the tiny house movement has been growing quickly which is what brought us to the
tiny house fest in Vermont. We were there to show off our tiny house on wheels and
check out the other tiny homes. There were some tiny house builders who had a
few tiny houses for sale. Although they were unfinished you could get an idea of
what the tiny house will look like when it's done. These were four of our
favorite tiny houses at the tiny house fest. I'm Colby and this is our bus! this
is Dharma she's a 1975 VW camper yeah so I got her
a couple years ago 2015 and once I bought her she was not running just a
real hunk of junk but I gave her a lot of love and fixed her up with my stepdad
and did a lot of work on the inside which I like to show you guys so we got
two closets back here this one is the clothing closet which is fairly small
and holds all our stuff that we have right now we're at just at this little
tiny house festival so we don't have it packed out the way we would when we were
traveling for you know during the year but we were able to fit everything in
there totally totally fine granted two pairs of pants one pair of shorts and
then this closet over here naturally the VW bus is known for breaking down and
last time we were on a road trip we broke down for a month in Texas so we
need our spare parts suitcase and also we have our duct tape our other kinds of
tape and also the Bible of Oh the Volkswagen the John Muir book of how
to maintain your BW and keep it alive so this was very helpful
it is definitely essential there's so many things to learn and all these
different designs of how to fix it yourself which
i think is really cool this is our bed it's not this short we actually have a
backrest which is up here so we'll put it up here when we're parked and along
with our instruments which we always carry with us and there's a yoga mat up
there too and frisbee is also essential so this comes down and we'll put it in
this little space that pulls up here so we'll just fit it in there and that's
how it becomes a full-length bed by the way the passenger seat very comfy I like
that Auto recline function yeah very high-tech it's held together
ratchet straps at this point yeah so this bus did not have the swivel seat
passenger chair like it does now because like you can see the back of the
driver's seat over here there's this metal frame here and that actually holds
the seat up there's nothing like actually holding the seat together like
that so if you get rid of this backrest the thing would just flop backwards or
flap forward which we found out when I cut off the metal piece the metal
backing of the chair there so the first time I was traveling on the road for
about five months I lived out in Boulder Colorado with my buddy and we worked in
the mountains during the summer as campground hosts and I used to have like
a little herb garden thing back there on the back side of the chair but it just
wasn't a better to have more space than to have a little herb garden and
bookshelf yeah which we could always do here it's a
did you guys build all this stuff out yourselves Colby did yeah yeah I built
it all out this was really before I knew REI I started working on it and it took
me about a year I took about a year building and finding all the different
little pieces and because a lot of it is pal wood but I did buy stuff when I
needed to like the cedar panels and the siding up here
even the sidings of all the doors and everything I made these panels to fit on
there and up there I've had to replace like four or five of these windows the
windshield is new that I did not put in does he have to have someone do that
professionally I love thanks yeah people tend to really like this and I just got
the sink as a gift from someone so that was really awesome yeah I guess he owned
an antique yeah she just had it in the basement and she's like I've been saving
this for years and I'm glad that you could have it now you know but yeah its
foot pump activated so we got like six gallon tank in here I guess I could open
up and show you two and our common and our compost what was your inspiration
behind the design I really just loved the like the cabin look so that was
really that was really a trying to see how I could make this little space look
like a kind of a rustic camper cabin I think I was able to do that but also the
whole like kind of a hippie Indian sort of vibe you know like sixties music and
stuff like that so my grandmother helped me make these curtains they're like
Indian sari curtains really it's just like a curtain from Pier one Imports
that was cut oh this is I tried to fix that on the way here while he was
driving yeah something always needs to be fixed
so that's one of them
there's always something to tinker with always something to work on you're never
bored hi my name is Blair and I'm here with tiny bus big adventure and Wayne
the bus this is a 1954 ford wayne school bus that we found in a junkyard in
colorado and it was missing the engine and missing the a lot of the windows so
we tried to preserve parts of the bus that were still usable and turned the
rest of it into our tiny house here we have the main living space my husband
myself and our two dogs living here full-time we have a queen-size bed
underneath it we have our little dog den and his and her closets and then in the
