You may not be aware,
but in the small house movement there's a big debate and that's whether you
should go with a tiny house or a schooly or renovated school bus.
Obviously I'm shooting this video in my tiny house so you know which way I went
on the debate.
But in today's video you're going to see an awesome renovated school bus that
might just have you thinking that a schooly is right for you.
I'm Annie and this is Roman and we live in little Groundhog
This is Eugene.
We named the bus a little Groundhog mostly because my grandfather was a long
haul furniture and freight trucker and when I was eight years old I went on the
road with him for the first time.
We were traveling across the country and he pulled his CB radio down and got on
the mic and everybody listen up.
I've got a special guest with me all summer long.
This is a little Groundhog and he gave me the name and it stuck.
Years ago when I was much younger. Um,
I ended up homeless for a short period of time and I climbed back out of it and
got my stuff together.
When I first decided that I wanted to go tiny and then started talking to her
about going tiny,
my main drive was I never want to be in a position where I'm ever going to be
homeless again. And I also wanted to have a vehicle.
I wanted it to be accessible to a point where if we were in one place and we
just wanted to go in 20 minutes flat, we're driving on the road.
So when he was like, I want to live at a school bus, I said, okay,
we can live in a cardboard box as long as you're there, I'm home. So we're good.
Buddied up. I told a friend of mine, a very good friend of mine, Hey,
so we're going to buy a bus and convert it into a tiny house.
Hung up the phone. She called her mom and said, I think Roman had a stroke.
Now that friend has,
since her boyfriend has bought a bus and they are converting it.
So I called her back and I said, Hey, did you have a stroke?
Little groundhog is 36 feet long, 8 feet wide,
gives us roughly 266 square feet of living space.
This is really it. I wanted everything to be kind of built in.
I didn't want to do something that was going to slide around or you know,
you put the brakes on and everything falls. I lucked out with my mom.
I got her to actually make my pillows for me, which is a lot of fun.
There's that personal touch.
You just kind of having the family be involved in it, which is really cool.
Of course,
right past the living room you ends up in the kitchen and she had some very
specific things about the kitchen that she wanted.
Doing dishes in a tiny home. A lot of people struggle with adjusting
going from having a dishwasher to not having a dishwasher.
My compromise was a big sink.
We had to have a big sank so that way I could wash dishes,
but also I could leave dishes and not feel as guilty. Let's be honest.
The second thing that had to take up counter space was of course the coffee
maker because you can't, you can't live without coffee.
Then we have an induction cooktop, so two burner induction cooktop that we love.
We've got a toaster convection oven that works just like a regular oven does on
like cooking and baking needs. Love it.
Being able to cook and cook the way you would in a conventional kitchen in a
house. We wanted to maintain that, you know,
that was important and I wanted a full size fridge.
I did not want to do an RV fridge
with this side. Again,
we wanted more storage and we even have this nifty pull out door.
This is Bo. He's got his own name tag.
He is our four month old Minx tuxedo cat that we adopted from some friends.
So he likes to ride up on the dash or sometimes Roman's shoulder while we're
driving down the road.
One of the things that was really important to me was having a full sized shower.
Um,
I kind of developed this thing a long time ago that when I move into a new place
and I moved a lot as a kid and when I moved into a new place,
nothing, it never felt like home until I could actually take a shower in it.
This was the very last thing that we put into the rig and probably should have
been the first thing we put in cause it was so hard to get it in the blinds
across the top. Getting those things cut is really kind of a challenge.
And then, you know, figuring out the wheel well, this right here,
that's a lot of fun. Um, and people ask me all the time,
can you actually sit in there and you know, and I can, it's,
it's really comfortable. And we did the, uh,
the kind of faux stained glass on the windows. Um,
just to add that little extra level of privacy when you're in here,
we get asked a lot as well. Is it a composting toilet?
Cause it looks like a composting toilet and it's actually not.
It's the porta-potty by Thedford
I think the first festival we went to,
we didn't actually have the closet doors on the front of it.
She loves stickers. Um,
we do the sticker swaps with everybody all the time and one of the place to put
them, but it not also be like, you know, this big kind of menagerie of,
of mess out in the middle of the bus. So she put them all on the inside.
When we actually moved into the bus, we, we pared down a lot, um,
and kind of organized, okay,
this is what we can take and this is what we might have to throw away.
And we got everything that we had all went in here and we didn't lose out on
any of our clothing, which was kinda fun.
I didn't think you could put that much in a closet.
When we first started building the bus,
I wanted to go more of a blue kind of feel, right? Teals, blues,
things like that.
And she with Disney and Mickey and Minnie and all that kind of stuff,
that color palette really spoke to her. And she loved this.
So we decided to kind of change that. So the reds, the Crimson's, the black and whites,
the grays. My mom had this kind of one demand.
If I'm going to come over your house,
I don't want to feel like I'm in this cigar tube. And so she said,
make sure you keep windows. So when you're sitting down the windows,
bring all of that kind of big space into your world.
Even though the wall physically stops here, you feel like you're in a much,
much bigger space.
I didn't originally put this in and it was a big deal for her because we use
this as storage space. I wanted to make sure that she could get.
So this is our vanity area.
This is actually over a wheel well and which really struggled on what to do with
the space. That wasn't just a box over the wheel well.
So we ended up making vanity and then we flip over to the other side.
This is one of two TVs that we have. It's the smaller of the two. Well,
with us going tiny.
It wasn't a sacrifice of going from modern conveniences and having our X-Box and
all of our electronics. We have two TVs.
I've never seen another one that has two.
We wanted to have a place to work, a place to play,
a place to eat, that kind of thing. And I wanted a table,
but I didn't want to do the kind of standard dinette so we did a fold-up table,
you know, pull up a chair. We both eat dinner here sometimes,
or I use it as kind of my office desk and it really just kinda folds out of the
way. And you have a lot more space in the bus.
We have storage in our ottoman that was bought this way.
And then we also built in storage in our couch.
A lot of people ask us if our couch folds out to a bed, but it does not.
However, it's seven foot long so anybody could sleep on it.
And if we really, really need the extra space,
if we have friends that want to stay over,
we have a twin air mattress that we can inflate that sits right here in this
space.
We moved in in February of 2018 and we're coming up on one year.
The flexibility of having this is tremendous.
Don't not do something because you're afraid. Get in there and get involved.
A lot of people look for that excuse not to do it. Find that reason to do it.
Make sure you comment below,
which you prefer a tiny house or a school bus and subscribe to see more tiny
house and travel videos.