We bought a shuttle bus & gutted it to make a tiny home

Behind us is our tiny home. We have the bottom slats that pull out, creates a bed. So if we ever have any company, they fit completely fine in here. So the projector just projects onto the screen that we hang here. And it's way too bushy for the bus, but we did get a really good deal on Facebook Marketplace with some leftovers. We have tons of storage inside. This is my absolute favorite part of the whole bus. Hi, I'm Amy, and this is my partner, Mike, and our rescue pup, Gibson. And behind us is our tiny home that we affectionately call Ronda. We have been living in Ronda for just over a year now. We've spent the last two winters down in Baja, and then we go back home and we work for about six months and we live full time in her. So the bus is just under 25 feet and about eight feet wide. First, we went for a van and they wanted $80,000 to get one. And that's just way overpriced. So we got the shuttle bus for a reasonable deal. And we had so much more space and opportunity to build. It was just a better route for us. What allowed us to do this sooner than I think if we had just gone with a car payment and the insurance and all of the other things that come along with that, now we own our home outright. Here at the front of our bus of Ronda, we have a 2002 E450 with a 7.3 litre. Super reliable engine, the milli-mile motor. That's why we went for the shuttle bus. We have a custom little house door we put on. We originally had the bus doors, but they're a bit rusted out and we just decided this is a little more homey. So we swapped her out to have a nice pane of glass throughout it and gives us a wonderful view. With the outside of the bus here, we wanted some sort of a table slash bar kind of standing area. So as we come back, we just mounted this foldable table. Perfect. Comes in nice and good. It's perfect height. It's an awesome little bar set up. Coming down later, we have the shore power on this side. Our electrical underneath our couch is right here. So we kind of had to put the shore on the opposite side of where it's normally at. Coming back, we have deleted two windows. We put two and a half inch insulation foam board inside. Butyl tape around all of the aluminum paneling and riveted it all tight to the steel. Coming around to the garage at the back of the bus, we have our dually opening, beautiful view from our bed. We kept the original doors because they just work perfect. We put some tongue and groove cedar paneling along both doors just to match the inside roof and everything else. We have tons of storage inside. 65 gallon freshwater tank below here in this black tube. This is where we keep all of our dump system. Easy access. Just pop the cap off, slide everything out nice and easy. So climbing to the roof up top here, we put floodlights out and a camera on the back. Above that, we have a deck that we had welded. It is four feet by five feet. It's perfect for watching the sunset. Our overall weight of the bus is 15,500 pounds. Coming around to the driver's side of our bus, we have our on demand Fogati water heater. It's perfect. It doesn't waste much water. It heats up pretty much on demand. And beside that, we have our outdoor shower. It's perfect. Instead of filling up your gray tank, you just set up outside, wash off after surfing or paddle boarding. And now that we're done with the outside of the bus, let's make our way to the inside. Welcome to Ronda. This is our front entry coming in. We got our freshly Mexican tile that we just put down. For the floor, we just did some nice gold trim around. Got some laminate underneath. We also built this little shoe rack just in the front here to keep the dirt from traveling in and out of the bus. We took live edge cedar, tried to throw that above the driver and the ledge here. Up here, we have the wonderful sound box. This is my pride and glory right here. Got a little bit of hoodie storage in here for myself. We kept the front window as it came. We just switched out the glass, make it nice and pretty and kind of put some nice little detail trim around it. Next up, we have our shower coming up. My lovely fiance, Amy, is going to introduce and show you the wonderfulness of it. So here we have our full size shower. I believe it's 36 by 36 inch pan. It was kind of hard to source RV pan that would work. So that's why we have this gigantic shower. We have the Nebia by Moen shower head, so it's supposed to be very low flow. So in the bathroom, we did carry on the cedar slot ceiling. We have this nice little window here for ventilation with a fly screen on it. We did have to level out this wall. The bus is unfortunately very curved, so that made tiling it a little bit difficult. But we leveled that out and then just shoved some insulation in there. And then we have this tile that I love. It's handmade in Italy, so it's way too bushy for the bus. But we did get a really good deal on Facebook Marketplace with some leftovers. We did our own composting toilet, so we bought a urine diverter off of Etsy. I really didn't want to pay 1200 Canadian for something that I felt like we could do ourselves. And so far, it's worked out great. And then we have a little medicine cabinet that I rebuilt with the same cedar that's around the rest of the bus in here. I begged Mike to install this Nautilus shower door, and it was expensive, but it was worth every penny. Save my sanity. So now we'll show you guys our gigantic couch. All right. Coming out of our shower, we have our lovely couch. We have the bottom slats that pull out, creates a bed. So if we ever have any company, they fit completely fine in here. All the cushions are handmade from Amy. Did a hell of a job. Also, we had all this random space behind. So, I mean, why not turn it into storage? Underneath the couch, we have our full electrical system. Everything is all Victron. We have the 3000 watt inverter. The Orion is the DC to DC charger, which runs from your alternator to your batteries. We have 1200 watts that charge our 560 amp hour batteries, 150 to 70 MPPT charge