Young couple’s school bus home looks like a luxury cabin inside!

I started researching campers, RVs, and then I found what I thought was an Airstream on Pinterest and I clicked on it and it turned out it was a school bus and I was like floored that you could do that to a school bus. A stipulation from Maddie to be able to have the TV in the bus is that it needed to be hidden. So this actually lowers down into this cabinet here. We did do a 12 inch roof raise as you can see right underneath the windows. I'm six foot tall so that definitely allows for some headroom as we're in the bus. One of my favorite parts about the bus is our shower and wet bath. We did a special coating on the shower. Living in this bus has healed a lot in me but the bus community has healed me so much more. All in including the bus this build cost us around $35,000. Hey I'm Seth and I'm Maddie and this is Our Home Mini Home on Wheels. Before going tiny, life was super busy. Just working that nine to five definitely was something that on one hand I enjoyed but also felt like you know I was kind of working my finger to the bone. Yeah I was just kind of bouncing jobs a little bit before we got the bus and wasn't really happy in any of them and we were in quite a bit of debt and so even though we were both making money we felt like we weren't getting anywhere. We were paycheck to paycheck. We knew we had to do something about it now or we were going to be controlled by it. It was going to snowball and we really felt the Lord was telling us to get out of debt and become mobile. We started to think about how do we want to do that. I started researching campers, RVs, they were a little too expensive. We were so paycheck to paycheck. We had no money to work with and then I found what I thought was an Airstream on Pinterest and I clicked on it and it turned out it was a school bus and I was like floored that you could do that to a school bus. They were definitely more in our price point. We just kind of ran with it. She's definitely the designer and I was the builder. It did take quite a bit of time but we were working you know full time and overtime but it took us about four years. We bought the bus off of eBay buy it now option for $24.95 so $2,495. Yeah we got a good deal on the bus. All in including the bus this build cost us around $35,000. There are some things necessities you think are necessities when you're living in a home but it's a small tax to pay to be able to say that your home is wherever you want it to be. It's worth it for us. Moving on inside the bus. This is actually one of my favorite things. We have a Maine Coon well what we think is a Maine Coon cat but this is like our pet area so this actually flips up and we have dog food, cat food and then their leashes and just different things here and then this is actually a litter box that's hidden and it just pushes to open and he actually enters through the back of the litter box and there's a little cutout and catwalk and so he walks into the back does his business doesn't track any litter out because we have some litter mats back there and then we also have an exhaust fan built into the cabin here that sucks all the nasty smells out so that was kind of a necessity. Another really cool part is we have this cat hammock up there for Moose and he sleeps here like every night and it's super cute. As we move past the the driver's area we come into the living room. This is a really cozy spot we can fit a lot of people in here so we have the couch on this side we have some stools this chair and so we can usually fit like probably max around 10 to 12 people in here really stacked in. This entertainment center was a big thing so a stipulation from Maddie to be able to have the tv in the bus is that it needed to be hidden so this actually lowers down into this cabinet here. One thing that was challenging but we really love is the skylights within the bus we have this really large one that's covered up by the surfboard and it has a retractable shade that's manual but we can kind of control the lighting in here it does add some heat to the bus and then one thing I will mention too is that the ceiling is actually tongue and groove cedar and so I just really liked how that added a lot of warm tones to the bus as well. Moving over here to kind of we have the dinette and then we also have another workspace here this chair flips around and then we have a table that pops up and so it just kind of creates another spot for Maddie to be here working on her photography and graphic design and then I'm able to kind of pop this up make it a workspace for recording music or working on social media answering emails that kind of stuff. We didn't do any upper cabinets throughout the bus but for us something that was important is that you know we live small so that we can experience more things so rather than you know taking everything that we could think to fit on the road it was like let's just do with less. Moving into the kitchen we decided to do butcher block countertops one thing that was kind of tough it seemed like every coating that you put on the countertops kind of yellowed it and so Maddie searched for quite a while but she found a water-based sealer that didn't change the color very much and so as you can see with like all the different wood tones in here it was important that we didn't like make these super yellow when we did a finish on them and then my brother-in-law actually made this for us it's just a cover for the stove you can kind of pull this off and then this is a propane stove actually we refinished this out of my grandfather's old coach and so this was black so we painted this with appliance paint and then we also painted the knobs gold so this is really fun it's pretty efficient too. Moving back to the sink this was kind of necessary for us to to be able to have a larger sink we did it under mount and so you know cut in the holes and and all the butcher block mounted this up underneath and then we also have storage underneath for all of our dish stuff and cleaning and then moving over to this side this is kind of like where we like prepare our food but we have this big utensil drawer that we keep you know all of our utensils and stuff and cutlery in there and then one thing i really like is the ninja coffee maker we're able to put our own you know ground beans in here and make coffee every morning this is a fridge by unique the cool thing i like about this is it runs on 12 volts and it takes about as much power as a laptop and so at peak this thing pulls max 400 watts but it only runs about 25 percent of the time so it's it's actually a relatively low draw on our batteries and so part of part of making a a really good solar panel system is you know you can have the storage and you can have the solar part of it but the things that consume the energy that's really important when they're boondocking so this was uh we're really happy with this buy it's got a lot of room so this is the freezer and the fridge part and then moving over here this is our pantry this has a few shelves and then i built these pullout drawers to be able to to create some extra storage space and you can see here we worked in the wheel well into this part of the