4 Window Short Bus Tour - Skoolie Conversion

Hi, I'm Maggie. This is my 7.3 liter diesel engine for window shorty. It's a Ford E350. My Instagram handle is littlehomebus and welcome. So we'll talk a little bit about the exterior of the bus. I didn't do a whole lot to the exterior but it did have a stop sign on it. So I took off the stop sign. There was a nice little circular hole here so I put a nice little patch over the top. I actually had my bus painted professionally. I thought it might look nicer and it does. It looks very nice. Yeah, but it ended up turning out pretty nice. That's pretty much it for the outside of the bus but let's take a look inside. Welcome to my entryway. I've done a few things here. I used some veneer to make a nice little stair razor. I knew I wanted to do something geometric here and it needed to be thin and easily put on. So I ended up using iron-on veneer. I cut it into a bunch of different 60 degree triangles and ironed them on each individually. It took forever but I thought it was well worth it. We also have the door latching system here. I wanted a scenario in which the bus could lock from both the inside and the outside. So I had this little lock that you can buy just from Amazon and a couple of other places and I modified it so that it would work for the height of the bus. So it's got two little mechanisms here and when you turn this little latch here these two pins move up and down and the pins in the bottom go in or out of the holes. Then I've got a couple holes drilled just a hole in the floor and a hole in the ceiling up here and it seems to work pretty nicely. I'm able to lock it from both the inside and the outside which is awesome. There's just a little pin that can go straight in this little hole here to lock it from the inside and then from the outside it's operated with a key. So this is the front part of my bus. I've done a couple of things up here. The school bus originally just had a wall here that I took out and I added a cabinet here that holds just all of my like toiletries stuff. It works pretty well for me and then I also added some like padded cover thing here because there was some ugly metal that I didn't know what to do with so I essentially upholstered it without having any upholstery knowledge. So that's kind of fun and then I also added a little section of flooring so when I got the bus there was sort of a cutout this way and that whole section wasn't here but I wanted to be able to stand or walk here so I added a little extra section of flooring which ended up kind of being a pain in the ass but totally worth it and now I'm able to just like use this as livable space. Yeah and then I also just like have shoes and slackline hammock just like hanging out in that area. Okay so my for my flooring I actually used paint stir sticks. I wanted something thin because I didn't want to lose any headroom. My bus is actually only five three on the inside so I'm five one but I wanted to make sure I was able to stand so I needed something super thin. I didn't want to use vinyl so I ended up using wood but I wanted something a little bit different instead of just plywood so I went with some paint stir sticks. It was a total pain in the ass to do. There's like 400 paint sticks on the floor, about 2,000 nails, a million nails and yeah it's it was a fun project for sure but very very tedious. I just painted the paint sticks and then covered it with three coats of polyurethane and it's held up okay so far but we'll see how durable it actually is. Welcome to my bench seat area. I have a nice little seating area here. I wanted a place to sit that wasn't my bed. I work from the road. I work a remote job so I needed a desk so I do have like a little table situation here. I have a lagoon table so it just hooks into that little mount and I'm able to to work on my computer. I also made my bench seat cover out of an old rug that was about to go to Goodwill and I was like no it can't go to Goodwill I have to use it so I just cut that up and used it as my bench seat cover. So under the bench seat I have my electrical for all of my solar system and then also a Dometic fridge. It's not super easy to access but usually I just move these pillows, move them over and then bring this whole bench seat down. Then I've got just a super simple electrical setup. I've got just a Goal Zero here with a fast charger. It's also got alternator power, solar power and shore power and then I've got a Dometic chest fridge that's just got a bunch of food in it but that works pretty well for me and yeah and then I just lift it back up and hook it back up when I'm not using it. So I wanted to reclaim as much wood and like materials as possible for this build so I actually found an Ikea headboard or entire bed frame on the side of the road. All of this wood was part of that Ikea bed frame so I just ended up cutting everything to size and making slats for both my closet and for my bench seat out of those slats of wood. Yeah but I love it. All right so I've got a full closet here. I've