Family of 8 LIVING in a Two Story RV! | DOUBLE DECKER BUS TOUR

What's up fellow journeyers? You're in for a treat today. I remember this is excited. Like have you ever seen the inside of a double-decker bus remodeled to live in as an RV? Like living in it. Living in a double-decker bus with a rooftop with six kids. I'm pumped to see inside of this because I've never seen this before. I've never seen anyone living and traveling in a double-decker bus. Okay, I need a door that does this. Even the entrance is cool. Well, hey friends. Come on in. I'm pumped. Pardon anything that is a mess. We live here. And you have six kids. Six kids. So me and my wife and our six kids. That's how we roll. Yep. Hence why you need two levels. Two levels. Hey, that's unique. And we're short, right? So this is fine for me. Okay. You might have to duck. You might have to duck. But for me, I mean, I'm good. This is our driver's area slash my office. This is where I do my work and drive. Can I sit here? Sure. Okay. It's like super low to the ground. Okay. It actually sits lower than the transit van that we pull behind. Wow. Does she drive behind you or do you tow it? We tow the van. Okay. All right. Everybody rides in here. Everybody rides in here. That's right. Are all these this height? This is pretty much if you get a double-decker, that's what you're going to get. Is this height? Yep. Pretty much. This is it, right? In order to make the 13.6 legal limits in the US, this is going to be... Okay. So same height as our fifth wheel. Would you drive this? It doesn't seem intimidating as long as you don't know what's around you as you're driving, I guess. Because the ceiling, you don't know what's up above. No, it's definitely way... Does the air bring it up at all once you start going? Yeah, about three and a half inches, but still not nearly as much as a Class A. Not near as high as a Class A. Okay. It doesn't seem as intimidating because you're not as high off the ground. I haven't seen all these buttons. And I love this. It's physical. Everything's physical buttons. Oh, man. What year is this? This is a 2009 Van Hool TD 925 Astro Mega double-decker. Wow. That's impressive. It is. Yeah. If you say that, people get out of the way. Yeah. Well, my horn people get out of the way. How many miles? The bus itself has about 220,000 miles on it. The engine has about 20,000 miles. Okay. This is super cool. It's good. We cruise along at about 69 miles an hour usually, and we feel like that's a pretty comfortable place to be. What is the height? I'm 5'9", so what is this? Yeah, so I'm 5'9", also, and so we're right about 5'9 1⁄2". Getting 5'9 1⁄2-ish in here. Yeah, I'm 5'10". Now, upstairs is about an inch shorter. Okay. Okay. So, that's your warning there. Let's do it. We come back this way. Now, it is narrow. Some people always say it's super narrow. Well, that's because we've got these wheel wells. We don't have an axle that goes all the way through. We just have these wheel wells for our independent tires. This was going to be just a wasted space. We knew we needed a fridge and freezer, so we put fridge and freezer. Fridge on one side, freezer on the other. I don't know if anybody cares to see what's in our fridge and freezer, but that's the fridge. Yeah. All right. We really do live here. There really is stuff in these. That's a lot of freezer space. Yeah, so they're both the same size and they're pretty big. That's awesome. Family of eight, and that works for us. Got to eat. That's right. Got to eat. Got to eat. This is our kitchen. Big butcher block countertop over here, prep area, and just all the storage for anything underneath it. You just turn the stove on or the oven there. Don't worry. So, my oldest daughter, she does it all the time because she stands and eats her cereal in the morning. She's always turning on the oven. So, you have an oven, you have- Yup. Induction stove, two burner. We get a lot of questions like, how do we get away with two burners with eight people? A lot of people are used to seeing the five burner stoves in a home. I'm the sixth of eight kids. My wife's the sixth of seven kids. Five burners on a stove, my mom never used all five of them, except on Thanksgiving, right? Other than that, two of those burners were covered up by yesterday's food. Then you've really got the two you cook on. We've said that same thing. I never eat- Oh, I'm turning that on too. That's right. We've talked in the RVing world. It's a number three, which is the worst. You've got double the amount of space just for three burners. We also use air fryer. We do a lot in the air fryer. This is a residential size sink. A lot of RVs have this really not very deep sink and things like that. We've got this residential size sink. It works really well for us. These windows are great. I'm all about light and windows and look at that. I mean, it's just like a wraparound window. It's wonderful. Sometimes