hey there jenna here welcome to my channel where i feature tours of tiny homes and creative homes
i've featured a lot of tiny houses on this channel but never have i featured a tiny house
as jam-packed as this schooly we're featuring today by jam-packed i don't mean that it's
cluttered i mean that this family not only has three kids living in their tiny house but they
also share the space with four dogs and not tiny dogs some of these dogs are as big as their kids
i can't wait to show you how they make full-time life on the road work and dare i say that they
do it in a way that's not only functional but also seems to be a little bit glamorous
if you like these kind of video tours make sure that you subscribe and ring that bell so that
you get a notification every time i post a new one and now let's jump right in and take a tour
hi i'm kyle i'm jen i'm ben i'm molly i'm eli
and we are red white and bethune we're here to show you our tiny home on wheels blue betty
before we moved into blue betty something that we really noticed in ourselves was that
we just got tired of the nine to five grind every single day we had a 2 500 square foot house on two
acres of land had the entire american dream but we were missing something and we knew that all along
and we didn't really know it was going to take a bus for us to find that several years ago back
in 2011 we were involved in a car accident that took the life of our son ethan and we were on
our way to disney for his seventh birthday that was the hardest thing that's ever happened to us
but what that did was it showed us that life is very very short that was a big inspiration to us
to really live our best lives and get out there and show our children that we can go
travel we can do all these things we can see amazing places and it's totally okay and doable
so we purchased this bus back in november of 2019 we renovated it basically from the day we
brought it home for the next three months every single day 10 to 12 hours a day and then we moved
in in march of 2020. we ended up doing a whole lot more than we had actually initially planned
until you get in here and live in the space you're truly going to learn things that could
be improved along the way and that's something we we've done two or three times since we moved
in little tweaks we've had to make you know to one better the lifestyle the children and us
i feel like it makes you closer to your rig when you're the one in it you're putting that
sweat equity in it and you're really putting your touch and making it customized to you it means so
much more than to just go buy something off of a lot welcome to the inside of blue betty it was
really important to me when we were designing this bus to make it feel like a home we came
from 2 000 square feet so we wanted to make sure that our bus was really our tiny home on wheels
you know we have a lot of great spaces in the bust but this behind me might just be my absolute
favorite our views are ever changing like right now we are parked right in front of a river our
kids can go tubing i can work at this desk that my husband built for a steering wheel cover
it's just so peaceful and relaxing especially with my plants that i have back here i recently became
a plant mom none of them have died so i'm winning at life but it's just so great to be able to just
sit here look out at the beautiful views that we get to see across the country now we love to
go off-grid we really do but we also like modern amenities as well we have two tvs in the bus one
in the living room and one in our bedroom but this one is so we can kind of sit around chill
just relax out here watch tv a question that we get asked quite a bit is how do you cook in such
a small space well we have our air fryer up over here that we use all the time and over here we've
got our microwave that we use to kind of reheat stuff and under our kitchen sink is where we have
our portable induction cooktop that we can put up on top of the counter and cook whatever we need to
we have our gold sink i love gold in my rig and so my sink was no different found it on amazon
we also have our water filter with traveling to so many different places and you fill up with water
that you really don't know where it's coming from this is great because it makes our water alkaline
we also have canisters down below that filter the water too as you can imagine with a family of five
with growing kids we need to have a lot of food and we love fresh clean local food as much as
we can get it so we put in a residential style fridge and then we also have a great size freezer
as well this space right here was actually a pull-out trash can before and we needed some more
food storage for our dry goods and so we made it into a swinging door and we've got several shelves
of food space with a family as large as ours we knew we needed a washer dryer combo whenever we
stay in rv parks we're able to use it when we're boondocking it pulls a little too much power and
uses a lot of water so we're only using this when we're in rv parks plugged up to water and power
another question that we get asked a lot as a full-time traveling family is
where do your kids sleep well when we bought the bus it originally had eight bunks in it
and we only needed three so we got rid of five bunks and kept these right here
our kids they got to design their own bunk a little bit they got to pick out their own
wallpaper their own bedding and it's just a really cozy space for them to be able to sleep in because
truth be told if we are boondocking we're outside like the only time we're inside is to go to bed