got a full size mirror which is necessary and then I've got my propane down here for my kitchen, trash can and then just a bunch of clothes and stuff, extra bedding, that type of thing. Yeah that's the closet. So I did decide to put in a skylight on my bus. I don't regret it but I will say they are super super leaky unless you really know what you're doing. I didn't know what I was doing when I built this but there are a lot of people that do so definitely follow people on YouTube who know what they're doing but yeah this skylight does open up. I don't have hinges quite yet or a thing that keeps it open but it is nice to be able to to let in a breeze when it gets really hot in here and it just locks back up. It's pretty easy and then my ceiling I did tongue and groove pine. I attached it directly to the bus ribs so the metal ribs that go across across the bus. I don't think I would do that again because there is some thermal bridging happening. My screws are really really hot when it's hot outside just because the sun goes straight from the bus roof to the ribs to the screws. So it's definitely hot in here because of that but yeah it works well. All right so this is my bed. It's a full-size bed. I didn't want to do a queen because I didn't want to lose quite as much space so a full size worked just perfect for me. It's just me in here so that's just fine. The bed does lift up. I have these little poles here that are just leather and the whole thing lifts up. It's got struts on each side so that it's easier to lift. It also stays open if there's nothing on the bed. Currently there's a bunch of pillows and they're a little too heavy to leave it open by itself but it comes down nice and easy too which is really nice. And then I've got some drawers underneath my bed as well. They just have all the necessities of life. Yeah so I also have a little shelf over on this side of the bed. It just holds a couple little things. I have a fan and a speaker and a couple other things. Then I've got a little nook over here because I didn't want to lose the space underneath this cubby area. So I created a little nook and it's just got all the bedtime essentials. I have a switch and a plug over here too. This switch controls these overhead lights. I've got a switch over here on the bed area then I also have a switch by the front door and then they're dimmable as well. I also made some curtains for my entire bus. I found some fabric at a secondhand craft store in Denver that I really liked and just made some super super simple curtains for the bus. They're not perfect. They aren't insulated so it's still really cold in here if it's really cold at night or really hot if it's really hot and they're definitely not blackout so people can still sort of see in which isn't ideal. I eventually will switch these out but haven't quite done that yet. And then the back curtain I spent forever making. All of these little pieces of fabric are individual pieces of fabric that I sewed together. They're called French seams so they're finished on both sides so it looks really nice from either side. Yeah but I like to sew so it was a really fun project for me. This is my kitchen. I really really love my kitchen. It turned out to be sort of the best of all worlds for me. I've got a nice stove here. It's two burner propane. My propane lives in my closet but the line is run over to this side and then I've got some nice storage space. I've got like tea and cups and all of the things. This cabinet actually was being ripped out of someone's kitchen when I was living in Washington and I found it on Facebook and fell totally in love with it. It was actually too big for the bus so I had to cut off another set of drawers that was on this side and then add a couple of extra little pieces of wood on this side and like build out the cabinet over here just so it would fit the space a little bit better. The wood doesn't match totally but it's fine for now. And then it also has a little pull-out cutting board which is nice and all of the woodworking in the actual cabinet is really beautiful. It's like handmade. It's like fully wood. Yeah it's really really nice. All right so I put in a little sink here. It's a stainless steel tiny little IKEA thing and I've got just this little simple faucet. I do have a water pump in the bus. I have a switch for it here. It is run off of my DC power and it turns on and off pretty easily. You can hear the pump kicking in. Underneath I have just a super simple water system. I've got just a fresh water tank and a gray water tank but it's it's a super simple little system. So in the back I have a particulate filter so it filters out any particles that might be in the water and then I've got my water pump which pumps the water through the entire system and then an accumulator which helps to keep the pressure in the system so that the pump doesn't have to kick on as often. But it's a super simple setup. Really easy to install. The plumbing is really really simple so it's worked for me so far. So for insulation I