it's really beneficial. Sometimes it's bad. You get sun and we got to figure out ways to cover that up. You notice there aren't any visible curtains here, so we get creative with how we cover that, but it's also like living in a fishbowl sometimes. That's what we say in our RV and I like having the shades up. Still worth the cost. Worth the view plenty of times. Other people outside might not think that about us. Close your eyes when you're walking around. That's absolutely true. One of the things we found about this that we really like is from the outside, you can't really see in here during the day. At nighttime, you can see all the way through and we can't see out, but daytime, you can't really see in it, so we can see all the people as they walk by and stare at the button. Do you have a pantry? Yes, so he's sitting on our pantry. You're sitting on the pantry? Oh, look at that. So here we've got our Keurig, which we use for hot cocoa. If you've watched any of our videos, I actually have done some videos about not loving the pumpkin spice stuff. I'm a big Christmas guy, so that goes all the way down. One thing people ask a lot is like, what the heck is up with this step? And that's just that our air tanks that raise the bus, so that's kind of got to be where it's at. We didn't really have an option to move that. When you park, can you level with the air at all or is it basically just raised and lower? It's mostly raised and lower, and we typically will try to level a little bit when we first get in because I can let this side out because it's a kneeling bus. Okay. So we can let this side out, but then turn it off and this side will lose air in the next 24 hours, right? It'll slowly drop down. We're tilted right now just a little bit. For us, that basically just means we're putting our head on the other side of the bed. This is our dining area. Storage underneath both of these. These both also slide together in case we have a guest that needs to sleep somewhere. So my dad has come and visited just to see what life was like on the bus. This was for him. A lot of people have mentioned before about the bus and any of the tours that they've seen. These come up, the back of these chairs come up to create a dining room table, and everybody says, that's wonderful. They really liked that idea. We really liked that idea. It's why we built it in and it doesn't function the way you want it to. The RV world, it's like, you know, the U-9, it looks really cool, but you fight over who has to sit in the back of the U-9 because nobody wants to crawl back in there. We use the storage underneath more than anything. I think Nathan approached me about a double-decker years ago when we started and was like, would you ever do this? I'm like, uh, that looks really intimidating. So the fact that we're like standing inside one. Yeah. Well, and I had never stepped foot in an RV. When designing it, some of this was just out of the top of my head a little bit. And I'd never been to an RV show to just even get an idea. And now that's like, I look back and I'm like, oh, should've gone to the RV shows like at least two or three times to get, or at least once to just walk through RVs and see what they're like. At the same time, like if you wait until you know everything you ever think you need to know, you'll never go. So we say get to 95% and leave, like make a plan, do a little bit, but don't wait until perfection or you'll just, you'll never do it. We designed it and then we sent it off to a builder. The builder botched a ton of stuff that we wanted and on a whole bunch of stuff in this bus. You get closeups of things you can see where it's just not built properly. That's from the builder. Well, we took it back from the builder and then we spent about six months working on it ourselves and putting things together the way they should be done. If I wait until it's perfect, we're never going to get on the road. So we said, is it livable? Can we get in it now? Can we get going? So that's, we, we kind of made the plan. We said, at the end of the school year, June 1st, we're going to hit the road. Tell us your vision for this. What, what are you trying to do with your family? How long do you plan to be? I mean, ultimately I'm kind of a keep it simple math kind of guy. And I looked at it and said, I'd like to take all my kids to 48 lower states and then we can fly to Alaska and Hawaii. So I thought, okay, 48 states, divide that among two, two years, like we get two weeks in each state. We're good, right? We're going to get you hooked though. That's what everybody says. They're hitting the road for a certain amount. They usually, it's a one year plan. You added an extra year. I think it's important that the kids have a big say in what we're doing. We went and said, you know, look, we're going to get on the road. We'll reevaluate this point. And at this point, and we'll just keep reevaluating. And