The outside looks like a school bus, but the inside blew me away!

It took us 6 months to build this bus. I build the bus permanently, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. My little painter. The terraces are essential for us. When I designed the bus, I knew I wanted this scalable terrace. I knew it right away. We thought that if you could integrate your outdoor house into your indoor house like this, then why not do it? It's already a tiny life. You don't need to be smaller. We built a school bus because we wanted a white and fresh page, but the main thing was a feeling of openness. We built it like a studio. Come in. Million Bones makes this house our little house. Hi, I'm Shane. I'm Elisabeth. Welcome to the Bay Wagon, our home on wheels. So, before living in a school bus, we worked on event production. We traveled the country, worked from event to event, built the infrastructure before arriving. And living in a hotel is a bit tiring. So we wanted to be able to carry everything with us, including the dogs. We built a school bus because we wanted a white and fresh page. We thought we could make the school bus the way we wanted it. So it took us six months to build this bus. Seven days out of seven, almost 12 hours a day. I did it as if I had a full-time job. No days off, nothing. We just got to work and finished it. We had a deadline to follow. We got married in Jackson Hole in September and we wanted the bus to be there. So we started in the spring and it had to be finished in the fall. Every time I didn't work, I helped him get on the bus. So we built the bus permanently 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. My little painter. We had to have a big kitchen. This is the water I love. And then it leads directly to the side terrace, which is really nice. The terraces are essential to us. When I designed the bus, I knew I wanted this flammable terrace. I had it right away. I had seen one online, so someone had made one and I was going to copy this idea. But most importantly, it was a feeling of openness. We built it like a studio. The bus purchase price was about $ 7,000. And in total, for the construction of the bus, we are at about $ 50,000 or $ 55,000. This lifestyle works very well in a school bus, because I decided to become an itinerant nurse. We can see all the nice places. Being on vacation and Shane can participate in events all over the country. This bus was a unique school bus of its kind. It took me two years to find it. It is equipped with a 5.9 diesel engine with 24 valves. And the rear tires are a real Allison MT643 transmission. So, the mountain transmission, which is not common in school buses. It is in a way the holy grail of transmissions. The four rear tires are locked, so they all roll together. So we never got stuck. We were in the deep snow, the deep mud, the deep sand and we practically got out of everything. It is a front and rear tire suspension, not just the rear. So it rolls on the road like a pillow. We travel 10 miles per gallon with a 100-gallon diesel tank. We therefore have a range of 1000 miles. It's nice, it's fun to drive, it's really great to drive. It's one of my favorite cars to drive. Before putting the rear axle on it, it was 31.6 inches. It was therefore less than the length of most national parks, which is what we are looking for. Now, when we put the bumper on it, it is a little longer. It measures 35 inches and I measure a little less than 8 tons wide. We have one of our axles. We are about to get it down for you. You go down this chain, you unhook the two ropes, you press a button inside and all of a sudden, it goes down. You are about to see. So, this is the first bridge. This is the most fun one. This is the one we spend the clearest time on. We go straight out of the living room or the bedroom or any other place. We are people from the outside. The school bus is already a small house. We thought that if you could integrate your outside house into your inside house like that, then why not do it and give you a little more space to relax. It's already a tiny life. You don't need to be smaller. So, there is an ovan hanging right there. And there is another hook over there, right next to the ladder. And it comes out a bit like a circus tent where it comes out with two weight bags. Two big poles that go underneath. It's a super cool oven actually and yes, it covers all that. We have a second oven right there for when we do projects on the side in the rain. You can simply open this one much more easily and it comes out on its own. So, there are two ovens on this one. So, it's another terrace. It measures about 16 feet by 8 tons with all kinds of storage. There are five fishing rods up there. The solar panel goes up there. Starlink is up there. Half of the front of the bus is solar. And the back half is the bridge. The solar panel also moves. It is on a T-jack. So, when you press a button inside, the seating rod opens. And when it opens, it raises everything at an angle of 33 degrees so that you can better enjoy the sun in winter, which is partly the reason why we have been off the grid for so long, by conserving so much energy. Until we moved to Seattle, we never even needed a generator. Now, we use it. Except for the mess of painting here, because we were repainting it the other day and it rained. But we have an outdoor table. We installed everything as an outdoor cooking stand for when we do a barbecue. The barbecue is wired to the propane of