Retired and Living Tiny: How Community Changed Everything

About seven years ago we retired and we decided to build our own home in a blue bird school bus. So come on in. Welcome to the inside of the bus. We're going to start with the kitchen because a lot of the design was based on what I wanted in the kitchen first. We'd lived in a small 24-foot class c for about six months and trying to cook in there was a nightmare. So I told Jim I was okay with living in the bus if we could have a big sink, a big refrigerator, and a big stove as well as plenty of counter space. So if I wanted to I could cook Thanksgiving dinner. I like a large stove to cook on so we chose a four burner propane stove and it has been great. We've been able to bake anything we want to bake in it and it's just worked perfectly. For my storage there's the plates and bowls the kind of things silverware and plastic wrap and potholders and all that stuff. I have really enjoyed having my flour and sugar in the big drawer down here because they don't take up any counter space that way and it's really nice. Also another thing another tip I would say is I didn't know what to do with all my spices I had because I have all kinds of cooking things up here like I have coffee up here and all kinds of other stuff honey and everything you can think of. So I just put them here in this flat drawer and the spices really work well that way. And then this is my pull-out pantry which also provides a little extra counter space when I need it like if I'm baking pies or cookies or something I can put stuff here. So it it works great and I haven't really found that I need any more counter space it's been very good. So what I do have on my counter over here is I do have a little coffee maker and my egg cooker because I use that every single morning it's great. And then I have this little baby toaster oven which works perfectly for two people. We do have a microwave that I bought at ReStore for $10. Mainly we wanted it for the vent so we could have a vent because I tend to cook bacon in here and it gets smelly and greasy and all that. So it has filters in it and we can do all that. I don't use my microwave very much. I'm an old-fashioned cook and I mostly cook on top of the stove or in the oven or in the little toaster. But I found a great use for it and that is to store all kinds of dried food in there. So I can store that and on the occasion when I use the microwave I just take it out. So moving over to this side of the kitchen on the top I just have utensil things. I highly recommend if you're traveling or whatever and you need extra space these magnetic strips are wonderful. And I got the two that I have from Ikea and they are so strong I've never had anything fall off when we're traveling or anything else. My sink is a double sink I also bought it at ReStore for ten or twenty dollars and it has been absolutely wonderful. We have this pull-down sprayer. We have the double windows above it so that we can get light in and I love to pull back the curtains even if you don't have a view it's nice to get the light. I did used to have a bunch of storage under here but they stole it from me on the outside by putting more solar equipment in. These are false fronts on both of these. Under here I just have the same stuff most of you have under your kitchen counter and that's probably cleaning supplies mostly. And up here on the uppers I really love these little cabinets they're mostly used to store things that I don't use on an everyday basis. We bought our fridge at the same time that we bought our stove way back when we were redoing the bus. It has really been great for us. We need a full-size one because we go to Sam's or to Costco or somewhere and you know you come home with a lot of stuff you got to put it somewhere. When we first got on the road we found out that these doors will just swing right wide open when you're driving down the road. So we finally came upon baby locks and they're just safety locks to keep babies out of cabinets but they have been wonderful they've worked so well. And then I also use this area up here to store my blender, my rice cooker, my instant pot and then there's another cabinet back there that has storage for things I use even less often. So if you're like us and you're looking to retire or looking to downsize I just want to tell you that this kitchen has served me very well and I've been able to cook and do all the things I want to do in it. The only thing that I miss is just not having a big room where we could have big family gatherings together. Other than that for the two of us I wouldn't change where I'm living. I love it. I love this here. It's easy. All the things are easy within reach and I don't have to take a lot of steps involved which gets a little more important as you get older but it's been great and I think you'll enjoy it if you take the plunge you'll find out you don't need everything you think you need. We had a kennel or a raised dog so we had a number of dogs. We had 75 chickens, six goats, just a lot of things going on in our life and as much as we enjoyed all the animals and everything it was getting to be quite a job and we had a lot of stuff to keep up with. One day I was coming home from work. I called Jim on the way home and I said I've just been feeling like we need to downsize. So I would have done anything to get her off of her job. I wanted her to be home with me. Well the problem there was she didn't want to do that because we were spending a lot of money. Our property cost a lot of money. So she actually said to me one day okay you sell all the dogs and I'll quit my job. I think I sold all the rest of the dogs we had probably in. It was one week. One week. But I called you that day and said I'm thinking we should downsize and you said I agree I'm thinking the same thing. Yep. And we decided that we would both