I've featured several bus conversion homes on this channel and you guys have
loved them all. But today's schooly home is extremely unique.
Not only did Adam and Joanie decide to downsize into a renovated school bus with
their three young kids,
they also managed to design the space so that Joanie could continue to run her
salon out of their home.
So we're going to take a closer look at this uniquely designed Schooley home and
learn what it's like not only to live with three young children in a school bus,
but also what it means to have a mobile business in your home.
Hey guys, welcome to our home. I'm Adam Wegman and I'm Joanie Wegman.
Before bus life,
we had a six acre homestead with a small hobby farm with chickens and goats and
a large garden. So that was our lifestyle.
Prior to bus life and owning a couple of businesses to all those things and
having children consumed our life with homeschooling and whatnot,
we had several things happen that made us look for a different lifestyle.
For one. We were a little tired of Minnesota winters,
so we wanted to get out of there in the wintertime and that led us to looking
into RVs or trailers or whatnot and we just couldn't find anything that would
fit our needs. We knew whatever we would buy
we'd end up gutting it and renovating it and making it our own anyway,
Joanie did a Facebook post and just asking what should we do? And someone said,
why don't you look at an old school bus?
She bought a one way ticket to go look at a bus I'd never seen before to buy a
bus
I'd never driven before and knowing nothing about it total start to finish time
to build the bus was seven months. I had some work I was doing,
but then I kind of stopped working and then just solely worked on the bus.
During that time we had moved out of a rental into another property.
We were selling things so it wasn't just full time on the bus there.
A lot of other things happening with moving our house,
selling everything from our home to selling everything from our business
at the same time
We did 90% of the work ourselves and we think we have including our bus,
about 30,000 into our bus build.
For a place to live and have everything we want the way we wanted it.
I think it turned out great. This home has changed our lifestyle significantly.
For one, we're with our children 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
We are educating them and we get to see them learn how to read.
We get to teach them math.
We get to see their eyes light up when they learn something new.
That piece of it and being in close quarters with them.
We have a tight knit family now and isn't that what you truly want is you want
to have a loving family?
A little bit about the bus in general.
We decided to find the biggest bus we could find cause it's a family of five.
We're all living in here full time so we needed as much space as possible.
So we found a 40 foot bus and the research we did was we wanted something
extremely reliable that had a track record of not breaking down, easy to fix,
easy to find parts. So we went with a DT466 international engine,
Alison transmission,
and we wanted something also with the tallest ceiling we could get in standard
size. We didn't want to have to do a roof raise,
we didn't have as much time as we would've liked to renovate everything.
So in doing so we found a bus that was I believe 78 inches inside and it was
used as an activity bus, like a sports bus. So it had some under storage,
tall ceiling, which was everything we were looking for.
So we have two solar panels on the roof and two batteries in our battery bank,
which is plenty of power for us when we have an electric fridge that runs
fulltime on it. And then just regular small appliance use.
We went with a kind of a residential style house door, so it felt like home.
So when we come up to that door every day it's like, Oh, this is a home door,
this is our space, this is our spot.
And then also the paint color Joanie's brother.
He works for a company doing automobile paint and he got this great color for us
and it's a custom color you can't find anywhere else.
So it's extremely unique to our bus, which we love.
Well, welcome to our home.
This is the kitchen area that I'm standing in as well as the living room,
the dining room, the homeschooler room.
We weren't quite sure how our setup would be on a day to day basis,
but we really like how it turned out. We can,
all five of us fit here to work with the kids on their homeschool to eat family
breakfast, lunch and dinner.
We make an effort to eat every single meal together.
I use this area to cook all of my meals from scratch.
I love being in the kitchen. I love serving my family with food.
We tend to travel with a little bit more stuff than other people.
We have a popcorn maker, ice maker. We've got our blender,
which this we also use to make homemade bread.
We grind our own grain to make bread.
So I would say that this is an amazing kitchen where I can do everything that I
used to do from this space.
I don't feel like it's super claustrophobic.
I can work in this space with the kids running around me cause you know kids are
always in the kitchen anyway when you're cooking.
So this has been a good working space for me as a mom to feed my family of five.
So we love how this part turned out.
We also have our fireplace and our wood stove.
We can cook on it if we're boondocking out in the desert and we don't have
regular hookups.
It's also a nice place where we can just sit here and relax and watch the
crackling fire at night when it's all dark and the kids are asleep in bed.
It's just a nice way for us to unwind,
kick our feet up and relax in our tiny home.
Here we are in front of the bathroom.