the bus, which is a huge 35-pound tank, I think. We use it to prepare it on site to cook it. Normally, Elisabeth is sitting on a chair over there, lying in the sun, but not today. We have a real door. So, a massive wood door. I built this thing from Facebook Marketplace. That's where I got the door. That's where I got everything. We were able to do it at a really affordable price because almost everything that was there was just recovered, which is pretty cool. The name of the bus is therefore the school bus wagon and because of that, we wanted to follow in a way the Toyota T100 look. So we kept the classic Toyota stripes on both sides slightly different and everything was done with paint for the house. We didn't spray anything for vehicles. We just touched it up as we went along and we did it with rollers. You can do it with rollers. Don't listen to everyone. You don't have to do it with automotive paint. So the bridge, the bridge is entirely welded. Everything is welded in category A, E, C steel, channeled. It's beautiful. It has a loading capacity of about 20,000 pounds, according to my configuration. Solidly welded and bolted so that we can easily load a trailer behind us. We don't have any at the moment. We have a car, but we don't load it. And then the air conditioning up there, it's the mini split for the interior. The only thing that a lot of people don't think about when they build their school buses, is the storage of their tools, the storage of their things, bikes, snowboards, everything you like, fishing, equipment. I built a huge garage for ours. Even if it's only 32 feet from the tip of the tail, you don't notice when you're inside that there's an 8TX 5-foot garage with everything in it. I have 150 gallons of internal fresh water that is entirely isolated, so it never froze. I have all the tools you might need to build another school bus here. Another thing people don't think about is your dirty laundry. Where are you going to hide it? Do you just leave it on the floor or put it in a corner? Well, I built one in the garage. I put a laundry bin. You can see a basket full of my dirty clothes right there. And you'll see when we get inside, there's a passage from the main living room that goes directly into the laundry bin and you can throw a lot of things in there. So, when we get to the place where we're going, I made sure that all my material connections are here on one side. So, when you come back to any place, you're usually connected directly. So we have a connection point right here to be able to feed electricity if we're on a camping trip, which doesn't happen often. We have a water pipe here, so we can connect to water under pressure and run it through all the pipes. And we have 150 gallons of fresh water here. All of this together, we can disconnect from the network for two and a half weeks before we just need water. It's the heater. This and the oven are the only two things that work with propane. The paint strips, following the Toyota theme, I just thought they looked cool. Tell me they weren't. You're about to see the bus start to go down. It goes down from four to five inches with the suspension and rails after a short stop. Everything compresses and what that does is that it makes it a solid base. So, we don't have the shaking of the suspension like traditional buses or motorhomes or anything else. As soon as it deflates, it's like being on a house frame. It doesn't move. Since Shane showed you the outside of the bus, I'm going to show you the inside of the bus. Go inside. So, when you enter the bus, you'll see that there's stone all around. We have blue paint shelves here, just an extra storage space. In a bus, you always need storage for everything else. And then we decided to keep the front of the bus like the real school bus because Shane loves it and it looks pretty cool. Just when you enter the bus, you'll see our medium-sized refrigerator. It contains a refrigerator and a freezer. We decided to opt for this arrangement, to have it like this because it corresponds to our lifestyle. This side is our pantry. It's a normal-sized pantry, four drawers containing all the food you can have. We have locking mechanisms on all our drawers because otherwise you're in the bus and things will just open. Now, I'm going to show you the rest of the kitchen. OK. So here's our concrete sink. It's 32 inches. We chose this 32-inch concrete sink and I know it's big for a school bus, but we also have an extra ton of space that you'll see behind me. It's our sink. So, it takes up a lot of space, but we wanted a very large sink and it's huge. The drain is useful in the sense that it's above the sink. So, the dish dries above the sink. It will drain into the sink itself. It's very useful for not taking up space. And it's also kind of hidden between these two cupboards, which is really, really nice. We also decided to opt for upper cupboards. It was a last-minute decision. They open up a lot of storage, plates, cups, all kinds of things. On this side, we also have more counter space here, more sliding drawers with utensils. All the kitchen space, all the cupboards are suitable for everything we need. We have a full kitchen oven. I love to cook, so it works with the propane here. And a full oven so that we can cook, make bread, everything I want. This part was actually connected to the kitchen, but we didn't want any more window space, so he actually disconnected it, rewired it and put it here. So, it actually