The Idea, The How, and The Road Trip
Hello! Welcome to The Art Skoolie!
This post is going to be an introduction to the journey my partner and I have had so far in taking steps to convert a school bus into a tiny house. Our goal with this blog is to give interested folks a chance to see the steps, the logistics, the materials, and the methods we are using for our construction process. I will include separate posts that only have links to the appliances, materials, and businesses we are utilizing for our build. I will also mention that this post is not about convincing people to build or otherwise get into tiny houses. We are assuming that you are already excited about the idea, and want to know more. Bear in mind, also, that we are sharing what has worked for us, and we encourage you to use materials or methods that work better for you.
Alright. Anyway, my name is Hannah. My partner’s name is James. We live in Denver, Colorado in a 700 feet squared apartment with our black cat, Grace. We both had accepted a long time ago that we would probably just be paying rent for the rest of our lives; either as rent-rent, or as a mortgage. It is a lifestyle that most Americans have, and it is growing more difficult by the day for the vast majority of us to secure that kind of lifestyle. Owning a condo or a house was the best we thought we would ever be able to do.
I had been struggling to find work for a few months, and we were trying to think of ways that we could consume less. Our electricity bill is calculated by averaging the electricity use of every other tenant in our building. We have so much stuff just lying around, taking up space, that we are really only keeping around in case we might need it sometime in the future if we ever decide we felt like doing it. And, even if we do, we spend forever and a day organizing stuff (again!) so we could just figure out where the one thing is. Our bathroom has a ton of counter space and floor space for the size of apartment that we have, and neither of us spends a ton of time in there. Not to mention the donated goods, garbage, and recycling we generate by making purchases thoughtlessly, and either it rotting or us deciding that we never wanted to do the thing to begin with. Purchasing food more intentionally, cooking more, and not making as many trips to the kitchen equipment section at the thrift store were a start, but still didn’t make the difference we were looking for.
But then, I remembered tiny houses.
I’d heard about tiny houses for years, over the various forms of social media, and thought it was the craziest thing I’d ever heard of. “That sounds like living in a shack!” I thought. “Why would anyone do that?” Strangely, in the last couple of months, YouTube’s algorithms had spat out tiny house videos into my feed, so I checked them out. They highlighted all of the benefits of having fewer, better quality possessions that you use regularly, and not even having room to accumulate crap you’ll never use. At that point, I thought it looked doable, even appealing. “Sure, but only rich people can do that. Look at how much those things cost!” That obstacle was discounted when I saw people building dwellings for $5000 or less. I started thinking about the idea more seriously. I had all sorts of questions that each got answered with relative ease, significantly pruning my initial wariness. (e.g. where will we shower? where will we store everything? how will the bed not be right next to the toilet? where will we wash our clothes? etc.) (Answers: In the shower we install on board; In cleverly placed drawers, cabinets, and on shelves and hanging storage; It doesn’t necessarily have to be; See answer #2)
I was initially scared to bring the idea up to James, because he is such a pragmatist, but the more videos and blogs I saw, the more I realized that people were doing this successfully. Almost all of them had some kind of help in creating their homes, but who in the world never needs help?
Then I saw a video about a couple in/from Australia (I think?) who had bought the man’s childhood school bus and used all salvaged materials to create a little home that suited all of their needs. The two pieces that caught my attention the most were that everything on the bus had been salvaged or built with salvaged materials; and that they had lived on the bus full time and traveled in it for seven years. That was what made my mind up.
When I first floated the idea of living in a tiny house with James, he was skeptical, as I had suspected he might be. However, I showed him some of the content I had seen online from people who had built tiny houses, and answered all the same questions from him that I had had, and he was on board.
Before I go any further, I think this is a good time to acknowledge that building a tiny house is not financially feasible for many people. Most of the stories we have seen involve people who have a large property, or have friends or relatives with a large property, and friends with construction experience or have it themselves. The materials, knowledge, and time required are not something everyone has, and is not the answer for everyone. We both come from relatively privileged backgrounds. Both of us have/had parents with steady jobs that allowed us to grow up in middle-class, relatively safe communities, and we are both white. Not to mention, James’s mother had a job as a younger woman which accrued retirement money; and when she passed away, she left James $30,000. So, what I’m trying to say is, as a result of our socioeconomic backgrounds, we found ourselves in a better position to undertake the cost of building a home. As you will find out, or may already suspect, it is not cheap. It’s much cheaper than buying a house outright in Denver, but it is definitely not cheap.
When we were initially thinking about it, we researched vacant lot prices for building, or parking, a tiny house on. We quickly realized that would be out of the question in Denver if we wanted to have a house on whatever lot we chose. We were stumped.
