hey guys jenna here welcome back to my channel where i feature creative and tiny home tours
in today's video we're featuring a family of five that just started living in a renovated school bus
adventurous by nature adam and nicole founded their relationship on wunderlust
after they married and started having children they settled down into a stationary lifestyle
and found that something was missing so they uprooted their lives and resurrected their
passion for travel by becoming a full-time nomadic family in an awesome schooly
but is bus life with kids a challenge they can conquer let's find out
hi i'm gavin hi i'm jake i'm nicole and i'm adam welcome to our tiny home
adam and i met back in 2007. i was a school teacher and i had taken students on a field
trip to japan i was working for a company and i'd been there for a little while and i i thought gosh
you know it'd be really cool to do something different i had said just find a job anywhere
and i'll go teach there it doesn't matter to me we one night we're just talking and we looked online
about teaching english overseas south korea kept coming up they had like 30 000 english teachers
in their country and so and i didn't even know where south korea was on the map you did not
i did so we found a recruiter and literally five weeks later we had visas passports a job we'd
sold all our stuff and we're on a plane to korea we spent a year in korea and then our contract
ended and we were like let's elope so we did when we got back to america
we felt like something was missing long story short we ended up pregnant with a baby and
that's where life became american right we had everything we had a three-car garage we had a
salary that you know was keeping us alive but you know what there was still something missing
as there always is because we like change our story here begins because then covet hit we
decided to rent out our house and start our trip because regardless of what we did we knew that we
could educate our kids we could look within for everything that we needed because of covid our
nomadic lifestyle that we've had all this time was almost for the first time given permission to do
we've been in the bus for about a month now and that includes renovations somebody else
had started the project a lot of the basic bones were in place the bus was mechanically sound but
we needed to now take it from that to a livable space for a family of five it took us
about two and a half weeks and that's it we've spent 46 thousand dollars on our bus and then we
probably put another 15k into it the kaja project where that came about we thought oh gosh wouldn't
it be cool to incorporate the name with something from korea kaja means let's go every time we start
up the bus to drive it i always tell the kids i'm like one two three we all yell good job
we're on the outside with our rig affectionately named bumpy by my kids bumpy is actually a 2004
bluebird all-american 40-foot bus so she's a big girl she's got a diesel engine gets a
cool 8 miles per gallon on the highway got a 100 gallon fuel tank in there so
300 price tag to fill it up so just remember you're moving a whole house
got the roof rack which was a big draw for us professionally installed by by a welding team
it also supports the solar panels there's eight panels up on the roof
with any vehicle when we were looking at buses you know big deal for us to be able
to boondock like we are now and in order to really experience that having a solar setup
was was pretty key to us 2 700 watts of solar power powered by a repurposed nissan leaf car
battery under here is actually where the entire leaf battery is set up we actually had a team
of folks put this together for us they kind of reworked what the original owners had done
what's nice about this rack is i've got the opportunity on this catwalk on the side to walk
the entire length of the bus so if i ever have to check anything out clean off any solar panels
i do have that access to do that there is room on the back side of the rack for us to hang out
come up you know check out the sunsets and just hang out up on the roof when it's not too windy
so when we did get this bus the previous owners had not painted it but they did all
the prep work to get it all ready for paint so it was fully primed we wanted to put our
own spin on it really kind of capture you know who we are in color on the outside
so we actually went with sherman williams industrial grade steel and aluminum paint
my daughter actually had picked out some pink paint just uh because she wanted a heart on the
side of the bus but we ended up doing a little bit more and did the entire length of the bus
on both sides and the bottom ballast to add a little color and we thought it really fit us
because it was a you know a nice combination of calming with a little streak of crazy in there
on the exterior here's our water fill if you guys come around here with me i'll show you where
the mass of water is that we house and the filtration system so first thing to note here
is we have a lot of fresh water we've got two 110 gallon fresh water tanks something to note
with that much water i think that equates to about two thousand pounds that's a lot
of extra weight on your bust so you know just throw that into the mix when you're considering
where you're traveling what that's going to do to your already pretty poor gas mileage
in the very front of the bus when you first walk in we have our bus door this was something
that we very much did not want to get rid of it's very authentic to be able to like
sit in the driver's seat press the button and the door goes you know like you're picking on someone
i love it and it's not something that we wanted to get rid of
the other thing that i wanted to show you guys up in the front we have them all over the bus this is
called a fireball we have five in our bus and if there is a fire we have one fire extinguisher and
it's under the sink and you know things can happen so we bought these and what it is is they're
filled with like fire extinguisher powder if a flame hits it then it automatically like bursts
like a ball and whatever ignited it will have the fire extinguisher powder all over it i actually
so far have been doing most of the driving i started and i just keep going because i feel
a little bit safe driving it ashley from bus life studios told me she goes you know grandma's drive
buses you should be fine and ever since she said that it kind of boosted my confidence a little bit
when we got the bus and it was delivered to us it only had one couch and we knew as a family
of five that that's just not comfortable for all of us we actually built this second couch in here