quit whatever we were doing and retire so we could go on the road and do some traveling while we were still young enough to enjoy it. Right. We wanted to spend time together. We had had a lot of friends in Tulsa, Oklahoma where we lived there but once we moved away from there we never really had close relationships. So when we went on the road we were surprised at the community in the nomad community. Yes. As the years progressed and we've been on the road seven years several of our friends have now quit traveling because of health reasons or other things. Bought property somewhere. Bought property somewhere. We were feeling like we needed more connection. I certainly did. We were kind of by ourselves. Yes. And we enjoy being with other people and so we really kind of wanted to at least semi-permanently settle down. I enjoy being with you. I know. I know that. I hope so. We just happened to be in Quartzsite and my line dance teacher said to me one day have you ever gone to a jam and I said no and she said well they'll let anybody play there so if you if you play an instrument you can go and play there and I said well I play the keyboard some and Jim plays the bass so yeah we should do that. We just fell in love with some of the people at the jams. Yeah. And we so enjoyed doing the music. It's been a lot of fun and we found a real community there. We developed a lot of good friends. Most of the jams that we were going to were here. Yes. In this particular park so we had we knew a lot of people in this park already so the whole sense of community when a spot came open in this particular park we just thought we ought to try it for a little while if we don't like it we can always go back to the desert. Yep. Well since our jams have become such a central part of our community it's important to us to be able to keep them going whether we're here in the RV park or on the desert or on the road somewhere else. So to make sure we can always host the jams we have an Apex 300 power system by Blue Eddy who's the sponsor of this video right here and our Blue Eddy allows us to host our jams from pretty much anywhere we want even if we don't have power grid to connect to. Now this unit has 3800 watt output. It can easily power our amps, keyboards, other equipment. You can even run up to three units in parallel to increase the output to over 11,000 watts. Right. That's a lot. That's a lot. Right now we have one additional battery for the Apex 300. It lasts us a good long time but you can actually expand up to 18 additional batteries which is 58 kilowatts. We don't need that much battery right now but I think it's cool that you can start smaller and expand when your needs change. So as our community grows and the size of our jams increase we could potentially power more and more musicians and equipment completely off grid. We also use our Blue Eddy in a bunch of other ways too. Sometimes we have potlucks out here on the patio and so people can bring their crock pots and other kitchen appliances and plug right into the Blue Eddy and not have to run extension cords all over the place. The Blue Eddy Apex is a great option for any sort of off-grid setup whether it's a tiny home, an RV, or a cabin in the woods. It can serve as your main power source or a backup for power outages. This unit can be charged in several different ways. My favorite is solar charging. This unit can take over 30,000 watts of solar. That's about 10 times as much as I have on the roof of my bus. You can also plug into a wall or even charge with a generator. Like I said we love how the Blue Eddy Apex 300 helps to power our community events because it's what's important to us. If you want to learn more about how a Blue Eddy system could power that thing that's important to you then check out the link in the description of this video. So I'm going to share with you a little bit about our living room. This chair here turns around when we travel but right now it adds one more chair to our living space and when we have folks over we have this bench here, that chair, and these recliners and it works out real good for for visiting and enjoying people. We use this not just for entertaining but we use it all the time. I love to watch YouTube. I love watching how-to's. Debbie loves the Christmas movies. We love the recliners because we can sit here and hold hands and watch a Christmas movie. Typically this is where I not only watch videos but I also sleep. So in case you're not my age yet it is really nice to kick back and just take a nap in the afternoon. I know sometimes it feels like there's no storage in here but it's hidden. Under these recliners we have eight containers that are about six inches tall and about 18 inches long and it's things that we don't have to access all the time. Then we have all this storage here. We built this bench. Believe it or not it's a lot of storage. Just think of it this way. It's a two by almost six foot storage area underneath these cushions and that's a lot of storage. We have a drawer over here under our little cabinet. It keeps also a lot of camera equipment and things like that. We have a little cabinet on this side of Debbie's chair and it's full of mainly music and books and things like that. Believe it or not you can find places to put a lot of storage. Not as much as you had in your house but I really love the mini split. It does an awesome job. During the summer it took good care of us. We had 114 degree weather this year and I think a little more and it did a really good job. Then when it starts getting cooler we have this little wood burner and it has a reburn so once you get it started you can't even see any smoke coming out the top. It's very efficient and we just love it. It's from Cubic Mini is who it's from. One thing about living in a bus is it's fairly narrow. My grandson said when he came through, well really what you