the bus to show our photography and home photos and same thing on the shelves here we really like these curves these curved corners so that was really a fun touch to do books um we really got into using copper as shelf bars which was really really a fun project to do so we just went to home depot and purchased a bunch of copper to give it that nice antique you know worn kind of look so we have those touches all along the bus as well and another cork board over here for you know fun mementos and stuff from trips [Music] [Applause] so when i was 16 my grandpa gave me his old camper van it was a gmc 1997 savannah and we built it out to be a comfortable camper together and i ended up living in that and traveling for eight years and then i lived in a backpack for four years after that just cooking on a jetboil and sleeping in a tent full time and then i saved up a bunch of money through truck driving to go on a motorcycle trip all the way down to ushuaia and then when code happened we were together and we just saw this bus on offer up and once we looked at it and once we'd walked around and realized that it was like the high ceiling to colin's body and it was something we really wanted to do we just impulse purchased it and then went for it and started building and the dream became a reality after that pretty quickly which was awesome so starting with the bus build the dream blossomed and we were really excited went through our demo demolition process really really fast had all of the oomph and power behind us and then reality of the situation kind of hits and you're in a situation where you realize how much work actually really has to go into building a vehicle and i really struggled with focusing on too much of the future product and oh when it looks like this or when we have this built and i was having a hard time staying concentrated and in my present moment so every day we would start the morning with writing a to-do list of what we wanted to accomplish from that day and we called it our purpose book so when we woke up we knew what was our purpose that day what we needed to stay focused on and that really was the fuel behind our foul our our fire excuse me to drive us to stay focused and stay motivated every day yeah we just had to keep on chugging and not freak out about the scale of the project because we would want to put a lot of beauty and like detail into a small thing and then it would just feel like insane building a bookshelf for four days you're like how are we ever gonna make it to the bed you know and then like how are we ever gonna you know finish the kitchen at this rate but we just kept pushing and pushing and pushing and we finished the bus in arizona and as the temperature just kept getting warmer and warmer and warmer we started pulling like 10 hour days and then 12 hour days and then like i don't know 24 hour days near the tail end of it i'd say that was also such a motivator because we were so close and it was becoming to feel so real and so beautiful that getting to that final product was also a huge motivator for us as well [Music] all right so these are our bookshelves they're secured to the steel ribs of the roof with these maple uh elbar things they've got like a countersunk self-tapping screw on the front that just goes in at like the perfect angle so on that one we support hundreds of pounds like i'm serious it's 100 pounds of clothes and then there's a ton of books up there so they're really sturdy and this is a three-quarter inch that's just resting here on the wall we've got a 12-volt edison bulb that's like wicked bright for a 12-volt light you know and it's set into a carved sunflower out of walnut yeah we cut the the walnut and the maple of different lengths to create this pattern and then we cut it in half long ways and book match them so we have two identical patterns for both and then we cut these walnut crescents here and drilled in little slots for the dowels and then cut all the dowels painstakingly to fit in between the steel rib and the walnut we stripped the bust down to sheet metal on the ceiling and floor and then we did a rust converter and then many many coats of oil-based primer and paint and then we got a closed-cell spray foam kit we got in our hazmat suits and we just sprayed this place down for several days and then we created a rubber barrier between all the steel ribs and the ceilings so there's no thermal bridging because we built it in phoenix where it was very apparent you know like when the sun hit the bus in the morning it was hot instantly and you couldn't even touch the steel so the blocking the thermal bridging was really important to us and we did kerf cuts through the quarter inch birch plywood for all the curves of the ceiling we did uh cut i think every quarter inch across 12 panels which takes a lot of time and then once you've got it it's like the scariest thing ever just crackling it into place but if you're worried about kerf cuts just do more of them and do them deeper and you'll be fine and our floor is also birch it's made of a half inch birch plywood that we ripped into six inch wide strips and then on a miter gauge we cut 60 degree angles on both sides which form hexagons and like the flower pattern and the 3d