Skoolie Tour: a Rare California School Bus Becomes a DREAMY Tiny House for 3

Give me a kiss. We had this idea. Oh yeah, we also had our daughter at the same time. Having a kid kind of triggered in me this desire to do something that was not, it was not as much for me as it was for a family. I wanted to put my energy into like a family idea. I sort of thought, what if we could leave our jobs? We could enrich our daughter's life. My wife's a fantastic photographer. She could pursue her dreams of being a photographer. We could just adventure. I just want to know what that would be like for me. Could we live a ridiculous lifestyle? Could you live in a school bus? Can you make one look nice? Can you be comfortable there in it? Can you feel secure? We settled on this bus. This bus is rare. They only made it on the West Coast. They only made it from 85 to 92. They only made like 2,800 of them. And California, they have these requirements that basically led to almost all of these being crushed. That's, that was sort of like, that's why we wanted this one on top of some other things. This one is just one of a kind. And that's why we flew all the way to California to get it. This has been a project that tested every one of my capabilities. Like I had a little bit of construction experience. I've done some work with my hands, but nothing like this. You've got to cram plumbing, HVAC, water storage, and the electrical grid into a school bus. And then also make it like safe to even drive down the road. And so for me, it's been a ton of actual physical learning. Like I didn't know how to do woodworking. I didn't, didn't really know how to do electrical work. And it's also been just a mind exploding, creative solving problem project experience. She's young, and she's not going to remember like every piece of it. But I want her to remember the feelings that she had. Like, Mommy and Daddy were crazy. We had amazing adventures. I grew up in a school bus. Welcome to Gilligan Phantom. This is our tiny house bus. We bought this bus for a couple of reasons. One of them was the ceiling height, so we're not bumping into the ceiling. I'm 5'4", so just to give you an idea. We replaced all of the bus's hatches with boat hatches so that we could get out onto the roof. We have solar set up up there, so it's good to have access. It also brings in a ton of light into the living room, and we get to have some airflow in here, which is great. We kept all the bus's original windows. We didn't do a roof raise. This is the living room. We have two couches. They're both RV mattresses. They're not a traditional twin size. They're smaller, shorter, and more narrow. I believe they're 75 by 30. We have custom couch covers, and they come off really easily, so you can wash them in the washing machine. We also painted the floors white. We didn't really know what to do with flooring because we didn't want to lose a lot of headspace, but we also wanted something kind of bright, and we didn't want to use the click vinyl, which a lot of people have used, and it seems like a great product, but it wasn't for us. So we just decided to paint it with a low VOC paint and put some runners down for the bus because it does get cold on the floor. So we're really happy with how that turned out. We also had two tables put in. We actually found both of these pieces of wood on the side of the road this size, and we just installed them with a little click-down table mount that we bought online so we can create more space for ourselves here. Both of these pop down, and then you just have a little extra space. We also have some storage underneath the couch. This pulls up, and in here we have space for all kinds of things. We haven't really had to use it yet because we're not moved in on the bus yet, but when it's time to move in, that will be really helpful. We also have storage in the dinette seats, which are just little plywood boxes that Justin made. We also had some cushions made for this. They're really cozy. For the kitchen, we wanted a lot of counter space. That was really important to us, so what we did was we made five feet of counter space on both sides. We knew one side would be the sink area for the dishes, and one side would be the cooking area and the prep space. We also had a local custom cabinet maker do the cabinet fronts for us. This is just one continuous piece of plywood, and they cut them to size, and then they installed them for us. So that was one of the things that we did outsource because it seemed like an important thing that we didn't want to try our hand at for the first time. We did get these really cool poles just off Amazon. They're just little brass poles. I'm really happy with them. So for the countertop, we had a friend in Charleston who was a countertop installer and manufacturer, fabricator maybe is the word. He actually contacted us and let us know that he had some really beautiful pieces of countertop left over from a bigger project. So we had this great option available to us at a great price, and he came in and installed it. He supplied his sink, and it's a really great size for giving Nova baths. We got this great faucet off of Craigslist. Someone just didn't like it after they bought it. It also came with a little soap dispenser, which is really nice. And we did a backsplash, which was something Justin and I debated back and forth, but I really wanted to make the kitchen feel like a kitchen in a house and not just a utilitarian space for somebody living on the road. So we decided to go with something I didn't originally think of because I'm not huge with black in the kitchen, but it worked out really well. And we use black grout to keep it clean because we know we'll probably stain white grout over time. And it came out really good. We're really happy with it. We bought it at Home Depot. It's not expensive. I think it was like $2.99 a square foot. And then I also talked Justin into giving me a little shelf here, which is really nice. Keeping things off the counter is great. We have Ikea knife rack, which is really awesome. We also have an Ikea rack for anything that we're hanging off these little hooks. That's great too. Any kind of on-the-wall storage solutions for a tiny living seems to be really helpful. We also got this amazing light fixture from a friend of ours who worked at Urban Electric Company. And I just think it's the greatest