guys you live in a hallway with a bedroom at the at the end. I said well yeah that's pretty much it but it has been very comfortable for us. My suggestion is that you make it fit you. If you are planning on converting a bus or even if you have a motor home or whatever make sure that it's something that you're comfortable in. There's a lot of advantages to having a bus. A house that can go down the road and just how many earthquakes do you think would be equivalent to how many miles we've driven this bus and it's still together but you know you going down the road it shakes your house pretty good. So could your house withstand that? I don't know. Well welcome to the bathroom. This is the room right past the kitchen and it serves as our bathroom, our laundry room, and it has our bathtub and shower in it. Right now first I want to show you our composting toilet. Many people have a bad feeling about composting toilets so right now I'd like to tell you that we love ours. We've had it for seven years. Debbie thought she wouldn't like it but she really loves it now and ours is a little different than many. It's made very simply. It's made with a five gallon bucket. I just pull it out, slip a trash can over it, dump it. It's so easy to keep clean. The way it works is it's an old refrigerator motor for an ice dispenser. I converted that so it has a little propeller and it agitates the sawdust and then the solids will just sink but we have really enjoyed it for all these years. And then we also have a bathtub that's made out of, this might be new to you, made out of a horse tank. It's great for soak baths and we pour the epsom salt in there and just soak my little knee until it feels great. And we do have a instant hot water heater. So that water comes out at 140 degrees. It's a little bit too hot to sit in but so you start with both the cold and the hot. Then you add as much hot as you can stand. So that's my recommendation. We put in a mirror. We got it from the Habitat for Humanity and it's a medicine cabinet. But Debbie can turn this and stand out here and she can see our full-length mirror behind you and she can fix her hair in this mirror at the same time. That's been a real asset. Now this is the other side of the bathroom and we have a wonderful washer and dryer. This is probably our most expensive purchase in building the bus and we had considered a few months ago of maybe giving it to someone else or selling it to someone else because we weren't using it that much on the road. But now since we're in a permanent place, we have a place to hang our clothes and that has been really a blessing because we don't have to run the dryer in here. We just wash them and take them out. It is so handy. We are so glad that we kept this washer and dryer. We also have a lot of storage space in this bathroom area. As a matter of fact, Debbie's clothes closet is right here. Now you can see that's a whole lot of clothes right here and behind our clothes on the bottom we store some bedding and things like that because you just make use of whatever space you might have. Now we're going to go into the bedroom. Well this is our bedroom. One of my favorite things because I like to sleep and I like to sleep comfortably and it's nice because we have two doors here that we can shut and that really separates the front room from the back room because sometimes when I am watching football I'm a little yes and no and ball right when the ball comes loose. Well that's a little disturbing sometimes. Deb does come back here and read sometimes. When I read it's typically after we've gone to bed. We have reading lights. Very nice to have a reading light that's specific to you. I can pull this down close to my reading material and so it's been really really handy and these I believe came from Ikea. You can see I've got a lot of books. I probably have 50 boxes of books in storage and I just couldn't get rid of them. I'm probably ready to get rid of them now but at the time I couldn't. Now this is my clothes closet on this side over here and you can see I've got a lot of clothes. This is just an old chest of drawers that I picked up at a garage sale and just painted it. There's one more thing that I really like about the way we set this bus up and that's the back window opens and we have an attic fan right up at the top. If I start getting warm at all I can open the back window take my little remote turn on the fan and I'm telling you it is comfortable sleeping. There's one thing that I would recommend and we don't really we've built this in a in a way that we really can't make that change right now but if it was up to me I would change the bed so that we can get around three sides. It's very uncomfortable trying to put a fitted sheet on these back corners of this bed. Now that's the only complaint and if I have to deal with that every once in a while that's not a big deal but for you if you're just building or just starting you might want to think about orienting your bed so that you can get around all three sides. That makes it much easier when you get ready to change your bedding. Our keyboard up behind this is just a place we store our smaller keyboard. Our big keyboard that we have weighs about 70 pounds but we just bought this keyboard on her birthday and it weighs about 30 pounds. It doesn't have the great sound of the other keyboard but it serves us well on the desert and in small jams and so we've really enjoyed it. Okay everybody thanks for watching and we're not doing weekly videos anymore but if you want to keep up with us or see some of our past videos on building the bus on living the nomad lifestyle or even some of our music videos you can do that at life is a joy on youtube it's life is a joy and also you can follow us on instagram life is a joy bus and also we have a facebook page life is a joy thanks for watching yes thank you very much