The Most Cleverly Designed School Bus Conversion - A True Apartment On Wheels

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello my name is Danny O'Brien I'm from New York City and this is a 2001 Thomas Freightliner 38 feet long and has a 5.9 Cummins engine I've been living in my bus for about six months I've been on the road for a little over a month come on in for a tour when you first enter the living area I brought as many books as I could it was one of the challenges for the build was to make room and also bookshelves strong enough to hold them while I'm on the road but we managed to do that we put a lot of this natural kind of pallet wood on the walls it's throughout the whole bus I have a about an eight foot couch here and part of it is it will open out and I have another cushion and it makes about a full size bed underneath it are two drawers where I have all kinds of art supplies and things stashed this side I decided to make another shelf here for lots of office supplies and maps and things like that and more books I have a printer this is about my skateboard from New York City that I used to ride every once in a while to my clients and I decided to bring it aboard I didn't know where I'd put it and it ended up here and it's kind of cool because I can hang my jackets on it now and I can also take it off and ride it having spent the last 33 years in New York City I'm kind of headed for quieter places I love nature and have always been a camper and I have a young son he's actually 23 now but every year of his life since before he could walk we were out in the woods camping and I grew up camping so I I'm kind of returning to that and this this bus is really giving me great access to beautiful places on the other side is a table that I've had in my life for many years it was my desk that I'd work at and do lots of projects and I had to cut about eight inches off of it so that it would fold flat against the wall underneath it is the bench that goes with it in this table I can actually pull off the wall and move to the middle of the room and put two more legs on and then the lamp here will string up a cross beneath the fan and hang directly over the table and I can seat about six people around the table which is pretty impressive it's it's tight but but it works now after the build was complete in North Carolina I drove to Florida to do a little business driver's license and things like that and and then drove all the way up to Maine to my cousin's farm in Maine and spent the beginning of winter in there was a lot of snow and very cold and I I'm so happy that I have this dwarf 4 K wood stove it basically kept me alive in in Maine and I would sleep on the couch in here and the really cold nights right in front of the fire I was actually cozy but a little bit scary so moving deeper into the bus I have I have a pantry space here lots of room for storage for my food there's an open shelf here with my spices and oils and things like that I have a cover that I'm making eventually it's a basically a coffee burlap bag that I'm gonna unroll it's very beautiful and that will help protect all that stuff from the fire in the winter months further on I mean this is probably the best kitchen I've had in in my life actually the most counter space I've ever had it's a nice red oak countertop all kinds of storage in this kitchen I'm still finishing details like the curtains and like the drawer handles for these drawers a lot of people think this is an induction top but it's not it's actually propane gas I'm a bread baker so I had to have my oven and I have a nice deep sink a berkey water filter to filter my water I have I wanted to keep it open in here so I didn't enclose the shelving I left it all open with baskets and I can move everything around and surprisingly enough everything's pretty much stays put except for things like the mirror which taught me that I need to put that down I have refrigerator which is a winter refrigerator there's a big handle I have prepared for that also but it can be refrigerator on both sides or this side here can also be a freezer but right now there generator one of the the design issues for me was I wanted to create separate rooms I wanted to have a living area and a distinct kitchen so this this block here in the middle that kind of creates this flow becomes all storage I have lots of storage in this this goes about two feet back more pantries my bathroom supplies and some storage containers and things and then in here this is a very deep closet I have hanging hanging all the way across and then in the back behind the hanging clothes are twelve inch shelves and then these drawers are three feet deep I have two very deep drawers summer and winter okay if you're wondering how I do might change over the whole into the bedroom through the wall is like a pass-through but also it serves a function I can close this on cold mornings and start a fire in the wood stove and then I open my bathroom door and the heat will actually go straight into the bathroom so I have a nice warm environment to take a shower because it does get pretty chilly in here sometimes a bathroom is a it's red cedar I stepped down off that wheel well and now I can stand up luckily I'm not so tall and I have a full shower I have a composting toilet the shelf this is a duck that I got when I was a kid from my dad I've carried it around in all my bathrooms and that's about it for this room over a course of two years while I was working on a contract with a client I designed and designed and researched and measured and every spare moment I had I was sitting with my drawing paper and luckily I have some design background so it will a really fun project I've basically spent about two years designing and then because of the way things were landing with this contract ending my work in New York City was collapsing my business because I was away so much I was I was traveling overseas with this particular client my son was graduating college my apartment lease was expiring all these things happen at once and luckily I saw it two years out and had this plan in motion and so when the contract ended mid-july I had to the end of July to pack up all my things and drive to North Carolina where the bus was waiting and I had this incredible crew of the stasi Jeff Quinton and Chris and we spent a couple months working non-stop day and day out on this bus and I am very happy here so this is my bedroom there is a wheel well to deal with when you don't go straight through the bus when you have a hallway to the side you end up having to deal with the wheel well so the way I chose to deal with it is to step up on it I continued the oak floor throughout and it gives me a little step into the bedroom where I have more books I have a couple little nooks where I can put candles or a drink or whatever and then there are a couple gas pipes I put on the wall to go through the hatch on the ceiling up onto the up onto the deck so up here on the deck I my priority was I am a yoga practitioner and I wanted to have a cool spot to practice I mean like what better cool spot is this one of the issues was though if I was going to enter or exit from the bedroom I had to make a hatch that was flat so we designed this hatch so that I can pull it up like this and then from the bedroom I can open the inner hatch and climb out up here I have four solar panels they each are 320 Watts apiece the front one I had a little accident on the way here it shook loose and shattered so I bought another one and that's actually 325 that's why it's 1285 instead of an even number but these are serving me very well so phase 1 of the build happened in Florida I bought the bus in Florida and while it was there I had it painted and had some lights installed where the flashers were and put new rubber all the way around and then I also had these that was locked I also had these bins or so this one I carry my tools in I carry wood in this one when I'm you know when I get to where I'm going I'll get wood and cut it up I have a chainsaw in the back for my wood stove and that's about it right here so in the back one of my priorities was to have a garage and a lot of people refer to their garages this is mine and I have my camping gear my climbing gear I have more tools I have my chainsaw in here I keep extra water in here an extra propane tank I have a generator that I can fire up in case the Sun goes away for a long time on this side I have my four lithium-ion batteries the inverter is here I have built shelves and have lots of storage above I keep my drum back here and eventually I'll have a tarp that comes off the top and I'll make a shop out of this area up here in the cockpit as they say I haven't really changed anything I've left it pretty much the same driving wise I put this little tapestry dangling across the front windshield just to keep the Sun out and keep it a little cooler up here where there is some changes up top here there's a little kind of where I keep my puja in the in the yoga tradition puja is like an altar and I was a yoga teacher for 18 years in New York City so it's something I hold fairly dear I added a backup camera and I can use it it's on all the time while I'm driving I can turn it off at night because otherwise it'll blind me but it helps a lot so that I don't run things over and I could see what's going on back there there's an outlet here to plug in my phone and my UE boom speaker for my navigation other than that that's pretty much all that's going on up here I have no idea how long I'm gonna last I think that I would like to do it a couple or a few years and then not sure after that I do have a plan with my son kind of like loose loosely sketched out he has a degree in in environmental biology and his kind of a one of his dreams is to start some kind of sustainable farm and I have a little building experience and I could if we could combine efforts and maybe purchase a small piece of land for him then I could basically roll onto his land and have a house right available he could continue with whatever he's working and I could I could start you know building the farm for him well thank you for taking this tour through my bus my home if you'd like to see more check the link below you