far back we have extra storage for traveling over here we have our sink and
fridge and kitchen space pantry is underneath the kitchen and that sits
right up over the original will wheel wells behind this wall over here we have
the bathroom which it's quite large for a tiny house bathroom but we wanted to
be able to have a little bit of separation between each other this is a
set furred camping toilet we are currently saving up for a
composting toilet or incinerating toilet but the thought per toilet holds about
five gallons and you're able to dispose of it like normal human waste and either
a dump station or a toilet my favorite feature is actually the shoe shelf in
the front cabinet so the shoe shelf here is all ends of the trees that are on the
property that we currently live on and when you open it up it's currently
hiding different gadgets and gizmos but it is
our usual shoe shelf so you come in here and take your shoes off make yourself at
home and then come all the way inside
honestly my favorite thing about the bus is the blue curved roof a lot of times
I'll sit in bed and stick my feet up on the roof but there's something about the
patina mixed with this robin egg blue that just really soothes the soul
when we found it in the junkyard the driver's window had been shot through it
with bb's and we decided that we wanted to keep as much of the original windows
as possible because they're magical like you don't ever see this kind of swooping
slightly curved window and any other kind of architecture so we really wanted
to keep it so one of the funny things in the 1950s is there was still smoking
everywhere so a lot of school bus drivers would smoke cigarettes well they
picked the kids so the original ashtray and the original
glovebox and we like to keep this because it has the serial number from
when it was an actual running Ford School Bus and though the company Wayne
works has since gone out of business you're still able to track Wayne school
buses every so often we're currently reconfiguring our water system so at the
moment we don't have running water but we do have tanks underneath and we have
solar panels they're not currently on the top of the bus because we've taken
them off we're building a tiny house as well so they're going on to our our new
tiny house and this is just the right height to standing yeah if you're
wearing a cap the top button of your cap will probably knock the ceiling but I'm
510 and have a pretty okay height well the
nice thing is with the rounded corners are no rough edges that you're gonna hit
yourself know there used to be our last a lot of people have toured it in our
last version of this we recently reconfigured it but we used
to have the original shelves here and it just made the whole space feel very
small and you'd always knock your head so we took those down and are currently
figuring out what to do with them thank you so much hey how's it going I'm Chris
from tiny industrial here in Vermont at the tiny house fest and this is what I
brought with me is called little wings a small micro house built on a utility
trailer I left the back porch on here or basically turned what is normally the
ramp to one of these things into a porch this is built on a six and a half foot
by 10 foot trailer I try to I try to build these to get people to think a
little bit out of the box some people look at these and they go oh where's the
bathroom where's the kitchen and let every structure has to have those
necessarily so let me show you around inside you'll you'll see what I'm
talking about it's not a lot of houses you'll you'll find that have first-class
airplane seats but this one does look at the tray tables everything works and
then over here we've got a full-size bed memory foam mattress and a rather large
TV so when people ask me you know what is this what is the structure intended
to do oh and one of my skateboard lamps up here
I like repurposing and recycling upcycling things when people ask me what
is this kind of structure intended to do it's well it's it's whatever you want it
to do right and that's that's kind of the the mantra that I try to promote
this would be great for Netflix binge watching I always tell people that this
is a great sort of additional space in somebody's backyard could be a guest
house could be a pool house so also be a wonderful thing to take to you
know the local football game and set up the barbecue for tailgating that type of
stuffs so the weight is pretty light it's it's right around 1700 pounds can
be towed by you know your average SUV Ford Explorer or similar and pricing on
this this would be around $15,000 but I I like to work with customers in terms
of what their specific needs are and and if somebody's interested in having one
of these tiny structures my first question to them is always like what do
you want to use it for and you know you you ask that question and a hundred
times and you'll get a hundred different answers usually right some people want
to travel some people want to use it as a as a vending space at craft shows
other people like I said one sort of a guest space in their backyard a place
for the kids to hang out and so on and so on so it's really about what it is
that you want and need and creating that space
you