thinking back i would have made it much more narrow it does not need to be this big
but we did it for a few reasons one is that there could be enough seat belts we have four seat belts
installed i would like to add honestly a couple more because when you're on a long road trip
if two kids don't want to sit next to each other i want them to be able to move away
from each other so there's no argument and it's still safe but currently we have three
seat belts on this side and one on the other side i bought this push pin map of the united states
this is a map of what we've done in our lifetime together as a family we do a lot of road trips
you can kind of see all the places we've gone and the few places we haven't that's
something that can help us kind of direct where we want to go this year this pillow
we actually got as a gift for this trip it came in the mail from one of adam's cousins actually
and every time we cross a state border we colored in we've only gone to two but it's
only been 20 days so who knows what this will look like in a year right but it's fun for us
we got the bus and it had this kitchen already laid out we did replace the countertop speed
butcher block they had a plywood of some sort on top and it wasn't sturdy enough
for our family so we wanted something that was super sturdy
and that we didn't have to worry about being damaged so we put this it's from home depot
the cabinets are ikea just a stock i think that you can just pick up there
they had a really big sink in here this is actually left over from the countertop that we
cut off that we just use on top there are dishes in it because all day they collect underneath
and we do the dishes at night to conserve water that we were doing them all at once
we also put some velcro down on the counter to hold things so that when we drive
they don't go anywhere that was another hack that we saw online this space under here was meant for
a washer and dryer when we bought it they had a picture of an lg or something fancy all-in-one
washer and dryer and we thought about buying one but they're like thirteen hundred dollars that
expense was something we weren't ready to take on at this point it is plumbed for it so instead
we put food there because we are a family of five and we need a lot of food storage we don't eat out
we go to the grocery store once every seven to ten days so we needed a place to put things
so on this side of the kitchen we actually reconfigured it we moved the cabinets down
and we put in a semi full-size fridge i guess we got it at lowe's it was very affordable and
it fits enough food for you know 7 to 10 days for our family it did come with this induction cooktop
which is kind of cool it heats super quick so we have that and then this is something that we can't
live without we've always had one and i found it at target and i had to buy a new one just for
the best this is a waffle stick maker if you're even not a parent these are super cool you can do
waffles you can do brownie mix you can do anything you want it's fun to eat and they're super cute
and small which is good for rv life we wanted to make sure that the front of the bus
where we were living was separated from the sleeping space not only for just you know
waking up in the morning but at night when the kids go to bed and we want to spend some time
out front by ourselves so why don't you guys come back and we'll show you the rest of the bus
here we are in the back of our bus this is more of like our sleeping getting ready quiet time area
when we first got the bus this was all exposed it was really important that all the kids have their
own sleeping space a space that they could sit on for quiet time our oldest 27 all of a sudden
started talking that he needed space so we wanted to make sure that he had a bed that he could lay
on that was his private property that he could put something on and no one was allowed to touch
we decided to do a toddler size for our young issues for these mattresses are foam five inch
mattresses or six inch we did install a tv back here and we put it on a rotating arm
so the kids could lay in their beds at night and just watch a show or you know whatever it gave us
the flexibility of having them in the back and we could be in the front across from the bunks on the
driver's side of the bus we have our bathroom this is a toilet area obviously we have the
nature's head composting toilet the bus came with that already we are still trying to figure
out how to make it work for a family of five i will tell you this has been one of our biggest
struggles on the bus it's not a big deal but it is something we're learning to work with
i do find in the bathroom one of the things that is a little hard is there's not a lot
of storage in the bathroom you know we have a couple of different areas this is actually
a trick door up here i'm gonna reach in you can see it opens and it's stuffed with stuff
our amazing shower it is built with flexi grout
this is our master bedroom in the very back of the bus this is a king-size bed we did buy a
foam mattress with the green tea cooling agent on it because foam mattresses get very hot so
if you are going to buy a full mattress they're affordable but make sure you get one that has
cooling in it or else you're going to sweat i know that many people in buses tend to board up or take
out the windows in the back of their bus i like to think that maybe it isn't a great idea to cover up
your windows because the more breezes that you can get in and the more nature you can be surrounded
by that's why we're living in a school bus we also have a skylight that lets in a lot of light we'd
like to eventually be able to get it to open so we can go up there but the minute you start doing
stuff like that you have to worry about leaks and things and that's not something that adam and i
are ready to take on underneath our master bed in the back i ended up buying ten tupperwares with
lids they stack on top of each other under the bed clean clothes fit perfectly in them you can see
underneath here we everybody has their two bins everybody has five outfits that's how we packed
i think what is unique about us and i think it's probably the the hardest part for a lot of people
is to find that piece of you that can just say you know what i'm comfortable with the fact that
i don't know how this is going to go you know i can think about it all day i can find every reason
in the world to say no to this but there's only really one way i'm going to ever really know and
that's if if we give it a shot you just have to say let's go thanks for watching this week's video
make sure to like share and subscribe and i'll see you next friday with an all new video tour