Social distancing has kept me from shooting any new video tours the past few
months.
So that's why this week's video was actually self shot and I think the owners
did an awesome job.
Chris and Sarah are two young go getters who converted a school bus into a
beautiful tiny home that not only works well for their stay at home jobs,
but also as a comfortable space to safely quarantine. All right guys,
let's take a tour.
Hey we're Chris
and Sarah
Before we moved in to our Schoolie we were actually living long
distance.
Chris was out in California working at Apple and I was back in
Milwaukee at school.
He came back and we spent a year out in Madison paying like
$1,300 a month in rent for a one bedroom,
a thousand square foot apartment.
We had been talking about living in a tiny house.
We liked traveling a lot and we didn't want to be stuck in one place and that
led us from a tiny house on a trailer and thinking about purchasing a big truck
to then trying to figure out a cheaper way to do that.
Of course schoolie started popping up and that's when I got the great idea
is like I really want to buy a school bus and convert it.
Ultimately it made sense to do a school bus conversion that way we have like the
vehicle and then our house and one instead of having that extra expense to buy a
big truck to pull our tiny house.
So yeah, we actually built the schoolie completely by ourselves.
We had some help from Sarah's parents and my parents and borrowing a lot of
tools from them as well in order to get it done.
But it took us about nine months to build it to the point where we could
actually move into the back bedroom and then probably another three or four
months to get to the point of where it is now.
So it's been a little bit over a year of actually building the schoolie to get it
to this point of where we're at.
So we've been living in our schoolie for about nine months now.
We bought the school bus for $4,000 all the added materials that we
put into it, I think we're all in at about 27,000
So we have a nine window, 30 foot international, 3,800 school bus.
It has a DT 466 engine inside of it paired with the 85
45 Alison transmission. We use truck bed liner.
It's a little bit more expensive than paint,
but we wanted the durability that comes with truck,
especially when we're by the oceans or for cruising down the road and there's
rocks hitting the front of the bus.
We wanted to make sure that we were protecting our asset
basically we do have security cameras all the way around the bus.
So on the door side of the bus we have our suburban intake and outlet for fresh
air and exhaust for our heater, on this side of the bus as well
we have our propane tanks that are currently sitting on the ground.
So this is our wheelchair door inside of it.
We made it accessible with our water system.
So we have a hundred gallon water tank and then we have all of our water piping
above that.
We have a shelf and we can throw our snowboards and skis in from this side.
The longer things that we need to store. So in our rear door
we have storage pretty much.
This also extends up to our bedroom and bed so we can have this door open
from the inside out and be able to lay here and kind of enjoy the breeze coming
through with a windows on the sides.
So when you first walked into our schoolie, it's kind of like the mud room area.
Obviously it was like the driver's captain's chair with the cockpit.
The whole dashboard area is what we have left in the entire schoolie
to finish inside, when you first walk in, you have the coat rack.
Sarah and I keep our coats here and then we usually hang our keys up here to
Sarah's famous shiplap that she loves and then we have the pallet
board ceiling and so throughout the whole bus we have these reclaimed pallet
boards. We went on Craigslist and phone,
I think it was six or seven complete pallets and we had two cells all them up.
That took about like three days to cut all them up and get them ready and then
we have a backup camera mostly because of the mirrors so you can kind of
see when you're backing up how you're doing but we can't see directly behind you
because of all the stuff inside the schoolie. Next to that we have an above,
kind of like the dashboard area for the driver. We have a utility closet,
just houses a lot of our electronics.
So moving into the living room area. First off we have the first TV monitor,
you can see the cameras outside of the bus or we connect our computers in order
to use it as a external monitor as well.
And then its bigger brother TV pops out of here.
And this door itself opens.
There's two bearings on the lift mechanism for the TV that it just rolls
over. And then as it rolls down, it rolls back and closes.
And then underneath the computer area here is like a desk.
It has storage all the way underneath and it can just lift up.
We also have two lights. These lights are actually deck lights.
We decided to go with these because they are led and they pull like minimal
usage.
So we actually have I think 30 total led lights like this on
different switches throughout the bus.
Underneath here we have shoe storage that lines the entire bottom
of the desk area.
So then moving into the living room type area. First we have our couch.
It's actually a old foam piece.
Both of these are foam pieces from my old mattress that I had in California.
It pulls out into a queen sized bed and we put five sets of
rollers on it and it can hold up to 500 pounds.
And so I've pulled it out and jumped on it and it hasn't moved.
And we have our first skylight here as well. Um,
it brings in a lot of natural light.
So we get to see the stars are for sitting on the couch. So this door
which is actually a drop down door and it's our hidden coffee bar.
And so I am very into coffee. Uh, Sarah drinks a lot of coffee too.
And so we have a five cup coffee pot. Um, mostly because of the power usage.
And then I brought my espresso machine in and so I use this about once a day
too. So now moving on to the range area of the kitchen.
The range runs off propane. It's a three burner standard RV range.
This kind of made a focal point for where we were going to Mount all the other
propane appliances. So now we're heading into the kitchen.
That was mostly Sarah's influence. And so I'm going to switch it over to her.
In our schoolie we kept everything pretty neutral so that way we could have like a
pop of color here and there.
So we bought this KitchenAid a couple months ago and we went with a
pistachio green color.