if that means we're on the road for two years, we're on the road for two years. It means we're on the road for six months or eight months. Then that's it. Yeah. But if it means we're on the road for eight years, then great. Bathroom. This is our downstairs bathroom. Downstairs bathroom. That's right. There's fancy. There's an upstairs and a downstairs bathroom. It's small. You'll mention the, uh, the height of that toilet. Very, very small, very low. That, that was because the builder couldn't figure out how to make this a sliding door. Had to be an opening door. One of the unique things about this is that because it sits lower than our black tank, it actually pumps up. And so it's got a macerating toilet or a macerator in there. It's a pump. We got more pantry storage back here. These, these two closets originally where the, the ramps and things for the ADA accessible stuff was. So that's what was here. And we just put in some shelves and, uh, put our canned foods, a couple, a little bit of canned foods in there. And we have our, our back door here. That's the other downstairs part that the kids really love because they can wake up and go straight downstairs. Yeah. So let's go on upstairs. I mean, I might not normally tell you to film as we walk upstairs. Our shower is actually halfway up our stairs. It's in the stairwell. The reason we have the shower in the stairwell is because this is five, nine upstairs is five, eight. And I didn't want a shower that was hitting me in the shoulder. And so we actually cut our shower into the storage area of the bus with access from here in the stairs. So the shower is actually a full seven foot and it's a cedar shower. That's pretty genius. That's awesome. I wish this video was scratch and sniff so you could smell that cedar. Yeah. Smells great. Yeah. It's great. You turn the hot water on now and it, uh, it really does smell like a sauna. Yeah. I like that sauna smell. Yeah. This is a whole new experience being on a second level. It's kind of blowing my mind here. I know. Uh, it's, uh, yeah, this is crazy. I feel like I'm on a boat. A little bit, maybe a little bit. When we get upstairs, right. We come towards the front of the bus. If you're turned around at all, this is the front of the bus. We have our washer and dryer. It's a all in one unit, ventless and right underneath it. A unique thing about our bus is that is our vacuum. And so we could just sweep things to it and vacuum. A lot of people haven't seen that. So it's like a back system right there. Is that true? Yeah. So we can just sweep to it and then it, uh, just vacuum. And then it's also got a cord that like a vacuum cord that we can just attach to it and run that vacuum all over the house. This is, uh, this is our main area. Uh, frankly, I don't, I don't come up here much because I am too tall to stand up here. These are much more functional than the ones downstairs. They're the same thing where the backs come up, but the kids use these as their school desks. So we do a lot of homeschool while we're on the road. Those come up. Kids use that as, as their, their desks. We intentionally do not have a TV hanging on our wall. That's just again, so that the kids can focus on schoolwork when they're, when they're up here. And when we're up here as a family, uh, we do our nighttime routine and stuff up here a lot and we want to spend time together. So we intentionally didn't go with a TV in this bus at all. You know, the whole point of doing this and living in this, maybe crammed lifestyle is so that we can be together. I was working a decent job, a good job. And I was starting my own company at the same time. And I was putting in just a lot of hours chasing dollars. Right. And the hope is always that those dollars, then I can spend on time with my kids. And I was like, well, I can just give up those dollars and get all the time with the kids and my wife that I need. I would almost literally like go to bed when the kids were, were getting up for school in the morning. And then after doing that for like three months, they're just, we said, you know, we're happiest when we're together. We were on a road trip just in our van. We had taken a road trip. We passed the great sand dunes. I was really upset that we were like rushing home to a desk job when we were all happy together. Like I had that. It was like the, really the first time in my life where I felt like we have happiness, whatever we're chasing. It's right here in this van. And I'm not stopping to see the great sand dunes. Like that's just ridiculous. Right. So I looked at my wife and I said, I don't care what the next roadside thing is. We're stopping. I think that what you said is really beautiful. And like, when that light bulb goes off and you're like, what am I doing? What's really the most important. You will make sacrifices in your, in your space to experience more with your family. And it really bonds your