Hey I'm Eric Gordon and this is my 40-foot tiny house Skoolie called The
Mountain Bus here in beautiful Boulder, Colorado.
As always trying to live as minimally as possible and also have a ton of options
as far as where I can live, what I can do, and being cost-effective. I live part
time in a VW van. Started out doing that for about three or four years and now
we've upgraded to a larger situation. In my life Craigslist seems to just be the
way that I find all things good. It's how I found my old 71 VW. Found this one super
beautifully built out down in southern Colorado and I reached out to him and
it turns out it was built out by a high school shop class. They were looking to
sell it to essentially fund their art program and their outdoor program being
a climber and an artist I was stoked on that so we went down and checked it out
and it was everything we wanted to do. It's a very simple build out. There's no
inset plumbing or there had been no solar setup put in there yet and we already
had both of those situations figured out. We started off when I drove the bus off
of the schoolyard that same day when I was first driving this 40-foot school
bus, which I've never driven something this big before, ended up actually having
a friend who has a 40-foot driveway exactly like garage to sidewalk. We
started off living in a school bus downtown Boulder around million-dollar
mansions, definitely got some strange looks for that. Soon after that a friend
that owns this property and this house with this beautiful backyard put it out
there that she really wanted to kind of start a collective living situation. She
just moved in here and really wanted to still embrace community and have a
strong sense of friendship around here so I had to like widen the fence to
sneakily drive this in because we're in kind of a quiet neighborhood here so I
had to like ram the curb and shoot the gap to get this 40 foot school
bus in this backyard all while doing it like to not draw really much attention.
This is The Mountain Bus. It's a 40-foot 1990 Thomas Skoolie tiny house. First
off we have the glorious Skoolie front door very important to getting into your
bus. We are heated all by big wood-burning
stove inside so we've got our hardwood stuff protected under the bus here.
That's where we storing everything. We've got a couple of storage compartments
here for all the gear and stuff that we can't fit in there. We try and keep
it as tidy as possible. Probably one of the most important things of alternative
living or anything like that living in a bus is gonna be your solar setup so
we've got a four panel goal zero setup here and we decided not to mount it on
the roof just because I don't have that time to be honest, but also it gives you
a lot more mobility as far as getting your most optimum sunlight wherever you are.
So as we cruise around back here here
there's a large diesel engine in here that I don't know how to work on so that's
important. Very important to shove all of your blankets and sleeping bags against
the windows to insulate your sleeping quarters in there. My very fancy way of
getting the solar into the bus is a drilling a hole in there, definitely. This
is actually a pretty great feature here. There we just have access to inside the
bus here. The wood-burning stove is right in here so this is where we also have
another wood pile that were able to just chuck some wood in there. All we need.
Got one more very large hard to open thing here with some more bins, outdoor gear,
our winter setup right now. One cool thing actually is the clearance that
this bus has is you know what schools take to all their sporting games in the
mountains here so that's pretty great. We've got a little bit of clearance if
we want to get gnarly. Here's a very jerry-rigged chimney situation that
maybe cost me about six dollars total. Found this all at the recycle place.
Just like the engine here's a bunch of wires that I don't know what they do but
I did dismantle the emergency alarm so that we can open that back door
without waking up the neighbors. And last but not least these are the mirrors that
I hit my head on very often when I'm walking around the bus.
Welcome to the inside of The Mountain Bus here, come on in. In the doorway here we got our nice
winter coat setup. Got all the shoes going on here, a little shoe rack, and skateboard.
I guess come on inside here. We've got the living room, the kitchen, and the writing table.
