Hey guys, Jenny here. Welcome to my channel,
where I feature alternative lifestyles and creative homes. In today's video,
we traveled to one of the most expensive cities in the USA and meet four friends
who challenged the idea of traditional housing so that they could live in the
heart of San Francisco.
We're going to take a tour of the repurposed shuttle bus that the four of them
called home for a time and also their newly converted van.
But first I'd like to thank nomad internet for sponsoring this video.
Nomad is the only truly unlimited internet you can use in rural areas.
And while on the road stay connected wherever you are without any extra fees
to find out more, check out the link in the description.
Hi, my name is Ryan. My name is Ben and we have one friend Toby as well.
The four of us converted these two vehicles, a shuttle bus,
and a Step van into two adventure homes.
So frequent stops all started about three and a half years ago.
We as a group of four, people wanted to live in San Francisco,
which is one of the most expensive cities in the world, experience the city,
but also not have to pay the incredibly high rent prices.
So we started with the bus conversion and the four of us lived in it for about a
year. And then the step van conversion actually came along.
When Ben planned on going to grad school,
we actually built that as a vehicle for him to live in Boston.
So the reason.
We decided to renovate a bus instead of an RV or a tiny house
is because we were living in San Francisco where we wanted to be under the
radar incognito. And you definitely stand out a little bit.
If you're in a tiny house or an RV,
we've actually ended up doing three builds in total,
FirstBuild on the bus was a quick 14 day build that happened
over the course of a couple of weekends.
We were all working and needed to get the bus done so that we could move into
it. The second build took three months and was a really
iterative process with a lot of YouTube video watching and asking
friends for help.
None of us had any real construction experience before this.
So it was a learn as we go along.
And then we took all of the experience and learning that we did on the first two
builds and turned it into the step van, which was our third build.
So we found the bus at a heavy vehicle auction at Twomey County.
So counties in general, they sell their vehicles, uh,
when they're retiring them. So we actually got really lucky.
This is a 2008 vehicle, so relatively new and we bought it, you know,
a few years ago, three and a half years ago. And we actually got it for $1,800.
So the in-person cash only, you can't see the vehicles online beforehand.
So that gives you a real advantage. The first renovation.
Costs around $4,000.
The second renovation costs around $7,000.
And then as soon as we left on our road trip,
after the second renovation we broke down. So we got a new engine,
which was about $8,000.
Hi, my name's Anna.
And this is a 2008 Ford E450 StarCraft shuttle bus.
We have two couches on either side.
Both of them are on rock and roll hinges so that they could both pull out and
fold into beds. And we have storage underneath both of them.
And this bus is designed to sleep two people really
comfortably. You can sleep two couples if you like to snuggle.
And then here we have a really big kitchen. When we designed this build,
we really wanted a big kitchen with lots of counter space because we had
lived in this bus before, without any kitchen,
we have wooden counters.
These are slots of wood that are black Oak from the Butte fire in
California, kind of near where Orion is from.
So we salvaged this wood and some friends of ours actually use their
mill and milled it for us.
And we just planned it and cut it to size and stained it.
And then here we have a, a winter fridge.
So we have it on really beefy drawer slides.
That way we could pull it out and slide it back in to maximize space.
And we have a fridge that we pretty much mostly use it as a fridge the entire
time, but we can change the temperature on this side to have it be a freezer.
And then we have a four burner stove and an oven
this we got from a place called RV, Dr. George in Sacramento,
which is just a bunch of RV parts that we can recycle and reuse.
So we were able to get a lot of things from RV, Dr. George, which was great,
getting things secondhand.
And then we have a really big sink being able to do our dishes
easily was really important. So running water,
we have a really good filtration system so that we can put in pretty much any
water. And it comes out portable, which is really great.
These Mason jars over here with food,
this is a pretty common thing that you see in a lot of van builts.
It's really pretty and functional way to store food as well as a
magnetic spice kit,
which is nice because of the size of this kitchen we've been able to
cook really huge meals all the time.
We had a Thanksgiving dinner in here with 10 people.