did tear out all the original insulation that was in the bus when I demoed everything. I did take it down to the ribs on both the ceiling and the walls of the bus and I ended up using just regular fiberglass insulation in my ceiling. People totally hate on that but it has totally worked for me. It keeps me nice and cool and also warmer in the winter. And then the walls I used one inch foam board insulation. That's worked really well for me as well. I think it's generally the the typical usage in walls in school buses but it's worked well for me. So I did end up sewing a cover for my seat. It's just ugly gray vinyl so I wanted to cover it up and I decided to use some velvet that I found on the side of the road. It actually was like a raspberry color like a deeper darker red pink color and I didn't like that color so I bleached it and it turned out this really nice soft pink and then I just used some canvas on the front and back and made a little cover. I had never made a pattern for anything before so it was a fun challenge to make a pattern and and create something that actually fit over a piece of furniture. And then I just have some little buttons on the bottom that keep it secured onto the chair. So I have about 350 watts of solar on my roof in two panels. They're actually different types of panels that my parents were just getting rid of. So they're not the panels that I want full-time eventually but they work for right now. They're just little flexible ones. They're not actually affixed to the roof but when I'm parked I just pull them out throw them up on the roof and it works really well. I also have alternator power so my battery is charged when I do drive. It's attached to my car battery and it charges really really really fast via alternator power so that's my main mode of keeping my battery topped up and it's worked great. So my bus didn't have a radio at all. I knew that I wanted to have speakers in the bus so I ended up running speaker wire throughout the bus to both the front and the back of the bus so that I could have speakers while I was driving. I wanted to listen to music so that made sense for me. I also really didn't like the covers that the speakers that I bought came with so I ended up making some different speaker covers out of some caning that one of my friends was getting rid of a rocking chair that was broken. Caning came from the rocking chair that was going into the trash can and then just some scrap wood from the rest of my build for the rest of the speaker covers but they work really great. They don't rattle. I thought they might rattle a little bit but they don't which is nice. Time and money. Yeah so I bought my bus for four thousand dollars. I've put in about twenty thousand dollars. That being said I didn't have any tools. I didn't have any experience. I didn't have any real knowledge of how to do this so I had to invest in some tools. I had to invest a lot of time into learning things, learning how to build, learning how to do everything. So it took me about a year and a half to build my bus. I was working full-time and working on the bus on the weekends. So it's definitely doable in faster than that if you don't have a full-time job but I spent about a year and a half working on this. Money on the road. I am a recruiter so I'm able to work from anywhere. I work remotely even when I'm stationary which is really nice so I as long as I have wi-fi I'm able to just use my computer during the day. I do work full-time. I work in IT and tech so that's it's doable from anywhere as long as I have a wi-fi connection and I've just got my my work stuff under the bed and I'm able to pull it out and put it on the table and use it during the day. So for advice I started this build with a partner. I bought my bus and was dating someone and he helped me tear everything out and put in the ceiling and the start of the build and then when we broke up I moved back to Colorado. I was living in Washington with him and I was like well do I continue this? Do I not? Like what what do I want to do? And I didn't know anything about building as I was saying just a minute ago and it was definitely intimidating for me to to really do this whole thing by myself. I never really envisioned that that would be the way that this whole van thing came to life for me. So it's definitely a challenge but as far as advice if you want to live in a bus if you want to build out a van do it. Don't wait around for someone else. Don't like suffocate your dreams or or wait. Just do it. You'll learn what you need to and you'll feel super empowered having done it. So I definitely recommend especially as a solo woman who didn't know anything I feel so so empowered just being out on the road living and and being in this thing that I built myself. So it's really cool. Again my name is Maggie. This is my cute little bus. I love it. It's super short. It's only 17 feet long and it's perfect for me. My Instagram handle is Little Home Bus. Feel free to follow along. I'd be happy to to have you along on my journey.