cube pattern and they're all glued down to another half inch of subfloor with an inch of insulation underneath that also in our ceiling we did these led puck lights we've got eight of them in the ceiling and two of them in the kitchen and then two in the rear and when they're all lit up at night it's really beautiful and like evenly lit we've got a max fan in the ceiling here and we went with the thermostat fan but we've never actually used it and we opted not to get the controller because it's really easy to just flick on and off to control the temperature in here and here's our wood stove we ordered this hobbit stove from salamander stoves in england and they had to write up a special invoice and ship it to us and i had to deal with customs to get it here because they're very rare and they don't have a distributor in the states but they're very happy to do business with you if you want one shipped to you and it was 1200 for the stove and the chimney and shipping and taxes which is quite reasonable i'd say because it's a really really really amazing stove yeah so the stove came with this chimney kit it came with two sections of triple wall and two sections of single wall that were for canal boats but on salamander's website you can choose between like a van kit or a bus kit or a canal boat kit or a tiny house kit with back exit or top exit and this stove fits nine to ten inch logs which i know is longer than the dwarf or the mini than the cubic mini so you can fit in really pretty hunky logs that will burn for hours and the air intake is this wheel down here it's very nice the door has this little um lip that sticks out so it's actually a very tight seal and the air that's let in through the bottom is brought into the firebox through a bunch of like weirdly shaped cast iron wall pieces that we take out when we're driving and then the gas that comes out of the combustion chamber goes into a secondary burn chamber where it burns off all the gas so then when you're burning hot there's no smoke coming out of the chimney and it doesn't get all over your roof which is another nice thing so for the hearth we wanted to raise up the wood stove off the ground of course because it's tiny it would feel kind of weird being down to our feet and we wanted to have wood storage so we built this super sturdy wood frame that we bolted into the floor which had arches here to support a three-quarter inch board and then a half inch hearty board that we also put on the walls in the back and we took those dimensions and then drew it out on our table and then cut all the tile to fit so that when we brought it in here we wouldn't have to deal with any funky angle as well the grout was wet not the grout the mortar was wet and we got the tiles from like mexicantile.com or something where they have this huge selection of beautiful hand-painted tile so we went through like mostly white and blue options some of them were like crazy busy and we were afraid of like overwhelming the space so we got these on a different site these terra cotta and then decided to just go with one belt of painted tile and these ones are kind of a bigger pattern um we bought this piece of sandstone at a landscape supply store in phoenix it was actually a big old flagstone it was like three feet by three feet for 20 bucks and got a diamond blades on angle grinders and put on masks and headphones and just jammed out and just had the best time it's super fun carving sandstone because it's like as soft as soap and we still have a ton i think we want to make some other stuff with it and they warm up really well when the stove gets up to like 500 degrees you can just like yeah get cozy by this stuff and it holds the heat for hours after the fire is out too so in the back of the bus here we have our bed lifted out of the way above this one eight foot couch and another five foot couch underneath each couch there's two tanks so all together we have 150 gallons of fresh water storage underneath both couches and they're all linked together with the pvc pipe which is the lowest point sunk into the floor so they all fill and drain at the same rate and over here we've got closet space and also access to the water tank drain down there and that right now is kind of like summer clothes because it's winter in arizona but we need t-shirts and sweaters at the same time and this is our main closet lift these off open this hatch and you can lift these organizers up to access all your clothes at the same time which is really nice because it's a huge chest and we thought about just making like little partitions and just like shoving everything in there but it would have been a pain to like pull things out and not know where you put things but with this you can just lift it up and see everything at once yes over here we have another bookshelf it's constructed in the exact same way as this bookshelf except for instead of that edison light we have these eye hooks for the closet and it's secured into the bus ribs and this is the one that holds a ton of weight when all those clothes are pulled up i mean i i have to kind of like put my whole body into lifting them and then these books are very happy but it's it's really sturdy so our bus came from oregon and it had