We decided not to do any sort of intense plumbing for this setup so we just have
this is a three gallon classic countertop dealio and you just flip that
on, we got water. This is a little catch sink where we can do some dishes like in
the summer like that window will be down we just toss it out there. We try and use
things that aren't harmful to just you know put back in the ground. Since we
travel a lot in our VW van and camp for months at a time we have decided to use
all of our camping gear because we have so much as our in-house gear as well
when we're not traveling. This set up we'll just we'll just unscrew it and
take it up with us on the road and then when we come back we just plug it right
back into the propane tank we got under here and this is just kind of some
simple storage here. We just got an extra water tank, some random tools. You end up
having an impressive tool collection once you've lived in an alternative
or tiny house thing because there's always something that could be fixed or
you could move it two inches and it'll change your life. Here we just got a
little writing table. This actually used to be like probably twice the size and
then when you're living in a small space for long enough you realize you only use
this much of the table. We could probably even cut this down to half this size.
We got a bench slash cooler under here so we try to make that look as classy as
possible while still being a fridge. This is that glorious wood-burning stove
still a little warm from last night that I was talking about. This is kind of like
the biggest thing that especially winters in Colorado living in a bus you
can imagine our floors do get pretty cold just because it's you know there's
there's that wind flow underneath the bus that tends to really cool it down so
having a really big wood-burning stove is excellent. We got some more lighting here
from the goal zero setups we have. A larger lead acid battery there
and then a lithium battery over in this side.
Continuing farther and farther into the chasm of glory we have our wood burning
wood, some little chips here to get the fire going, and then bigger logs down
there. If anybody out there is gonna be using a wood-burning stove as your main
source of heat always buy hard wood just do it, spend the money. And into the
humble bathroom situation. It's an awesome hack that I learned about from
somebody. You have here a five-gallon I guess you call a waste water tank and then a
funnel. In that funnel you put a ping-pong ball. Pee goes in there and then
it caps it automatically and there's no smell. We have a self composting toilet
that is essentially you got your bucket your compostable bag and then we take
ash from the fireplace and use that as our compost initiator and it also
neutralizes all bad things and it's just super simple.
Got some more coolers here. We're really big on coolers in The Mountain Bus.
Just for we'll take that one camping or what not but or use it as a shelf.
In the summer when we're using our mountain bikes that's a huge thing that
we love to do. We actually they both fit right here in this kind of space.
Right back here we got the bedroom, the closet, which I get very little space of and
then on this side another we got the wheel wells here again so one side of it
is the shelving and the closets and the other side is just some more hanging
space. This is a full king sized bed platform back here but we don't have a
king sized bed because who really needs that? That's ridiculous. In a tiny house that doesn't make sense.
Lastly the the cool thing that came with this bus is the doggie door.
This is you know right there. We use it as storage right now cuz we
don't have a dog, but it just reminds us that one day we got to get a bus dog.
It's probably corny but maybe not. I own a coffee business that I run out of
my VW van around the country and I've incorporated the advice of 'Life is short.
Live your dream. Find your line'. I think of those on a daily basis. So simple. Life
is extremely short when you think about it. What one thing would you do with this
magnificent life? You should just start living a dream as soon as possible. That
looks different for everybody so the find your line part is just kind of
like what what line are you gonna choose to get to that point in life where
you're doing exactly what you want and if you died tomorrow you would be a
happy person. Figure out the direction that you really want to start putting
yourself down and start to look for the avenues that you can do that. When you
find the one that feels right and you know it feels right don't hesitate go
for it. You know if you have the ability to do it just do it or even if you're
not even there yet create that path for yourself to where once you start
changing your lifestyle in that kind of way you realize how little you really
need as far as feature comforts and then how much more important or how these
things have always been important just like the people around you, the things
that you spend your time doing, just being happy. You're able to focus so
much more energy on that rather than cleaning a massive house or worrying
about paying large bills for things that don't really add much value to your life
besides you know, they look nice.
I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. If you did be sure to LIKE comment and
subscribe. If you want to find out more about Eric you can find him over at
Caribbean or Coffee and today's episode was filmed on the DJI Osmo Mobile.
They're having a holiday special where you can get one discounted so if you're
interested in getting a gimbal for your mobile phone the DJI Osmo Mobile go over
to DJI and buy one. Get it discounted. Have a great week. Byeeeee.