build that's always a challenge is kind of you know navigating around the wheel well so that's why we decided to put the pantry here and then one really cool thing in the bus is privacy is always a big part so we did add this pocket door that kind of slides out from the fridge to create a little bit of extra privacy this is our closet all of our hanging clothes up here and then we have these four drawers that serve as our clothes storage here and then one of my favorite parts about the bus is our our shower and wet bath and so this is really cool um but we did a special coating on the shower that's called ardex and it's uh it's called a feather finish and it's a little bit more elastic so it kind of helps against cracks but basically it's like this concrete finish all throughout and then our toilets in here as well and we did built-in shelving and stuff so one thing i will say is that with the shower water conservation is always a big thing when you're boondocking this has a valve that we're able to turn it on and off without turning the hot water off so we can just kind of either slow the water down to conserve water or turn it completely off and do military showers if we have to the other really cool thing is that we were going to try to do a vanity sink in here but we just wanted the extra room so we actually pulled the vanity sink out and built a little section here so that somebody can be getting ready in the morning and then i can be using the bathroom or maddie so we don't have to wait for each other to get ready so we have the vessel sink on top we got some extra storage and then actually underneath this countertop we have our insta-hot gas water heater and that thing can give you boiling water almost if you want if you crank that thing up it's super efficient we run all of our propane just this in the stove and we can honestly last about a month and a half on just a normal propane tank that you get at a gas station and then moving back here to the bed we have a queen size bed it left us a little bit of extra room so i actually have a storage compartment here this lifts up and that's where i keep all like my vlogging and just some miscellaneous music stuff kind of sort of way at the foot of the bed one thing i would do differently if we were to do a build again is we do have the mini split back here and that's really nice when you're sleeping but i think i would do a dual head system so that we had one back here and one up at the front and then moving over here to the other side of the bed is we have kind of a few shelves we have some book storage above our heads and then one thing that maddie was super into was surfer magazines and so growing up she had a bunch of them that were mailed directly to her when she was a kid so she actually framed those and those are on her back wall so this is our door i actually built this custom our door folded in it was accordion style and so instead of making it solid and swing out we decided to build one for the space we added this window in there the rest of our windows don't have screens so this is super nice we're able to pop this window up and run our max air fan and then we actually just added this a few weeks ago but this is a fold down table just locks up here while we're driving just like that we did do a 12 inch roof raise as you can see right underneath the windows i'm six foot tall so that definitely allows for some head room as uh as we're in the bus moving back here we did add a hitch to the bus so that we're able to flat tow our jeep and that comes in super handy when we're parked somewhere for a long time we can take our our jeep around to different places like groceries laundry that kind of stuff also the jeep is super helpful because as you can see this rack here we were storing our generator and stuff on it and like on our first trip this thing did not hold up then we realized that we had a rack on top of the jeep and so now actually we can leave our generator and stuff like that up there and just pull it right up next to the bus whenever it's convenient we do have a mini split for heating and cooling on the bus it's just super efficient a lot of those models anyone can do them they come all ready to go and everything so and then i guess we can take a look at uh underneath our bed here and this is actually where we store our batteries and our inverter for our solar currently we're running 600 amp hours of lithium batteries and then we have a multi plus two victron and then the charge controller most people run 12 volt but my previous trade was as an electrician so i kind of geeked out with the solar uh solar system 24 volt just has a lot more capacity and a smaller footprint so we we only had to have three batteries i'm a big fan of that usually we can last with full sun we can last seven days without being plugged in so that's pretty cool then on the left side here we have 60 gallons of fresh water this bed does lift up for access although it's a little cumbersome but we can access it from the inside moving over we did our gray water tank underneath we're from the midwest originally and so sometimes we have to deal with some low temperatures so to mitigate that i actually built in some insulation around the tank and then put a heating pad that has a thermostat on it we also did heat tape on any piping that's underneath and that's just ran it's all on 12 volt and so when we're in warm climates we just pull the fuse and so it's not drawing our power but and we have the option to to be able to camp in in colder climates so here's our 50 amp hookup shore power most of the time where we're traveling i'm a musician full-time so we're on tour right now most of the places we have is off-grid so we're running the generator usually we kick the generator on like once every three days unless we have really good sun then we can last longer and then we did decide to do a rooftop deck and we wanted to make this as big as we could because the back half we use as a stage sometimes to play music and stuff but love having the deck i feel like it's a mainstay one thing i will mention is that you can see these black rails up here we did build those our own and we bolted them through the frame of the bus so that was very very sturdy that's one thing i wanted to make sure that was taken care of and those those rails run on both sides of the bus and then here's some more undercarriage storage and really some of this is for music but you can see everything just kind of stacks in there nicely we mounted these up with unistrut so they're very sturdy not going anywhere what i was not expecting was that we would be entering into a community where everybody helps each other and it's like a big family everybody helps take care of each other it's made a big impact on us and honestly i see i see god's heart throughout the school community because everybody's so kind and loving and generous living in this bus has healed a lot in me but the bus community has healed me so much more i would say that if you're on the fence about doing some type of tiny living i would say research it and figure it out because i'm so glad that we made this decision i would do it 100 times over again 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