hey there welcome to my channel where I take you
on tours of tiny homes and unique spaces today we're traveling to London England
well no not really we're going to Portland Oregon but it may feel like we're across
the pond because we're taking a tour of a double decker bus from Great Britain that's
been transformed into a unique backyard tiny home The Man Behind the project is
going to explain the origins of the bus and why he's making it into a super cool Airbnb
in his backyard and if you like these kind of videos make sure that you subscribe and
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make this house
hi I'm Whit this is the Royal Scot and I'm excited to show you around
the Royal Scot is a 1953 28-foot double decker bus that used to be a commuter bus in Manchester
in the United Kingdom until the 80s she went to San Francisco for a few years before going
to Mount St Helens to become a tour bus in the late 80s her engine caught fire I like
to imagine that it was the eruption of St Helens but I don't think the timing lines up somebody at
that point bought her said they were going to fix up the engine but then ended up having a couple
kids and turned it into a jungle gym in their backyard in the early 2000s Matt bought it and
turned it into the grilled cheese Grill where she sat for about nine years as a successful business
the grilled cheese Grill was pretty well known here in town and so as I've been building it
people will stop and get out of their car and tell me stories about going to the grilled cheese Grill
they also want to know what's happening with it if I was turning it into a food cart myself and
they like that it's getting a new life and that it's still here in Portland so it's kind of a
cool end to the story or next chapter for the bus you'll notice the grilled cheese Grill sign up
there I kept the original and eight years later I bought it now it's here of vacation rental foreign
the driver would have sat over on this side you can see that the front is split I'm not
exactly sure why they did that all right we're looking at the entrance to the cab
to the driver's seat the window broke during a brawl during a Manchester United game in
the 80s just kidding I have no idea how that broke I got it that way it took me a little
while to realize that it opens sliding not pushing we've got a couple steps to get us in
come along
I found the double decker bus on Craigslist for eight thousand dollars
when I got the bus it was 70 years old you know pretty beat up covered in dust
as you can tell everything here is original it's not completely cleaned
out just kind of dusted there's like a cool window here there's random old stop signs
and old typeface and the window to look back at where all the passengers would
have been it does not drive the cool thing is the tires still move foreign
I'll show you the back
you can see we've got this sort of classic red and white color that we chose to paint it when
we got the Royal Scot it was brown and had a lot of work that needed to be done to it so we sanded
it down tried to patch up all the little holes that we could find all the windows leaked so
we had to come by tear off all the old caulk put on new Builders caulk around the windows
so this is a tiny house on Wheels it needs power it needs water so we've
got our plug-in which plugs directly to the side of my house it's connected
to my electrical it also has water over here which is also connected directly to my house
so we've got water coming in directly to a water heater in there electrical going into
a breaker box and out here is the backyard for our rental guests just set up as a little patio
here it is the British passenger side we've got our entrance way over here
and this deck was just built by my dad and myself just a week ago
old pictures show me that this entryway it used to be open so this would drive up to the bus stop and
people would kind of hop on while it was still rolling Matt the owner of the grilled cheese
Grill put in this door come on in here we are on the inside we had a wall that came up with a
window and people would have entered the bus and walked through this hallway we had this idea to
take out the floor right here so you can stand up in the kitchen without bumping your head foreign
behind me you can see this beautiful artwork kind of goes throughout the
bus but this was put in when the bus used to be the grilled cheese Grill and
when I found this bus I knew that it was something that I was absolutely going to
keep so I cleaned it all off protected it with polyurethane spray and touched it up
when designing this place I knew that I wanted a area that you could sit on a nice cushion and
I just love the idea of a Nook to people being able to sit together face each other and have
a conversation with maybe a cup of coffee or a beer the other cool thing is that this
bench is built right over the wheel well the wheels on this bus are big they come up here
so we had to build this whole bench over it and then on this side the reason why there aren't
cabinets and everything over on the kitchen is because it's covering the
wheel well so everything's kind of designed around things that are permanent in the bus
over here we've got the kitchen this is a countertop from Ikea they make a longer one
but I couldn't fit it in my car and I happen to have these extra scraps of Butcher Block so I
book ended the countertop and I think it turned out nice in the kitchenette over here we have a
induction cooktop with our tea kettle our toaster and down below our microwave pretty simple setup
we've got our dishes and our bowls our plates our glasses our silverware
and down below we've got our little cute white black Decker refrigerator
I knew from the beginning I wanted this place to be filled with plants so when we knew that
this concept of an open kitchen was going to be here I instantly knew that there would be
a couple shelves it would be filled with plants this light is just an Impulse buy
it was an inexpensive light that I really really liked I knew that the brass would
match the brass faucet we've got little touches of brass and black throughout the whole build
all right let me take you to the bathroom
we had to put in this wall and decide how big the doorway was gonna be my dad built this store
it's quite cool this design is kind of based off of being in a sailboat
it's pretty skinny and honestly I didn't think about how big the
toilet was and getting it in and out we have a Nature's head toilet
and the bathroom on the passenger side I've got a full shower fully tiled Subway tiles dark grout
small house small bathroom small sink this is a super tiny sink I really like it it's
cute doesn't take up much space it's built into a Live Edge piece of Walnut that I've had for
the last five years just trying to figure out what to do with it fit perfectly so I put it
in and just had to notch out some edges to make it kind of flow in towards the shower
you'll notice the switches in the bathroom it's a cool Connection to the Past just old
switches that used to operate something in the bus I don't know what but now they
will operate little lights and trinkets inside the cab when I finish foreign spiral staircase
the very first thing we did after gutting everything was we started to put up the
studs in the ceiling and then insulate the ceiling we had a lot of leaks in
that first month and so there was a lot of patching the ceiling painting the Rooftop
the ceiling is local Cedar hand stained every single piece and then polyurethane everything
in place you can see some of the detail work we had to put in basically there are seams
where pieces of wood weren't long enough so we needed to cover the seams so we came up
with this idea of putting pieces of trim in and then the question was how do we bend the trim
and our best idea was making these tiny little blocks and bending them down the curve of the bus
we used MDF uh that salvaged from a local Portland door shop and sort of clast everything
up by making it board and batten with the trim pieces there are a lot of Windows in
this bus and buying curtains or even having somebody else make curtains is an expensive
proposition so we came up with this idea of hanging up a little piece of metal have S hooks
this is actually wire that was advertised for holding up light string lights outside
and this is a queen size bed back of the bed has this little headboard this is wood that
I got from a friend's property a Live Edge piece it just boxes out the very end here to
sort of give a headboard the bed was its full length there was a little bit of Gap left so we
created this headboard Additionally the cedar ceiling that we had I ran out of paneling and
just didn't have any more wood and had to come up with a solution for the last
fifth or sixth of the bus and so I got fencing panels that I had and cut it into this design
ran some wires hung up some lights I think it turned out nice this section over here I
imagine just being an area that you might sit down and hang out eventually the idea
is that we will hang a projector around here and there will be a screen on the
other side you can throw your pillows around here hang out and watch a movie in this space
when all is said and done it probably came out to 22
000. I had to be pretty Frugal with a lot of material to not go above that price
somebody who's watching this video and is hoping that one day they can build their own
tiny house or their own bus you can people say on Instagram and Tick Tock to me all the time
like I want this to be my life it's literally what some people say and my response is this
is your life and you need to decide what you want to do with it the way I got into tiny
house building was I got a little bit tired of sitting behind a computer all day life is
way better now that I'm doing something that I'm passionate about I wouldn't trade it for anything
foreign thanks for watching this week's video I hope you
guys enjoyed it and I will see you soon with another unique home tour