We did butcher black countertops and we sealed them with an oil based
polyurethane to give it that like golden yellow color.
And then we have a leaf that goes on top of our range.
When we put it in here,
we have a leaven feet of counter space in this cabinet.
We just keep our dishes up here, plates, bowls, pots and pans.
We found this cool idea on Pinterest.
We just screwed the lids up into the cabinet so that way when we
unscrew a Mason jar just comes down like
this and then the lid stays up there and when we want to put it back,
we just put it back.
So our sink and our faucet where a gifts that we got the sink was from my
mom and then the faucet was from Chris's mom and it's a spray head so it can
clean the sink.
And then one of the stipulations I had when we moved into the bus was to make
sure that we had a good water filtration system put in place.
So this is an 11 stage reverse osmosis system came with this faucet
and then it holds three gallons of water in a tank underneath the sink.
We've seen a lot of people go with a smaller size refrigerator and they're just
constantly going to the grocery store.
We didn't want to have to sacrifice that if we were to go off grid for a while,
we wanted to store our food and have it easily accessible for us.
So we went with an apartment size fridge and then in these two cabinets
we store food and then our silverware down here and they're on soft close
hinges too. So this is our toilet room.
Our door knob is actually an inactive door knob.
We didn't want to deal with putting the lock system on the wall and inside the
door and we don't really need a lock on it. How it stays close though,
are these magnets right up here so that way when it closes it just
magnetizes and it really stays in place.
And we went with the nature head, composting toilet.
We knew we didn't want to Blackwater tank,
we didn't want to be carrying that around when we were traveling.
So this story doubles as not only the bathroom door but a door to our bedroom.
Chris had bought these pallet dressers when he was out in California and we just
loved him so much that we just had to find a spot to put them inside the bus.
So we mounted them underneath the fireplace and then
underneath the bed.
So we have a queen size bed and we have storage underneath that just lifts up
So we have a lot of storage down here.
I think we can fit seven 80 court bins down there and then seven
40 court bins on top of those.
We have our dirty clothes hamper here and then our wood storage bin right
next to it. So this is our future shower.
Right now we're showering at planet fitness and we keep our bags for the gym in
here. And then we have a spot where we can hang up our towels.
When we come back. The shower is all plumbed in with nobs down here,
a shower head up here and the drain on the floor there.
So really we just have to tile it. So this is our fireplace.
We went with the cubic mini grizzly. Heats up pretty well,
but I think the way we had it designed with the wall here and a wall
here, it kind of holds the heat back here.
So that's why we had to install the RV furnace for heat up in the front of the
half of the bus.
The big thing back here was that we just didn't want anything combustible,
so we went with the gray subway tile and then we went with the cement counter
tap. So we bring these compressed bricks that we get from Menards.
They come in a pack of six and they're actually 12 inches long and we just cut
them in half so that way we can fit them inside the cubic mini,
they're like three bucks a pack and we can get about a day and a half when it's
really cold outside.
So with having a queen size,
but it was a perfect amount of space to put our closets right next to our bed.
So this is Chris's closet. This is my closet,
and then this closet's mostly mine, but we kind of share it.
It's 24 inches deep.
You really only need about 22 inches to hang your clothes.
The shirts just barely touch the ground,
so it's deep enough to hang your clothes in here.
And then we opted to have shelves in our closets just for extra storage for
miscellaneous things like I keep my makeup bag up here and then Chris keeps some
folded clothes up there and the fairy lights are probably one of my
favorite things in the bus.
We just wanted something fun and it looks really pretty at night when we're just
hanging out watching a movie and we just have a fairy lights on.
This is our air conditioner unit. It's just a window AC unit.
It gets pretty hot here in the summertime,
so we definitely needed that back here.
Right now we just have plastic over it because it does bring in a lot of cold
air from the outside because we have vents on the outside of the bus and then
underneath here we have reading lights.
And then we also have our Sasquatch light so that light turns on
all of the exterior lights on the outside of the bus.
So that way if we're sleeping here in the middle of the night and we hear
something outside the bus,
we can just turn those on and we can kind of see what's going on over
here. We have our TV,
it's really just an iPad but it's big enough where we can watch TV shows,
movies while we're hanging out here at night. Right before we go to bed.
These are lined with insole shields and then our
finishing fabric on top. Chris's mom and I actually made these curtains.
We sold them all together.
These windows are really drafty so it really helps with that and like stopping
the coals. And that's also why we have plastic on our windows too.
Cause in the middle of winter time it gets pretty drafty in here.
So we blocked it off with plastic wrap and these curtains help really well.
So one of the challenges of going tiny,
especially in a schoolie is that we only have 150 square feet of space.
We had to give up a lot and we pretty much sold everything that we had or gave
it away. It really changed our kind of our thinking process about what we buy,
why we buy it instead of just buying things because we like it.
We haven't actually moved the schoolie since we finished the build or got to
this level of the build.
So in the future we'd like to start getting on the road and traveling.
We just have a few things that we need to do as far as maintenance wise on the
bus,
we're looking to share what we've been doing as far as the build and our
websites.
skollielivin.com where we kind of share a lot of our experience and research that
we've done over the last year,
and we're trying to build a tool for other people coming into the industry so
they have something to reference when it goes to,
as far as them trying to build out their schoolie.
Thanks for tuning in this week. If you like the videos I'm producing,
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Every Friday.