We chose to use an old pallet for the door along with a chalkboard in the middle
of it so I can plan off the week here
we have a very tiny sink and we got that on Amazon and then our separate toilet
is a compost toilet.
We have a diverter that goes right down to our gray water tank in back
of the urine diverter,
it's like a bag and you can go probably with five of us six days without
emptying that. It's easy,
it's efficient and we like the height and the size of it.
I'm Eden. I'm nine and I'm going to be showing you around my bunk.
I like to come to my bunk so I can get away or read.
This is my book that I'm reading right now and my favorite part of my bunk is my
sloth pillow and my baskets so
I can hold all my stuffies in and I love my bunk.
My name is Lincoln and I'm 8
and I really liked this bed.
This is what I call my room and this is my favorite stuffy and our friend
knitted these cartons
for me under here is our tub and that's how we get clean.
My name's Solomon and I'm 5 welcome to my bed.
I like to come here and play with my stuffy.
I love my bed. Bye.
Come on back and we'll show you guys the bedroom.
This is my favorite part of our build and for a few different reasons.
One is you always need a place to come to relax and in a tiny space,
especially when we have limited seating in our build,
we wanted a nice place for the kids to come. If we wanted to watch a movie,
we chose to put a bed in here that has a trundle that pulls out cause we have
three kids and the youngest one still struggle sometimes with getting up at night and
feeling unsafe and even though they're close, which has helped a lot,
this has been nice to have this tunnel to pull out.
We may at some point replace this because we won't need that anymore and we
might build a different bed system, but for right now we love how this is.
We also included these cabinets all the way around.
So one of the requests that I had was to build me cabinets.
I am a hairstylist by trade and so I need to look nice.
I do weddings and makeup for a living and I needed a store more clothes than
just hiking clothes or lounging wear I think it gives this lovely light,
airy but still beautiful and romantic look to the bedroom.
We do love the bedroom.
One thing I wanted to mention is we got this comforter and it zips on and off,
which makes it very convenient because before this we had a regular comforter.
It looked something like Adam and I jumping across the bed and trying to shimmy
ourselves across the bed to tuck in a comforter and it just,
it never looked put together back here.
Here we are. This is a special part of the bus to me.
This is our third door and the entrance to my mobile salon.
I have always wanted to do hair.
My husband kind of kept pressuring to get on the road full time.
I had a little bit of a difficult time thinking that I would close my salon and
spa and leave the one thing that I was really passionate about,
he made a compromise with me to be able to use seven feet of our school bus to
put in a mobile salon and makeup studio for me.
This is the place where I get to serve other people.
I was putting so much emphasis on achievement and not enough on making an impact
on people's lives.
Being on the road and going from state to state and being able to do this has
been a wonderful experience for both of us.
I wanted to talk to you guys about how it was to transition from 1,450 square
feet in a full wellness salon and spa to seven feet.
One of the things that was really important to me is to have a shampoo bowl that
I could stand behind.
We were able to fit that right up against this wall by putting the overhead
cupboards for my color in here.
And then of course the chair is over here.
So really my space is just right here and I don't need a lot of space.
I just need enough to stand and work with the clients.
It's very simple and compact and I have everything that I need in here for my
makeup studio and for doing waxes, cuts, colors.
These are a must, these child locks so you don't lose your inventory on the road.
And here's my second cabinet for all of my developer.
If you guys want to do a mobile salon,
you will have to get reciprocity and get licensing in every state that you want
to practice hair in,
you do have to have doorways that close off from the living quarters and just
look on the regulations on the website, a working sink, bathroom,
things like that for clients.
And you do also have to have your mobile salon license
We thought we were some weirdos, that were going to live on a bus.
But as we have traveled,
we've found so many people and you get to hear their story and how they ended up
on the road.
This lifestyle lends itself to people pouring themselves out and then sharing
that the people we met on the road has been incredible.
This is a completely different lifestyle than we thought that we would live.
We didn't have dreams or aspirations to live full time on the road,
just we wanted a different life than we were living in Minnesota.
This is not an easy lifestyle at times. It's a very rewarding lifestyle,
but it's not easy to do this.
So we've learned a lot about ourselves. We are looking for a home somewhere
we can settle eventually.
We won't be in the bus forever and our kids are getting bigger so they won't fit
in the bus forever.
We want to spend these days with quality time, with our kids,
quality time with each other, and also dreaming and looking at new horizons too.
So this has helped us dream in ways that we didn't before because we were a
little bit for stuck. Thanks for watching.
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