uh the regular bus escape hatch right here that was so obscenely rusted that when we pulled off the ceiling it was just like orange and black streaks all over the whole thing so we thought about modifying it and like putting in a cool like circular window kind of thing but in the end we just ripped the whole thing out and then built one out of walnut and building something weatherproof from scratch is pretty challenging and frustrating but we used a lot of gorilla tape and a lot of clear silicone and did a lot of overlap in the design on the exterior and it doesn't leak we've been through a really rainy rainy winter and so far so good [Music] this space really just became goodness gracious something to be super proud of because it did involve goodness gracious so much work and so when we're laying in bed at night or we wake up first thing in the morning and i can touch my kitchen cabinet cabinets and open them up and remember all the hard work we went through to build that it really empowers a part of my heart and reminds me that i am strong and i am capable and if you have a dream no matter how crazy it feels you can actually accomplish stuff when you put your mind to it and yeah i i love looking at different projects and remembering oh remember when it was 115 degrees outside and we were out there sweating and chopping wood and putting this together and now we have this beautiful art piece to look at and feel really accomplished about so we want to live in the bus for several years to come traveling around the country and canada to different farms and learning as much as we can about market gardening because our dream is to buy a piece of property maybe in oregon somewhere nice and green maybe a valley or a mountainside and turn it into a market garden homestead and having the bus makes us you know makes us capable of traveling across the country and living on site and like seeing what other people are up to and educating ourselves uh while being in the comfort of our own home and then coming back to our property where we could also live on the bus while we're building our next house and setting up our farm [Music] [Applause] so in the back of the bus here we've got a big old maple and walnut light bar that has two leds on either side and above that we did a little cubby and put a cork board in the back so we could put up little pictures and butterflies and buddhas and this used to be that big old red you know lift this handle because you're gonna die and you gotta escape kind of thing but i chopped it right here and did a little welding and turned it around where you can just slip a bolt and nut right here and lock it because i looked at some lock sets that schooly builders use where you can like unlock it and lock it from the outside but didn't really seem worth it i also didn't want anyone breaking in to a you know poorly installed or cheap lock on the outside so this is a nice and easy solution this right here is our butterfly table we wanted to have a table that folded out to accommodate four people maybe five if you have like a chair right here and also not stick past this window like not block any of this window and it couldn't be any wider than this and those are our design constraints when we made this table of six hinges and pulls up like this there you go those fold out little arms and on the top we did a map of colorado with resin port over it we built a pulley bed in the back here so that we could access our back door also like load in big things if we wanted to help people move or just kind of maximize our seating area so then when you have friends over you don't have to like have them sitting on your bed and whatnot this feels like a whole different room when we lift the bed up in the morning you also don't have to make your bed you can just kind of chuck everything on there and crank it out of the way and i'll think about it which was really nice so we made the frame out of maple and walnut and on the bottom is oak plywood that we drilled a crazy dot art mandala into the bottom of the whole thing is held up by these cam cleats right here which have a 900 pound capacity on each and this is thick paracord we tried to do it with normal paracord and it slipped and crashed down it was terrifying and so it goes from these cam cleats to these cheek butts which are like horizontal pulleys and then there is a series of eight other pulleys and with pulleys when you go up and down you gain mechanical advantage and so we're not actually lifting like a 250 pound bed it feels much easier to do so yeah let's drop it and there you go so we have a really unique size of bed we actually just laid on a piece of plywood and measured our bodies to see how big maximum we could make it and then we just bought some camping mattress regular memory foam and cut it to the unique size to make sure it fits perfectly and we can use a full sheet fitted sheet to pull it around and it holds it all in really nice it's very comfortable one really fun thing about the bed well as well as we installed bubble levels to each side so if we're parked on a kind of a slant or somewhere that's more uneven we can pull up on one side of the bed and it can level us out which is really cool so we painted the bus with