controller. And then we also have our 120 setup and our 12 volt setup. It's been working great for us. We also have the knockoff Laguna mount so we can actually have a nice setup with dinner and actually eat together. With our ceiling here, we did quarter inch tongue and groove cedar. Turned out pretty good. It's kind of hard making everything fit on such a curve. With that, we did the little puck lights going in each one. It's on a dimmer switch, so it's pretty nice. Now that we're done with the couch area, we're going to start moving into the back. This is my absolute favorite part of the whole bus. I told Mike that I need to bring my espresso machine. I don't know how we're going to do it, but just make it happen with the electrical. So he did. And we love him for it. So I get my nice espresso every morning. So in this big drawer here, we have all of our plates and bowls. They're all ceramic. So just in between them, we put these little drawer liner things. And so far, touch wood, nothing has broken. The fridge itself is just a 120 volt fridge. So in here, we can fit about two weeks of food. Honestly, probably more. We just have so much fresh storage. So we love that because with having such a big water tank, we can go off grid for quite a while so we don't have to run back into town for groceries. We can just stay put and relax. We do have this huge pantry. We have tons of dry storage. And then we do have space up here for when we go back to Canada and need a coat. So that goes all the way into the top of the fridge as well. On the driver's side of our bus, we do have our big old sink. It's got a cover on it that we double as a cutting board. We have a full range of in here. So we've got the oven and then the three burner propane stove. I love the oven. I love to be able to just chuck in a pizza for feeling lazy or do some cookies or whatever we want to do. So in here we have our little secret hidden drawer. All of our electronics, the drone, all of the stuff that we don't necessarily want people to be able to walk in and just see right away. And then under here, we do have our water heater. So we've got hot and cold water throughout the whole bus in here. We do have dog food storage. He's a pretty big boy. So we need somewhere to put that. Here we have the water heater control panel. And then this just turns on and off our water pump. And then up here we have this roof hatch. So we kept the original roof hatch. I did want to do like a cute skylight. But after my dad told me that there's absolutely no way that I would get it to seal, I decided to just listen to him for the first time in my life. And we left it. And I'm so happy that we did. It gets really hot through here. Obviously, with it being on the top of the bus, it would have been just an absolute heat blast coming through, I think, if we made it glass. So and recently I made this bug screen. So I just repurposed some old mesh from like the house windows and just glued this fabric over it. So this pulls off just because the flies down here in Baja are absolutely terrible. And then you can just pop this up and then get onto our rooftop deck up there. We have the most important part of our bus, which is our dog Gibbs. He's gigantic. He's about 90 pounds. So he needed his own space that we could just tuck him away and he could feel safe and also be out of our way. So he's got his little dog house here that he loves. He shares it with his roommate, his Goosey. And then in our bed, we just have a queen mattress back here. It's our mattress from home. So we just took our Casper that we had and we just had to cut two inches off of it. And that fit perfectly. I'm about five, eight, Mike's five, ten ish. And we can both fit in here. We can sit up in bed, which was important to us. We got some cheap little lights off of Amazon. They're just rechargeable. And then back here, we just have a shelf with some more of our little trinkets on it. I recently installed a little roller blind here, so this is just for Gibbs, because he does like to jump on and off the bed when we're not here. So that is our boundary so that he can't get up here and then hurt himself when he jumps down. And we do have magnets in our ceiling. So we put these up there and then that's how we watch TV at night. So the projector just projects onto the screen that we hang here and then it just slips down the opposite side of the bed by the doors there. But we're not using it. So if you come in here a little bit closer, we do have all of this hidden storage down here. So you just pop the magnets off and then this is our closet space and in here. So we do just have more storage space. You can fit all of these little baskets in here. So it is actually quite a bit of storage. And then if you stick your hand all the way down here, that's where we shove all of our dirty laundry. So it's kind of out of sight. And then that goes back into the garage area. We obviously couldn't have the pull out doors like that. So the slider is kind of what we thought would work best in here. And on it, we just used leftovers from the ceiling and did a cute little mountainscape. I just didn't account for the mattress being in here. So that's why it's so much shorter. But it's there and it does look good. When I was trying to convince Mike to do this, I was a little bit apprehensive about how we would actually make it work. You most of the time see people have fancy remote jobs or they're just working from the van. This really wasn't something that either of us were super interested in. And we just have managed to make it work. We go back and we work for six months. And this past year that we did that while living in the bus, we've managed to save more money than we were ever able to save while living full time in a home and working full time jobs. So I just think it's it's nice to know that you don't have to have a fancy job, a fancy remote job to make it work. Thanks for watching this week's episode. I hope you guys enjoyed it. Please make sure to like, share and subscribe. And I will see you soon with another unique home tour.