controls the oven here, which I found pretty cool. There's also more storage here, shelves, you'll see baskets, you have to find room for everything in a school bus. Each space counts. So, since we don't have a lot of space here in the bus as far as the walls are concerned, we have incorporated art everywhere in the bus. Even the doors are works of art. Incorporated on the cupboards, even on the side here. Art is everywhere and it is designed on purpose. We also added a spice rack here that can be removed. I love to cook. It's very convenient to have it right next to the kitchen. Just on the other side, right next to the sink here, is our full-size trash can, which is really nice to have a full-size trash can in a bus. Coming back to the bus here, we have our silo. One of our favorite parts of the bus. Made from the floor of a box trailer, it is probably about 100 years old. All the counter space here is made of it. We sealed it, repaired it and you can even see some of the screw holes on the top of the cupboards. We decided to install a television here. This television rotates by about 180 degrees. You can watch it outside on the terrace. You can watch it in the kitchen. You can watch football wherever you want. The television goes down on a button. So, this part is in the work plan here. We added a little breakfast corner here. So, in this bench here, it also has a double lens. There is a freezer below. No more food storage because we like to cook. On the other side here, there is food for dogs and more supplies for dogs, I guess. I made the cushions and I made them about 5 days ago. We changed them because we wanted something new and different. So, everything you see is handmade. Shane and I literally made everything in the bus. So, here we have Mison's niece. She is about 10 years old. And this little guy here is a tuna. These are our little babies. One of my favorite parts of the bus is the ceiling. We decided to opt for a blue paint ceiling. I think it's paint killed by skeletons. We had to do a lot of things to get this look and it was painful to assemble it, but each piece is different, which makes it very unique. I chose where I wanted to place them. So, if you look up, each piece has blue and each piece is very unique in its appearance. We decided not to opt for a ceiling because we extended, as Shane said, all the solar panels and the terrace at the top. Shane fits perfectly here. I fit perfectly here. We found it more comfortable here and more comfortable to keep it as it is in the bus. So we decided not to opt for a ceiling. In the bus here, it measures about 1.90 meters. We have a spray foam insulation throughout the bus. We have about 4 to 5 inches of spray foam. The ceiling, the walls and the floor have about 1.5 to 2 inches of spray foam. And then we also have the floor lining at the bottom. The bus is very comfortable and warm. So, this is our little wood stove that we have here. We also have a mini split that is behind us. It also has heating. We haven't used it yet. All we have is this wood stove. We probably have to feed it every 3 to 4 hours depending on the temperature. Our wood storage is below. So we're going to use this straw here. It's the ramp. And so we cut the wood over there. We put the wood here. And that's how we warm up. We decided to use the tile behind. And it's a little close to the bed. Yes. But we have thermal protectors. So we had no problem with that. This is our little dog cave under the bed here for the nephews. She likes to sleep here. We decided to opt for a double bed. This allowed us to gain a little space in our alley. The bed rises because we have storage in the back. Behind is all our winter storage, our camping stuff. Everything is in the back here. There is also storage on the side. Sliding drawers. There are 6 huge drawers for all our clothes that we need. We don't have suspended clothes. We just folded everything. It's just for the lights here. All these buttons control something. Most of them are outside. One controls the trolley that lifts the bridge. We have all our side lighting and our front lighting as well. And all these buttons are useful. Very good. So, the last part of our bus is our bathroom. It's a full bathroom here. It's in hardwood here that we decided to make a little more rustic. We have compost toilets that we made ourselves. It's very private here in the back, which is very pleasant. And then this little door here is our little laundry room and leads to the back of the bus. So, we put our laundry there. The laundry is hidden, again, from space. We had to think of all the different places where you can put things. So we decided to put a little laundry room there and you can just close it. The school bus. When I get in, I feel at home. It's comfortable, it's cozy, it's warm. I don't feel like I'm in a white camper van I feel like I'm at home. I love every second. I feel fulfilled when I get in. The bus makes me feel, as Shane said, but even more than at home. It's our home. It's where I come home from work. Shane is already preparing me to eat. The dogs are on the bed and welcome me. The school bus is where we're supposed to be. I wouldn't change anything. It makes me so happy to be in a school bus and I feel like everyone should build a school bus because why not? Thank you for watching this week's episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Don't hesitate to like, share and subscribe. I'll see you soon for another unique home visit.