We weren't able to fit an entire Turkey inside this oven, but we did a lot of,
a lot of yummy roasted things
Here we have clothing storage right now it just has some
random miscellaneous things in it, guitar.
Oh yes. And the ceiling paint thing.
So when we first decided to do the ceiling painting,
we really wanted to create something that made the vehicle feel really big and
spacious.
And so we thought doing a painted canopy would help make the
space feel really open.
We grabbed two canvas cloth drops from Home Depot,
and we laid it out on a living room floor and Toby who is
our fourth best member. He is the artist of the group.
And so he painted this entire canopy with a bunch of bunch of bunch of little
dots. And it took around 200 hours.
He listened to every single Harry Potter book while he did it.
When we were traveling for several months,
we had a tradition where anybody who would stay in the bus would get to add
a dot to the ceiling painting. So this is the vehicle conversion number two.
And so before there there's evidence of the first vehicle conversion where we
had hanging beds. And so here, this, these are the,
the ropes. So a bed used to be here.
This was Toby's bed and there were four ropes,
one for each corner.
And we had prosec hitches tying onto each rope,
which was connected to the bed frame. And so we had a bed here.
We had a bed here,
Both of them, we could level, depending on where we were parked,
we were parked on a Hill,
which a lot of times we were in San Francisco and then we were able to lift the
entire bed and fold it up against the wall so that we could have a really,
really, really open vehicle.
The Van was our second conversion.
So you would think that it would be this nice, smooth process, but we, uh,
in general really like to push ourselves.
So we got really excited about doing new things. So for example,
doing the back door, we did the shower in that one,
which she didn't do a shower in this one,
we got a little bit more advanced on our electronics.
So we still have this big learning curve and we're trying to push ourselves.
So it took actually about the same amount of time. Um, but we do have a cleaner,
more precise, uh, result as,
as a product of the experience from building the bus first.
And the van conversion took about three months.
So about the same amount of time as the bus and building setback is it's
actually a substantially smaller space.
So trying to fit everything into such a smaller space was a really big challenge
on building this stuff in as well.
So I would say the two unique things that really stick out about the set van
build are the back deck that folds down with the electric winches
and the leveling bed with the linear actuators,
which we did since we are living in hilly San Francisco, that way,
because level our bed and have a good night's sleep. The step van,
we ended up buying on Craigslist.
So someone had bought it a similar auction and then we purchased the
step van from him.
So basically him as a secondary program and the set van we bought for
6,000 and put $12,000 of renovations into.
Hi, my name's Ben, and this is our step van conversion. Let's take a look.
So right off the bat, we have the cab,
we did this whole thing as a kind of stealth build. So the cab,
we really didn't do anything to the interior here,
except for some kind of behind the scenes,
disguised items, such as our shower, our shower pan,
we cut out of a piece of steel and bent it and
then installed it so that you can stand
right here with a curtain that goes around the,
from the hooks at the ceiling.
And you can drain that either to your,
our gray water tank or straight to the ground.
If you're in a spot where that works.
And then all of the shower components are up here. Other than that,
we really didn't touch this space except for adding some metal paneling to the
door and to this cabinet that we installed.
So that when you look in from the outside,
it still looks like a normal worker van.
And then let's head inside right here
to the interior build. So for the interior build,
one of our big focuses was to have as much cooking
space as we could.
We all really liked to cook and having the space to be able to do that easily,
especially with a cooktop that isn't also a counter space.
I know a lot of people like that,
conversion of countertop that flips up to your cooktop,
but we wanted to have dependent independent spaces for that.
We have our rollout fridge right here. It's on some drawer,
slides pulls out like that, and we have a dual zone,
winter fridge. It's a 62 liter. I believe.
Here in the kitchen,
we took a couple of the elements that we did in the bus and brought them into
this build as well.
Stuff like the Mason jars screwed the lid up into the shelf above,
and then you can not have those rattling around. We got our spice rack on them,
magnetic steel plate, right there,
all of these cabinets we got from Ikea and then
modified them.
So we re drilled all the pattern holes in the shelf folders,
because we didn't want the depth that you have in a normal house.