alkyd enamel we picked out the paints at home depot and those little paint swatches and we took them to a local paint company that mixed them up for us and we rolled it with four inch short nap rollers and i'd highly recommend rolling your bus instead of spraying it it's actually a lot easier than it sounds and it comes out really nice and alkyd enamel is good for cars it's been super durable so far we only have a couple chips around the bus and they came from like a significant knock from a rock like it it's standing up really well and it cleans so we spent a couple days sanding down the bus and doing tsp and acetone and then we did two coats of oil-based primer and then four coats of each paint preferably in like the morning or evening when the metal is not so hot because there can be bubbles or it can just streak and go on thin when the metal is hot this is our propane tank door we did a 25 gallon asme tank that's mounted up into the floor so it's like this big pretty pretty wide we call him chancho big boy and he was like 150 pounds empty and you just open this little gate lock to access the fill and the valve and all that so we went with four trojan t105 batteries just because they're cheap and they get it done and we've got them linked up in parallel and in series to create a 12 volt system and over here we've got two starter batteries and all these are linked together through a dual battery relay by blue c systems and this is a magnetic switch that switches over at 12.1 volts to combine or isolate both battery banks from each other so on a sunny day where we're not driving our starter batteries stay very healthy and on a cloudy rainy day where we're driving and there's no sun our solar batteries and our whole house system maintains a healthy voltage up on the roof we have 660 watts of renegy solar and we have a 30 amp renergie charge controller and with those panels and these batteries we've been pretty happy we were in like uh maybe like four or five days of just clouds and no sun at all and we did bottom out like very very very low every day we'd have to start the bus and like recharge a little bit and really watch our usage even like you know shutting off the fridge at certain points if we didn't have any important food in there so we are gonna get lithium batteries at some point but we're normally in sunny places because we need sun too we don't like being depressed and in rainy crappy weather so it works we're fine one of the last things we did for the bus was create these wood mosaics that we call them and the cool thing about them are that they are all the scrap pieces from our entire build so all of our leftover bits and pieces were able to go and create this beautiful piece of art which i love that we curved the corners and fit it into the inset of where it used to say school bus and yeah if you guys have any other questions about our build there's our instagram tag the jump to move to schooly life involves a lot of fear um fear of am i gonna fit in with the lifestyle is it gonna fulfill me am i gonna feel like i have purpose still in my life through living in a school bus and traveling every day those were a lot of questions that came up for me personally but what i've learned is about the jump when you're there you get to find new creative things about yourself and your personality you meet tons of people that have unique homes and you meet these wonderful people through this lifestyle that took that jump in that leap to see if it fits for them and also it takes you out of the everyday nine to five i come home to the same apartment that looks the same as my next door neighbors and you feel like you're left or you're living life just in a different scenario or the same scenario but in a different way you get to feel unique i guess and special i definitely would say don't feel limited by the idea of living in a small space because it actually forces you to be outdoors more forces you to be involved in your surroundings more and it also since you can customize it however you need to customize it for yourself you can really feel comfortable in a small space which is great uh thank you guys for watching we're slow bus underscore fast house on instagram and if you want any custom wood mosaic for the front or back of your van or bus we're gonna start making those and keep in touch with us on instagram if you have any questions about how we do what we do we are also going to start working on building custom teardrop trailers and also gypsy caravans that's what we're really interested in for our future work because we enjoyed creating this so much that company name is tight grain if you'd like to check us out we'll get started on there and yeah thanks so much for watching [Music] you

Channel: Tiny Home Tours

Views: 169,368

Keywords: tiny house, tiny house on wheels, living big in a tiny house, 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, diy tiny house, diy home, school bus conversion, van life, tiny homes, school bus, tiny house living, bus conversion, skoolie conversion, bus life, tiny house tour, how to, skoolie build, tiny house build, shipping container

Id: klMZfi8FrTE

Length: 32min 23sec (1943 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 31 2022