Channel: Tiny Home Tours

Views: 1,187,718

Rating: 4.9355497 out of 5

Keywords: tiny house, tiny house on wheels, living big in a tiny house, tiny house england, tiny house uk, tiny house movement, tiny home, small house, small spaces, small house design, alternative living, architecture, affordable home, off the grid, small space living, tiny house life, tiny home uk, diy tiny house, diy home, school bus, school bus conversion, skoolie conversion, skoolie tour, skoolie bus conversion, skooliepalooza 2020, skoolie build, skoolie conversion tour

Id: aSSZzR6zllY

Length: 14min 44sec (884 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 21 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/PerNewton]

Fantastic. A great path you’ve chosen after years in the City.

[u/Mdhdrider]

How much weight was added to this bus from its original weight? All that wood has to add a lot.

[u/Garfield-1-23-23]

Very nice-looking bus and I'd love to have it, but all I can think of are niggling critiques, so what the hell:

• I don't understand why so many wood stoves have some wonky bent-up flue going to the roof. It's pretty clear they work best when straight. I wonder if in this case he cut the hole and then changed where he put the stove. Also, how do people get insurance with a wood stove? It's my understanding that a wood stove is an instant no.
• As is a roof deck.
• That fridge setup looks like it would be a huge pain in the ass to get anything out of, especially if you were parked uphill. Maybe that's the appeal, they cut down on food and drink consumption.
• I know people dislike the center-aisle layout, but to have to step over the wheel well in an un-roof-raised bus to get to the bathroom or the bedroom would probably get old fast, even for a shorter person.
• Kitchen knives (I guarantee they're razor sharp in this bus) directly in line with the driver, a song as old as ... THUNK.

To reiterate, it's a very nice build.

[u/cgott84]

From driving an RV around NZ I can tell you he's gonna have avalanches of too much shit on shelves everywhere... With much less tchochkes on surfaces we constantly had bullet items.

Cool looking build though