family being in a small space. Like it's so bonding and you realize what's really important and you appreciate things in life. I know for us living in an RV, we've really appreciated the small things more. Yes. All you have to do is just widen your stance. It's okay. I can almost do it. I can almost do it. Under these two benches, it's just more storage. We have about a hundred board games in this one. And then a bunch of school stuff in their books and whatnot. I was having this little bench behind you. That's just above the stairwell. That's where the kids keep their book bags and most of their school stuff right there. Basically this folds down and then it's a platform. So it's over the, over my wife and I, we sleep on this bed basically gives the kids more playroom during the day. And then we've got the headboard footboard and this just, you know, creates an entire closed door. Scenario, right? So we've got our own room. Now we're experimenting with these, with this. I put this up just in the last day or two. We want some sort of curtain system around this. So we end up getting dressed right here on the stairs. We all tend to have good balance. So nobody's falling down too much yet. So I put these up just kind of as a, how do we want to do this? So this is just kind of a temporary curtain system going on. Look at this. This is cool. So here we are at the back of the bus and we've just got like closet space back here. There is a, there is a window back there and a seat. Sometimes I will sit here on this seat, just sing the kids there, you know, nighttime songs or something like that. We had the seat built there kind of a function that way. They each kind of have their own bed, their own bedding to kind of personalize their space. We intend at some point to replace their, their blackout curtains with something that they like. You know, he, he loves Batman, so we'll probably get something Batman here, but he also loves all his stickers. So he's been stickering up his walls, which is totally fine with us. This is, this is his space, right? So he gets to do with it what he wants. We don't have any, no ventilation fans, but that's a bathroom number two. This is where it's at. Oh my goodness. Hello. People way down there. Thank God I just saw you because you never could have walked right to your GoPro. Oh, it's been filming forever. It's okay. Amazing. We need one of these, right? I do too. I would say this is one of the coolest perks of the double-decker bus for sure. This is really cool. Yeah. So how much time do you spend up here? Not as much as we'd like. The problem with that was just as you saw, like people walk by and then they're like trying to talk. And I feel bad, like, like literally talking down to people. And we wanted to build relationships with people in the RV parks we go to. More or less now, this is an area for my kids. Yeah. They love coming up here. They bring their friends up here. They got their toys. I set up their hammocks and, and, uh, you know, they can kind of get away. We put down this boat decking that looks like wood. It's super soft. That's, uh, that just makes it so they don't slip as much. We'd seen a lot of schoolie builds and a lot of those have a deck up top. And so we were like, oh, that'd be really cool. And it rides like this going down the road. No, no, no, no. It has to go down. When we're going down the road, I take the front and back rails. I set, set them. They go down. So they're underneath this. And then this all folds down. Can't ride down the road being over 16 feet. We've got two solar panels up there, two solar panels back there. And that gives us a good amount of solar for traveling. So we can, we can manage off grid for about four days. Six kids in five and a half years. I mean, we had, um, ours are five years apart and I feel like I'm drowning sometimes. Yeah. Six and five and a half years. So our oldest just turned 10 and the youngest are twins and they're four. Yeah. So six kids. I love it. I love it though. I love big families. I come from a family of seven and it's special. Wow. That is massive. Yeah. So it goes all the way through, but also all our water tanks back here. Well, lots of good stuff. That is a massive garage. That's awesome. Yeah. One of the things people are halfway interested in is, uh, some of this just battery setup. This is our eight safari UT 1300 Lyran energy batteries. We use mostly Victron components. And, and then we have like our circuit breaker and our, our water heater in here. Residential water heater, just like you'd have in your standard house. Not what you would typically find in a motor home. If you want more content about the double-decker bus, check out double-decker fam. If you want to see more tours with people living in their RVs, we're going to link to that. Definitely check it out. Well, that is our adventure for today until next week's video. We'll catch you guys later.