hey there welcome to my channel where i take you on tours of unique homes and showcase stories
of people living alternatively in today's video we're going to meet a canadian couple who dropped
everything to live in a self-converted school bus home with their two toddlers
sounds crazy right well maybe it is but i think when you see the inside of this tiny home you're
going to be pleasantly surprised with how spacious it seems not to mention their impressive solar
array that's located on top of the bus and allows them to live off-grid for long periods of time
and if you like these kind of videos make sure that you subscribe and hit
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hi i'm dom and i'm derek and we would like to welcome to our home sunny the schooly
the idea was we gotta travel but airline tickets are expensive hotels are expensive restaurants are
expensive if you can take all of that and put it into one little vehicle you're gonna save so much
money and you're gonna enjoy the trip so much more i would say that to do this trip he had to
convince me when i travel what i miss the most is my home so when he showed me some conversions i
thought hmm if you make me a five star like that i'm gonna go for sure i wanted to take my kids to
go and see the national parks while they're still young to build a solid foundation so that they
love the outdoors when we decided to do this it was in september and he told me okay let's do this
it's gonna take me three months so at christmas we're gonna be on the beach in mexico my love
i said okay so he showed us up with a bus on october 31st and we left the next september
it took us about a year most of the time he was all by himself so it was a long process but and he
was working on that every day from after breakfast till dinner when i say okay it's time to come in
now because everybody's having dinner and you're making a lot of noise for me it's my first house
basically when i wake up in the morning i'm amazed with what he built i think that this bus has let
us save a lot of money because we've been able to just boondock where we want in blm land in
national parks and it's not expensive to live i had no idea about this lifestyle i googled the
word boondocking the day that we started driving so now we have boondock we're boondockers we just
boondock i don't know if like are we nomads are we well yeah really what is the definition of a nomad
welcome to sunny the schooly sunny is a 40 foot diesel pusher it's a thomas built hdx safety liner
we chose the high raised roof version so that we didn't have to raise the roof on it
because we did not want to do one of those roof raises they take so much time we're
running with a mercedes diesel and we get about 10 to 11 miles per gallon right now
we have no drive shaft at all in the middle of our bus so we have through storage all the
way in this compartment we loaded it up with all our electrical stuff so we have our inverter our
charge controller at the back of our storage compartment we put a 90 gallon gray tank and
we've been able to use that for over two weeks if we're really careful when we're boondocking
let's check out the driver side on the back side of our bus
just before the wheels that was the place that i managed to put my black tank
we're on the driver's side in the storage bay and this is where i found to be the best place
to throw my battery bank it is directly across from my solar inverters and the charge controllers
and everything these are lithium phosphate prismatic cells they're 3.2 volts and 280 amp
hours i series and paralleled them all together to get a 53 volt battery bank with 560 amp hours
we have enough power to power three or four buses on a daily basis i looked at it as an investment
long term if i keep this bus then i'm gonna love this battery bank if i sell this bus and the next
person that purchased it doesn't want all this solar i'm going to be able to take it out and
i can power a whole entire house we named our bus sonny the schooly because we wanted to follow the
sun then you put so much solar on top of the bus that the sunny the schooly is now very relevant
with the panels with the battery bank with the bms because i built my own battery the whole thing
cost me about 12 000. we're running nine 400 watt panels so we're sitting at 3 600 watts on the roof
we went with such a big array because we have such a big battery and we don't want to
run out of power i threw in my water system down here i also went with a pressure tank
a lot of people that i've spoken to regret not putting a pressure tank in and what i used to
hold it on were these propane brackets they're super heavy duty you can get them to just bolt
right onto a frame and you'd be able to hold a 20-pound propane tank no problem we have
three water filters we're going to be going all over the united states canada and mexico and we
didn't want to get sick because of water and we never wanted to be scared to drink our own water
so i work online it gives me the freedom to travel and be wherever i want i teach people how to drop
ship and run ecommerce stores and brands and one thing that was extremely important to me was being
able to connect to the internet i have been using starling for the last month and we absolutely love
it we've been in the middle of the desert with internet speeds faster than most people's homes
we went with a zombie proof door this is an aluminum frame with aluminum sheeting on the
top i riveted everything in and sealed it all off so it doesn't leak and we went with an rv style
window i see a lot of people putting in plate glass from homes or house doors
which is extremely dangerous in a moving vehicle if you get in any kind of accident
that is just going to send huge shards of glass all over the place so if you're
thinking of putting in a house window just rethink and try and find some tempered glass
we left it open on the top without putting a whole bunch of cupboards up here because
we wanted to have the biggest feel that we could have in the tiny little space that we're living in
so we wanted to have a nice long couch that we could lay down on it's all custom made you're in
a bus so underneath our couch we have a whole storage unit as much as we can and if you put
both of these on the ground you can have another bed they fit side by side right in the hallway
i wanted to build like an armrest with my couch but i also made it into a nice little storage
unit so i put like all our kids jackets and kind of cold weather gear goes in here
what's nice about building a small space is you can find the extras from a house build
so i found this floor really cheap on marketplace it's hardwood maple 5 8 we wanted to have
a decent sized table that would fold away to give the kids some place to play it was kind of
important for us to have like a little bit of space because you're in such a narrow hallway
so our table drops down and gives them a little bit more space and then we like it nice and warm