thing. In the kitchen, we have tons of storage. We used Ikea cabinets for our base. We have our Instant Pot and our Vitamix in here. I filled this one up with all of my jars of dried goods, quinoa and rice. We decided to use this as a little bit of storage too by using this Ikea spice racks in here. And I thought that that worked out really well. It's just somewhere to put your spices, keep things off the counter. This is actually also the electrical cabinet. And it has like the brain of all of the electrical in here. And I don't understand how any of it works. I'm really impressed with Justin for figuring it out because he didn't know anything about electrical beforehand. But he'll explain some of that later. We decided to go with this little refrigerator. We wanted something small. We don't need a lot of space. We got it off the floor by just making a little box down there, which is also going to be a storage area. All right, come on back to Nova's Nook. We created this space for Nova because initially we thought she'll just sleep in bed with us forever. But then we realized that she'll eventually need her own space. So we did create a sleeping area for her. It's only 28 inches this mattress, but it's plenty big for her. She has taken a few naps in it. We also decided to create sort of like a angled wall on the ends of her Nook so that she has a little bit more of an enclosed space and it adds just a little bit of a flair to it. And I'm really happy we did this. It was a project that I decided I was going to tackle myself and it almost was a nightmare, but it ended up really well. So we're happy with the way that it turned out. We also have a ton of storage down here. Justin currently has this Velcroed because he doesn't want to make drawers yet, but you can imagine this space is nice and open and ready for us to fill it with all of our stuff. Nova has another light from the Urban Electric Company in her room, which is cute. It kind of does this little eclipsing. So that's really sweet. And she has a space over here for all of her toys, her blankets, her dollhouse. Nova has a magnetic chalkboard in her room as well. This is the door for the bathroom. So we can close this all the way, give someone privacy. And Nova uses this for chalk and her magnetic alphabet. And this was just a little do-it-yourself project that I decided to make at the last minute. And I'm really glad that I did because she loves it. And then going into the bathroom, we have an Airhead composting toilet, which was something that we did spend a lot of time researching. There's a few different composting toilets out there, and this one just was the best for us after all of our research. We also have a space here for a shower in the future. Right now we don't have a shower and we're not in any rush to build one because we do have one outside. So this is our bedroom back here. We do have a his and hers closet. This is my closet. I have some Ikea storage down here. And up top on the shelves, I have some folded clothes. Tons of space for things in the future. Justin also has a closet, which hasn't been finished yet. We also keep the hot water heater in here. And then back here is our bed. We have a king size bed, which has been really great. It's tons of space. We have tons of natural light back here with all of these windows. So we had some curtains made with some beautiful fabric that we found from Africa. And we use some Ikea hardware to get it up. And we also have the mini split back here. So we're keeping the whole bus cool with just this mini split. It works pretty well. And this is definitely the coldest room in the house, which will be good for really hot nights when you need some relief. So as is the rest of the bus, this is a work in progress, but this is everything that you would need for a grid tied electrical cabinet. So we have 50 amps shore power running to 120 volt AC panel. And this goes out to most of our circuits. As you can see, there's circuits that run underneath the bus and then through the walls. There's also circuits that run up through the ceiling. We also have 12 volt power through this AC to DC converter, which leads to a 24 to 12 volt converter, and then our 12 volt fuse panels. And we went 12 volt for as much as we could because we hope to be off grid in this bus at some point. And before we do that, all we really need to add is a 400 amp hour, 24 volt battery bank and a 4,000 watt inverter. Oh yeah, this is our YouTube subscriber counter. Hit that subscribe button and you will show up on there too. That's our 12 volt water pump right there. And this is a seven gallon electric water heater. This thing takes about 20 minutes to heat up. So in the morning, before you take a shower, just pop that on. That'll give you about an eight or nine minute shower if you need that. So underneath the bed, we have our a hundred gallon water tank. Really, we could have space for another a hundred gallons if we decided to do that someday. So I took the front door and I converted it from a bifold to a regular flat door. We just have a standard house lock on here, which locks us up. Val found this on Etsy. She said it was from Soviet Russia, which is fun. So our gray water storage is in the undercarriage storage compartment. We have a matching hundred gallon water tank. And for the time being, we just have this drain, which we hook a hose up to and a pump, and we just pump it into the house and down the drain. But we need to upgrade our drains at some point to have some more water flow because this drains really slowly. So we've got two storage compartments, which is eventually going to house surfboards, outdoor tables, maybe electric skateboards, things like that. This is our mini split condenser. So this is just racked on here. Pretty sturdy. I'll show you. It's sturdy. It's really hard to show you, but our water fill connection is right there and our shore power connects to the undercarriage storage door on the other side. So we have nine 240 watt panels that are three series, three parallel. We've got a solar combiner box over there, which you can't quite see. So it's a lot of solar power. Thank you guys for watching our bus tour. If you want to see us build this bus from the very beginning, there's a playlist about to show up right here. If you want to see what we bought and used in the bus, it's all in the description below. Peace.