But then, I remembered the video about the Australian couple who had made a tiny house on a school bus. They had raised the roof, created two sleeping lofts for themselves and their two children, and they even had a kitchen and a place to lounge. It didn’t look cramped at all. In fact, it looked like as reasonable a size as the trailer bed tiny houses we’d been looking at more seriously. James told me about how his parents had had a Volkswagon Vanigan when he was a child, and he used to play around in it and pretend it was his house; so a bus seemed even more appealing.
We thought, “If we can salvage the materials, and spend any money we have on new appliances and lumber for the structural stuff, we could build a house inside an existing bus, which can move around independently while we save money on daily living costs and build up enough money to buy the land we want to build another tiny house.” It was perfect. We were going to convert a school bus.
We started heavily researching construction methods, the process others were using to convert their buses, seeing what people did for water, heat, electricity, choosing a bus that was the right size. We didn’t want one that was too small, as we didn’t want to feel too cramped; but we also didn’t want one that was too long, because it would be more difficult to maneuver, and there would be fewer places to park. We estimated that we would probably find the best size-to-functionality ratio in a school bus twenty-four to thirty-two feet long. We wanted to have the build completed by winter 2019, so we wanted to get started as soon as possible. We were going to be flying to New York to visit my mother in the first week of January, and we figured we could work on finding a bus after we got back from the trip.
We checked out Craigslist for buses in our area, but all of the listings we found had buses that either needed serious mechanical work done or didn’t move at all. Trying not to get discouraged, I checked eBay, figuring there might be some viable listings. Almost immediately, I found one for a 2003 International thirty-foot school bus (DT466 EE engine), with its mechanical work all up to date, being sold from an hour south of where my mother lives. The seller had one hundred percent positive feedback. Growing up with my mother selling her art on eBay for a living, I knew how difficult and important it was to have one hundred percent positive feedback. We contacted the seller and found out that no one had made an offer yet on the bus. Feeling like we’d lost our minds, we made arrangements to meet up with him the following Friday, when we would be in New York. Our plan after we picked up the bus was to drive it home to Denver at the end of our visit. So far, this seemed like the beginning of a long joke.
We flew to New York, touched base with our seller, bought insurance for the bus, and had a whole ordeal with the New York DMV that I will get into in another post. After finding out firsthand how underfunded the New York Department of Transportation is, we drove to our seller’s house, picked up our bus, and drove it to my mom’s, where her landlord was kind enough to let us store it until we left.
On the trip back, both of us quickly got comfortable with driving the bus. The main thing to keep in mind is that, since it is such a large vehicle, it would take more force and more time to maneuver and stop; meaning, keep a safe distance between yourself and the vehicle in front of you, check mirrors religiously, and start breaking pretty far away.
About three hours east of Denver, we broke down. The worst thing about this situation was the fact that a nasty snow storm started blowing in a few minutes before, and we were miles from the nearest town. However, we started learning a lot of things about the bus’s engine really quickly, Googling like crazy to figure out what the problem could be. We contacted our seller and told him what happened, and he said that in engines of the type we have, if the oil level got low enough, it would automatically shut off. We were able to get roadside assistance through our insurance after a while (the snow was bad enough that they were delayed in getting to us), and the mechanic who helped us (who is amazing, and I will link his shop at the end) spent an hour hooking our bus up to his tow truck, put oil in the engine, tried and failed to get it to start, and towed us an hour west to Limon. He replaced our fuel filter the next day, it still wouldn’t start, and then towed us to a diesel mechanic ten minutes south of where we live in Denver. (Joe, you are a diamond)
One thing we did not take as seriously as we should have was that our fuel gauge was broken. It was stuck on “Full”. Even though we kept track of the mileage and fueled every three hundred fifty miles or so, we apparently did not fuel often enough. The diesel mechanic, after confirming that the fuel line was functioning properly, was able to determine that we had run out of fuel. Now, I am the first to admit that this situation was completely avoidable and kind of hilarious; but I am also incredibly grateful that we had the help that we did, and that something worse was not wrong.
Anyway, we have a bus now. I will provide more details in the next post about our plans and materials in the future.
Thanks for reading! Please share if you found this post enjoyable or helpful. Feel free to send a message or leave a comment if you have any questions.
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The bus that clinched it: https://youtu.be/aq7DmqXDXUY
The angel mechanic from Limon, Colorado:
George’s Repair Shop
199 Main Street
Limon, CO 80828
719-775-8828
Ask for Joe! Tell him James and Hannah from Denver sent you.