We wanted to create enough walkway here,
that it was comfortable for two people to stand back to back one at this counter
one at this one.
And also it allows for a guest bed on the floor.
If you have some guests over. And then when we were doing this build,
we also had seen something similar to this with the kind of
bungee cord cage for your cups. Nothing's broken,
nothing's fallen out.
Obviously has to be big enough to not be able to fly through that spacing,
but this has worked really well for us than other storage in the kitchen is just
your typical drawers. We have like soft, close hinges.
And those, unless you take a real crazy turn,
have stayed closed for us and then storage for the rest of the way we have this
floor to ceiling cabinet. And then you can keep your bigger items and stuff.
That's maybe not in season in any of the overhead space up there under the
bed, um, or even up top in the big overhead storage above the driver's seat.
And then.
Moving to the back.
Another thing that was really important to us was to be able to have friends
over and, you know, if you just have a single permanent bed here,
some people are totally fine, you know,
invite people in and you can sit on their bed and that's fine.
We were okay with that,
but we really wanted to make as much couch space as we could.
So we ended up with this kind of J couch.
The way that this all works is this section of foam
picks up and inserts right into this cutout here.
And you end up with a almost queen sized bed in the back.
And that queen size bed in the back is on two
linear actuators,
which you press a button here and the whole thing can move.
So when you're parked on a street that is at an angle,
you can still sleep on a level surface and not roll out of bed.
So another thing that we were focused on,
like I was saying about space and being able to hang out all your friends,
we decided to transform the back door. So when we bought the van,
it had a typical roll up garage door, style door,
and we kept that look from the outside so that you can't see the way that we
modified it. But basically we took all this reclaimed pallet wood.
We welded a frame together,
and then we made a sandwich of that existing panel door,
the steel frame, and then the pallet wood.
And the whole thing is sitting on hinges at the bottom right there.
And then we have some controls in the cabinet and you just flip a switch and the
whole back door that is that darker gray palette folds down
and becomes a back deck.
And you can set up a couple of camp chairs and a table and hanging out,
have dinner out there,
and then to get kind of into the systems behind all of this.
One of the big things that we wanted to do with this that was different from
the bus was create a vehicle that would do well in
the cold weather. We really wanted to do the installation properly.
We added a heater, um, to the vehicle.
So the whole thing has two inches of poly ISO foam.
And we have a propane heater that's mounted underneath the vehicle
for the water system.
We have a fairly deep undermount sink up here in the front,
uh, with just your typical kind of extendible kitchen faucet.
We have two water tanks in the vehicle.
One is underneath the back section of the bed, water tank.
Number two is mounted underneath the vehicle.
And the reason we have those two tanks is again for that cold weather aspect.
So your exterior tank is totally fine to be full of water when it's above
freezing, but when it gets below freezing,
you start to have issues with freezing water in the lines,
in the tank and potential issues with cracking and stuff like that.
So we have one tank inside, one outside for that reason.
And then we just have a couple switches in this cabinet here,
shut off valves, and you can switch between tanks whenever you want.
We have our panels on the roof. I believe it's two,
220 watt panels up on the roof.
And then all of our electrical is under the back corner of the bed right here.
And then all the lighting control and bed control.
They kind of have a control panel on the back of this cabinet right here.
So when we did this build,
we talked for about three seconds about not doing another ceiling painting,
but realized that that was a horrible way to go.
The ceiling painting really opens up the space and is super unique and
just an amazing thing to have in your home.
So
if you're thinking about a.
Van bus or anything else, conversion,
give yourself more time than you think you're going to need.
I think that might be the biggest thing for me,
especially if you don't have any experience, like we didn't have any,
it's just going to take some time to get familiar with woodworking,
plumbing, electrical systems, and the works and watch a lot of YouTube videos.
I would say that don't be afraid to reach out to people within this community,
because there are so many people who are in your position right now,
maybe thinking about doing a build.
And if you want to get any ideas or learn about how people did, you know,
a certain thing in their vehicle,
a lot of people in this community are willing to share.
Thanks for watching, make sure to like share and subscribe,
and I'll see you next Friday with an all new video.