so we love enjoying the outdoors and the kids love coming into their own little quiet space hi
i'm molly and this is my bug i get my own space the wallpaper is flower themed and i love flowers
this hamburger is my favorite stuffed animal i keep my dolls in my bunk because i love to
play with my dolls so this is probably my second favorite thing hi i'm ben and i'm in my man cave
this is probably the best bunk because i have a tv a playstation and the most room i like
living in a bus because we get to go to a lot of places and it's a lot of fun hi my name is
my blank i like putting my tablet in my bunk i have a light right here and turning it on
our bus literally has everything a regular house has just on a little bit of a smaller
scale we have a fully functioning bathroom with a real toilet we have a black tank down below
we decided to put in this fun greenery you'll see this a lot throughout the bus
the thing with boondocking is it gets really really dirty and so you need a place
to shower off and we have a shower right here in our bus that our tankless hot water heater gives
us hot water until the tank runs out this is our office space and kids dresser space we needed a
place where we can edit our youtube videos deal with our rental properties you know work and
our kids have a lot of clothes so we wanted to make sure that we got them a dresser that can fit
all of their stuff they each have a big big drawer and then they have one of the smaller drawers
up above over here is mine and kyle's closet like all of our hangable stuff
we put up here down below this is our custom dog kennel it's actually five feet by three feet so
they can all stay in there comfortably and hang out they lay on top of each other on the couch
anyway but it's a great thing that we definitely knew we needed to add to the bus traveling with
dogs on the road can be really really challenging so when we're in beautiful places like this we
actually have a huge dog fence outside that we're able to let the dogs run around in we
can sit up by the campfire so whenever we're here they are lounging around and hanging out with us
welcome to our master bedroom you are looking at a king-size
bed we were able to fit a residential king in here mainly because we love to have movie
nights with the kids and we will all pile in the bed it's really like a big lounge area
this is our 1983 silver eagle bus it's a model 10 it's 40 foot long powered by a 6v 92 detroit
diesel engine the bus weighs approximately forty thousand pounds that's including our toad
so one of the things that allows us to be able to boondock in places like this is
we do have a huge solar array we have approximately 2 800 watts on the roof
we're able to power the bus pretty much completely solely off of that especially when we have awesome
sunshine like we do now we're a family of five this is a 40-foot bus we consume a lot of power
so i felt it was pretty much best to fill the roof up as much as i possibly could with solar panels
that way would give us the best chance of charging the batteries as much as we possibly can when we
need to we also have two rooftop ac units they're 15 000 btu coleman mach 8's they also have soft
starts in those which eases the the draw a little bit when you're initially cranking the ac units up
so it doesn't surge so much from the batteries right off the bat
so what we do is we have two victron inverters we have a 5 000 watt 24 volt inverter that pretty
much is dedicated to run the air conditioners we have a 3000 watt 24 volt inverter on the other
side that pretty much runs all the 12 volt and keeps everything else in the bus going at all
times one of the biggest draws to this type of bus for us was the underneath storage the model 10
40 foot has three bays it's passed through completely so you have three doors on each side
this particular bay here we house all of our solar stuff and our batteries we have 1200 amp
hours of lithium batteries at 24 volts but as a family our size it was super important for us to
be able to have this pass through storage that way we could haul all the kids stuff and you
know be able to keep the things that they enjoy doing with them at all times next to our tool
in battery bay we have our wet bait we're able to carry 110 gallons of fresh onboard along we have
a single 100 gallon waste tank we also have our hot water heaters stored on the other side of this
we keep all of our hoses for water fill and all that in this bay here one of the big things that
we don't like about the bus or that we plan on changing is this bus does not ventilate very well
with the current setup it's something we've been battling since day one so over the winter we're
going to probably reduce some of the windows that way we can get some cross ventilation and some air
running through the bus without having to run the airs all the time getting out of your comfort zone
was a big teacher for me and it still is to this day like this is not an easy decision to make to
sell everything you have and leave a life that you knew to jump into one you had no idea about
i really challenge people a lot to get out of your comfort zone and see what's really out there
you might be surprised at what you can find i will say i never ever want to live in a regular house
again something that i say all the time is you will either find a way to make it happen
or you will make an excuse not to go live a life that you actually want to wake up to
thanks for watching this week's video make sure to like share and subscribe and i will
see you next week with an all new tiny house or creative home tour
you