so under this bench i have a diesel heater that heats our whole entire bus we spend a lot of time
driving i did not want to jeopardize the safety of my family so i searched all over the place
for car seats that had seat belts that bolts to the bus and it is really solid and then the
other seat this thing folds straight down it's got two seats two shoulder straps and
then it folds up into this little tiny space which gives us this whole hallway to work with
this is damien he's two and i think he loves bus life and this is isabella yes and how old are you
four you're four and three i'm five really no you're not and do you love bus life yes
what i've always thought is my kids are coming along for the ride
but i think that this is a great way to raise kids because they see what makes mom and dad enjoy
life instead of living for your kids so it's your responsibility as a parent to have an amazing life
so that they can see what an amazing life is like and go and live one themselves later we're making
a good foundation a good base for them for later and it's positive this little apartment
moves to all of these huge backyards where they get to experience unique things outside
we were getting to this final stage and we wanted to get like some nice countertops made
and we were looking at the prices of them and they were so expensive so we just rocked into ikea
and got like one of their butcher block countertops we really wanted the big sink with the
front and everything but i did this calculation before we had built the bus on how much water it
takes to fill one of those sinks it was like so much water and since we carry our water on board
i took that 24 inch sink idea and threw it right out the window because you are never going to
be able to use that if you're boondocking all the time so i went with a smaller sink i built
all my own cabinets i got the full extension cabinets the drawers because i didn't like it
cut off with the soft clothes because my kids they'll slam drawers and i have some huge drawers
that are really heavy and if they slam them it's gonna be a ton of noise i also used as much space
as i could here and i went with toe kick drawers it just uses a little bit extra space we went
with a 24 inch stove oven so a cookie sheet was like the minimum that we needed to put in here
our fridge was oh my gosh it was such a struggle we wanted the biggest fridge
that we could get most fridges are high and our roof curves at the back so a high fridge
meant that the fridge was off the wall quite a bit so i lucked out and found this fridge
it was like brand new on the market it does us really well and we're so lucky that it's
extremely energy efficient not the biggest fan of the bottom freezer because it's got these drawers
but we had to get this fridge because nothing else was gonna fit
food and water were the things that we thought of the most so we did as big as we could for a
pantry these shelves go like all the way to the back since we're from quebec we brought along
50 cans of organic maple syrup and that takes up a lot of space and then going with the big
drawer style we went with these huge drawers that just barely fit open in the hallway and we just
loaded it with stuff we've got the kids books in this one we just loaded as much storage as we can
our bathroom was a difficult thing to design so many people do composting toilets and this
is not a composting toilet this is a flush toilet and now we absolutely love it as much as you can
love a toilet that is but anyway right now we don't have a door for our bathroom but our plan
is to put a big heavy curtain for a door i ended up building my own shower we needed a bath
we have kids kids need to get in a bath finding a bath that fit here that was going to be 100
waterproof was near impossible so i thought maybe i could make my own and i looked into
making a shower out of fiberglass it is all one piece so this thing is 100 waterproof
back in our little bunk area we wanted it to look kind of different we didn't want to just
have like a box for the kids to sleep in we wanted them to have like their little bunks
that they felt comfortable in this is really like their only spot in the whole bus that's theirs
and we did them like two different colors so that they could have their own little style
their own little color of course isabella wanted pink but we were not doing hot pink in this buzz
i cut out like a nice little entrance here so isabella our oldest she can you know look out it's
not just like a big wall it's not a cage and we didn't need a ladder because this is actually high
enough for her to climb here here and then get up here and damien is just being able to get up there
so yeah it's kind of like a ladder and you know a nice little design all in one this
drawer is isabella's clothes and it goes all the way to the back
we managed to get all of her clothes in there which is for a four-year-old a lot of clothing
and then on the other side we have our closet which is packed full of clothes we have another
big drawer that goes all the way to the back as well damien shares that pretty much with me
back in the master bedroom we wanted to have a big bed so we went king
underneath we also have our washer dryer two in one combo so it is a apartment size so really
small we've only used the washer we haven't really needed the dryer because clothes dry so fast
outside here in the desert we would rather pay to come to an rv park plug in our hose and run the
washing machine then go to a launch mat you know it's almost the same price in the long run and
it's so much more enjoyable than sitting in a laundromat so it was worth putting in that washer
dryer i would not do another build without one on the side here we needed a way for those kids to
get onto the bed which might be a mistake we made a little stair step on this side and it's actually
been really convenient we put our books in there and the kids can climb up and down onto our bed
if you're watching us right now living our best life that we can i hope that it pushes you
to do what you've always wanted to do i did not know that i could do this until i took that first
step i like when people say wow your life is so amazing wow you're so lucky i wish i could do that
you can do it if you don't do it now when are you going to do it you know i look at some family
members that are older and they want to travel but they can't things are just holding them down now
they've got these big anchors set in and it's a lot harder to do it so you've got to be able
to break free of that and realize that life is going to be good even if you step outside the box
what's happening everybody this is sunny the schooly we made it all the way down to
baja we've been down in southern baja for the last couple of months and while we were here we painted
our bus so that we're no longer ghetto yellow and on top of that we painted our jeep to match
thanks for watching this week's video please make sure that you like share
and subscribe and i will see you soon with another tiny or unique home tour